Each month, the buzz increases in Flash developer circles about the release of Adobe’s Flash CS4 (Deisel). After oggling every sneak peak I could find, here’s the list of top 5 features I see talked about most:

1. new tween engine
2. inverse kinematics engine
3. new “3D” features
4. new stage rendering engine
5. possible XFL-format

Adobe folks say these aren’t even the biggest things in the Flash CS4 release—which is crazy talk. If you don’t know about all these feature, let me go over them one at a time.

The Flash CS4 Tween Engine will mean no more keyframes. This sounds kinda scary for some designers who learned to animate with keyframes. I know. I was one of them. But fear not. As far as I can tell from what I’ve looked at, you can always fall back on a keyframe-like system to make your animation adjustments. But you won’t want to. Adobe is making animation so much easier with this system. You’ll be able to copy and paste and save you animation sequences—and easily swap out the ‘subject’ of your animations. You can just move stuff around on Flash’s authoring stage and the motions are recorded as an animation. This is going to put the joy back into animating for a lot of pre-Flash 6 users.

Combine the tween engine feature with Flash CS4’s inverse kinetics and it’s likely enough to make all those designers specializing in cartoon animation stick with CS4 for the rest of their lives. Animate a walking person and you’ll know what a pain it can be to mess around and get it just the way you want. No more. In CS4 you will be able to just string a few symbols together, add a line of “joints”, and Flash handles the rest. No code. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Crazy.

The next release also use’s new 3D features. I don’t know the full extent of this, so I won’t say much. But one thing it will do is allow you to manipulate a 2D object as though it were a piece of paper, rotated and angled any way you want.

The stage rending engine is cool because you’ll be able to add movie-clips and videos and other stuff to the stage and preview it right there in the Flash CS3 authoring environment—no hitting the “preview movie” command to see how it looks. I’m a big fan of saving time, and that’s exactly what this means.

The last Adobe Flash CS4 feature that I want to point out is one I found out about on Colin Mook’s blog: A possible new XFL format. I don’t know exactly how this works or even if it is a definite for CS4, but Adobe is looking to make the contents of any given Flash FLA file more easily edited than ever before. Imagine editing the text in your FLA without opening up Flash. Or messing with an image in Photoshop, and then when you open up Flash the changes to that image are automatically updated for you! Very cool stuff.

Of course, we still don’t have a release date for CS4 and I suspect that Adobe won’t spring it on us until Flash is just a few months away from delivery. But soon. Soon. I can only hope it is soon.