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Gradient masks are an every-day designer trick to gradually fade the opacity of an object. Just about every bitmap software application (notably Photoshop) has offered them for years, but Flash has never supported them. Designers have traditionally worked around Flash's limitation by importing semi-transparent PNGs or by fudging the effect with layered semi-transparent shapes, but true semi-transparent masks in Flash have never been a possibility. That is until now with Flash 8.