Very disappointed in MX 2004

[nubian niht]

i myself am having problems w/ 2004 so i have reloaded my flash mx because i ran into an embarrasing situation while updating a client site of mine.

this is my situation regarding loadMovie(); with 2004:

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...hreadid=493323

[cwflash]

FlashMX04 is getting the true test right now with every user at least trying it. No one here is crying about the color of the interface etc... these are real issues.

I just brought an MX file into 04 and it broke every component. Everyday its something new. The sooner we root out the issue the sooner it will get fixed ! ?..... right Macormedia ?

[Ask The Geezer]

If I were a Macromedia shareholder reading this thread, I would have logged off and called my broker at the bottom of page 2. I would have told him to "Sell".

>The sooner we root out the issue the sooner it will get fixed ! ?..... right Macormedia ?<

Puleeese, don't encourage this kind of behaviour. "WE" are not paid to root out the problems of software pushed on the market before it is ready.

I don't much care for the idea of being an unknowing Beta tester either. I'm glad I didn't buy it.

[FPChris]

I didn't mean to sound like I was putting down. Yes all software
take a little time to get used to new additions. I *want*
to use MX2004 but I can not in its current state.
I took to MX right away and have loved it. It didn't destroy
anything Flash5 had already in place.

Many people can't even open previous files in MX2004.
Old bugs are still there and often used features have
been removed. This has NOTHING to do with any goodies
they added. Most of which are pointless like the timeline effects.
Have you even looked at the so called Help files?

All software has bugs. But every other company has a concept
called PATCHES. A concept that MM doesn't think they need
to do. They only patch the player.

So if history shows that they don't fix things why do I want
to pay them to give us more? When the previous set of bugs
were never fixed? And why do I want to pay for the current
unfinished product.

Chris

[circle282]

All good points. I know for sure the help files have been updated. Maybe MM will patch now that they are banking on this release.

[cwflash]

Originally posted by iaskwhy
If I were a Macromedia shareholder reading this thread, I would have logged off and called my broker at the bottom of page 2. I would have told him to "Sell".

>The sooner we root out the issue the sooner it will get fixed ! ?..... right Macormedia ?<

Puleeese, don't encourage this kind of behaviour. "WE" are not paid to root out the problems of software pushed on the market before it is ready.

I don't much care for the idea of being an unknowing Beta tester either. I'm glad I didn't buy it.

The Bug issue aside I am talking about features that are gone, things that have changed that didnt need to etc.... This is exactly what Macromedia needs to hear. If things are silent the assumption is all is ok. Thats the way the software world works. User input is crucial.

[MikeDowney]

Can you guys please be specific and list your detailed concerns instead of just ranting?

[Ask The Geezer]

Nope, not trying to be dramatic. It was an honest statement. I read the whole thread too, and a number of others like it elsewhere, by people concerned with the problems and bugs, apparently still in the program. Of course, your going to say there aren't any, that's what your paid to do, but I'll form my own opinion from what I read.

Nor have I given up on Macromedia. I'm in love with my copy of MX. I did install the flashplayer 7 and it caused all sorts of problems with other programs I have installed, including IE6. I had to remove it and go back to 6.79. And I didn't see any increase in anything but problems when it was installed. To be honest, what I read about 04 bothers me a lot. I'll hold off till I see how it goes, but I'll probably end up with it anyway. Just not any time soon.

Calling people stupid for voicing their opinions in a forum is what really devalues it. But that's just my opinion.

[keyone.it]

OK, this is one of those things you can't report as a bug because it is just the simthom of a cracky software (and this is the case of the new release of Flash, that is just as unstable as all those hyper-economic packages that add functionalities to the projectors)..

I was just creating a very simple card to be printed, with a few static textfields and colour shapes..
I selected a textfield, and tried to take it's decimal of the Y coordinate to zero (this is another issue...MX2004 is worse than ever with object positioning, a real bastard...you give an integer to a coordinate and it brakes the other...and it doesn't tell you when you press ENTER...to see the real position you must deselect and reselect the object first!) and the darn text halfens in size!!!!!!! I try again and the size of the textfield get's even smaller!!!!!! I go on and on until the textfield width and height valuse are below 1!!!!!!
Finally opening the transform panel and resetting the scale value of the textfield to 100 I can then patiently go back to the coordinates and fix the pixel alignment (this is another issue...the pixel-hooking function has never worked in MX either....).

Mike...I'm not saying that your collegues' sweat is worth nothing...
I'm just saying that I know how it works...it's normal to introduce products on the market before they are throughoutly tested...and 'till it comes to softwares it's less harmful that other things, like cars (AUDI is a very good example with the TT coupè).
But here I think that Macromedia has started exagerating, Flash is really heavy and looks quite unstable, aside from all the other listed issues (and I've seen how many they are..).

I don't want to complain about Macromedia's marketing decisions...I know that today only quick-money counts and not the goodness of the whole system.
Internet is the biggest failure in this case.
If it worked better, now sites would be charged millions, just as tv spots and other media productions.

Cheers!
Ascanio Colonna di Paliano.

p.s.
I purchased the darn StudioMX 2004 (yet waiting for the package to arrive, so I'm not registered), so don't come and tell me I did not do my part. I put the money in there so I'm waiting for the fixes.
Flash Player 6 took more that 1 f@...!ng year to reach an acceptable level of performance, stability and compatibility...and still computing capability is too limited.

[MikeDowney]

Give it time. It's an excellent app with a lot of impressive new features. And you don't have to re-open and re-publish every single FLA you've ever worked on. Create new projects and discover how many new things you can now do. Personally, I've spent more time in Flash MX 2004 than I ever did in the previous versions. ActionScript 2.0 being a Class-based language alone is phenomenal. I can build entire scalable, flexible applications purely in code if I want to. Sure it'll take time for everyone to learn - but it's so much fun once you do!

Regards,
MD

[cwflash]

Originally posted by MikeDowney


Now can we please get real here and try and be productive? I understand if the new release of this extraordinarily complex application has some bugs or features that you simply don't like. Complaining and whining that you're gonna lose ( <- note the CORRECT spelling!) all of your customers (though I don't understand the logic behind such claims) without making a legitimate effort to find a fix or a better way to do it is just juvenile.

Thats why I am not on here often. You can tell the difference between those who are dealing with the real world and those who are not. Its not fair to act as if Macromedia has an army of robots at their disposal to built perfect apps. It still takes human toil to accomplish things and just like everybody errors are made.

Mike, its a result of your products being dominate and superior that the critics are so quick to jump if something goes wrong.

MX was such a freaking awesome leap in Flash that I for one was drooling over the possibilities of 04. Its frustrating when you cant make the leap and take advantage of new features when features that you have relied on for years are radically changed not for the better. Its pretty frustrating Mike.

I hereby unsubscribe, Good day all. I will wait to see if these issues are fixed to upgrade.

[Ask The Geezer]

When I first got MX, it was 'all' new, to me. I came from Swish V2. I expected new, I expected a lot of exciting things, and I got them. I don't qualify as a spring chicken, any way you look at it, and MX was the challenge I was looking for in my 'getting bored' life. I got MX in October last, and researched it well before I bought it. I don't recall anything in any forum like what I'm seeing now. And not just in the FK forums. There must be 'something' to what all these gripers and complainers are *****ing about.

About the fp7, I did as much as I could to research that too. I got the version for my OS, and I did post some questions in the forums here about it. There was no fix or nobody knew, or the fix meant I had to give up something else I wanted to keep. That's not progress, that's a pain in the butt. I uninstalled it. Everything started working the way it was. I admit to not knowing all there is to know about flashplayer or MX or 04, but I do know I don't have time to worry out the bugs. It's easier and more productive for me to go back to what worked.

Give it time? You bet. I'm just worried about other 'improvements' that are going to make the work I've done so far look like crap or not work at all. That's a valid fear expressed by a number of people.

[FPChris]

Hi Mike and thanks for responding.

I've no dought that alot of time and effort goes into releasing
your product. Emotions run high as we are equally passionate about
the products we create and sell.

However, we aren't at liberty to go through version after
version with bugs in our programs. Our clients make us fix them.
We have to FINISH products before we release and get paid.
Btw, documentation *is* assumed part of the final product.

The Flash Player gets patches, MM has to save face
with end users. I wonder how popular Flash would be
on the web if MM could take the same attitude they do with
their software and apply it to their player. Not very.

I probably wouldn't be here airing all this publicly if
I knew MM had a history of fixing their software. I'd be
telling people to calm down it will be fixed soon.

Sadly, MM likes to explain away bugs not fix them.

I truely apologize for the negativity but this is our livelihood.


It's just a bunch of griping instead of reading, understanding, commenting, and figuring things out.


This is simply not true. I've been 'reading, understanding,
and commenting' about several bugs FOR YEARS and I still can't
figure out why they STILL exist.

Mike, honestly. If you never purchased Flash before and
bought MX2004 would really think it was a finished product?
Would you except that even though you just bought it
the help documents are very limited and you are expected to
wait for updates? I saw a potentional C++ developer reply
about this on MM newsgroups and the utter shock this
guy was experiencing. Lost one there, safe to say.

Look around. We are not alone in what were saying here.

Chris

[FPChris]

Personally, I've spent more time in Flash MX 2004 than I ever did in the previous versions. ActionScript 2.0 being a Class-based language alone is phenomenal. I can build entire scalable, flexible applications purely in code if I want to. Sure it'll take time for everyone to learn - but it's so much fun once you do!


Mike, AS2 was one of the thing I REALLY looking forward to
along with the strict syntaxing. If you look at my posts
pre-release you'll no dought see how much I was dieing to
jump into it. Being a long time C++ programmer it looked great.

Matter of fact I really was more jazzed about the strict syntaxing
I wanted badly to finally be able to bulletproof my code.
So I read up on AS2 and liked it, couldn't wait.

I downloaded the trial as soon as it became available.
Only to find the strict syntax isn't really strict at all
it is merely a means for the 'programmer' to force the
compiler to throw an error.

You still can assign strings to variables declared as numbers.
Read that twice if you need too.

How does this provide any further protection to the programmer
over AS1? AS2 actually becomes more dangerous than AS1, especially
to programmers that rely on the compiler to catch such errors.
You now have a variable explicitly typed as a Number but with
zero guarantee that is what that actually contains.

Unexceptable, might as well stay with AS1 if I still
have to police the code myself.

Chris

[MikeDowney]

All right, I'm not going to get through to some of you so this is my last post on this thread.

Originally posted by FPChris
Mike, honestly. If you never purchased Flash before and
bought MX2004 would really think it was a finished product?
Would you except that even though you just bought it
the help documents are very limited and you are expected to
wait for updates? I saw a potentional C++ developer reply
about this on MM newsgroups and the utter shock this
guy was experiencing. Lost one there, safe to say.

Look around. We are not alone in what were saying here.

To answer your question, yes, I absolutely would have bought this product. I've already built many great applications with it. Several were built with the beta, in fact.

Would I think it is a "finished product?" Of course! I'm not even sure what you mean by that. I have yet to see a single bug, incomplete feature, or anything else that would lead me to believe FLMX04 is "incomplete." Quite the opposite, actually. I think there are an overwhelming number of new, complete features that have opened up all kinds of possibilities.

As for the help documents, I know mine are complete. In fact, they were complete about 15 seconds after I first launched the app and was presented with a dialog telling me that newer help content was available - and *poof*, through the magic of the Internet I had dynamically updated docs in seconds. And guess what - the next time there is an update to the docs, I'll get that in seconds as well.

Look, my point is, don't enforce your judgement on people without being at least a *little* objective. I just responded to a lengthy thread that - in a very straight-forward way said, "these are the problems and issues I'm having with FLMX04." And I was able to respond to each one of them in a very productive way.

I know you're all passionate. I see it in your work. Many of you, like myself, have been using Flash since the very beginning. And among us we've shared joy, excitement, frustration, confusion, misunderstanding, and on and on. I have to respond to these posts because I've seen the same thing with every release of every product I've ever been involved with (even outside of Macromedia). I have always seen a small group of passionate, vocal people rush to judgement without giving the product a fair shake and in the process have mislead others.

When I see others post comments saying things like, "well I'm not going to upgrade because I've heard a lot of people saying they're having major problems" it makes me shudder. As I've been responding to most of the complaints, I'd say that 80 or 90% of them were easily solved due to the user just not knowing why something wasn't there, or why they were experiencing strange behavior, etc, etc. That's what tech support is for. We don't expect all of our users to be instant experts on the products - that's why we get out in the community and try to answer as many questions as we can.

I'm finished with this thread for now as I don't see it as being very productive. If you have specific questions or problems please post them in detail and I - or my many colleagues in the community - will try and help you out.

Regards,
MD

[Toby Mack]

Mike,

I hope I caught you before you quit this thread.

Issue:

Backwards compatibility, What happen to it?
Will MM address this problem?
If there is no, will MM make a conversion program so
we can use FLA's created in Flash 5?

I have tried to convert my work into Flash MX just like others have suggested and then open them in MX 2004 but still doesn't work.

I read you notes on a possible system conflict with other running software and looked into it but was unablle to find any conflicts.

Can you enlighten us on this?

[FPChris]

Thanks Mike. I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
Although your comments simply back my growing lack of faith
in your company.

I'll spare you the lengthy rant and simply agree to disagree.

Chris

[youschmuck]

Would I think it is a "finished product?" Of course! I'm not even sure what you mean by that. I have yet to see a single bug, incomplete feature, or anything else that would lead me to believe FLMX04 is "incomplete." Quite the opposite, actually. I think there are an overwhelming number of new, complete features that have opened up all kinds of possibilities.

PM me please mike.. I will give you my address.. fly you out to my house.. and be the first one to present you with MANY bugs from this program. ROFL.... Did you just say you haven't seen ANY bugs yet? I have yet to find a program EVER that I couldn't find a bug in and I'm not even a tester! Were you there when they tested this on platforms??? Oh wait... ah... they didn't test.. gotcha.

As for the help documents, I know mine are complete.

Whoa whoa whoa... did you just justify Macromedia's OBVIOUS lack of help files and good documention by saying that YOURS were complete?? This really makes me laugh. "well.. I know the help files suck for you guys.. but mine were complete and that's good enough".. rofl.

Look, my point is, don't enforce your judgement on people without being at least a *little* objective.

Hard to be objective when you just dropped $999 on a program that keeps telling you invalid format. "hey honey, I just dropped our tax return on a set of programs that work for 20 min and then crash. Don't worry though, cause macromedia doesn't patch and the MM guy posting on the forums has yet to see a bug. Things should turn out ok though, cause I'm staying objective. How much was the plasma center offering for blood again?". I've read your posts Mike. You talk to us as if we were software testers. Lets keep in mind MM is supposed to test this.. not us. No one is asking for a perfect program. And please don't reference THREE people making nasty comments... perhaps this thread yes... if you look around the internet you will find LOTS of people saying the same things on many different sites. A BIG issue is not that there are problems with the program but more that MM has no history of patching the programs. As such, people think, "geez, problems with my programs and Macromedia doesn't patch... that was nice way to blow 1k"

When I see others post comments saying things like, "well I'm not going to upgrade because I've heard a lot of people saying they're having major problems" it makes me shudder.

What are they supposed to say? "Awww.. those 50 angry reviewers (and yes mike, there are more than 3) we're probably just teasin'"

As I've been responding to most of the complaints, I'd say that 80 or 90% of them were easily solved due to the user just not knowing why something wasn't there, or why they were experiencing strange behavior, etc, etc.

Glad your % helped is so high... Please help with my problems:

1.) Random crashes.. no reason... just bam, DW, FMX 04, dead
2.) The dreaded, invalid format error... I didn't get it for a bit.. and now I get it on another system of mine.... system specs are the same on both comps.

Look.. my judgement is harsh. I'm not some pimple-faced meathead in highschool that just dropped $35 on some MMORPG. This thing cost me a grand.. I expect it to work. I find your, "calm down children" attitude very condecending and your posts do little to curry my favor to MM.

I'm not trying to be rude or arrogant... I'm trying to get my work done.

I don't have a problem with the bugs... my problem is MM's release when it's obvious to me that it wasn't ready to be released.

If you think I'm stupid, or my comments are stupid, then how about you front me the grand I dropped on this until the problems are fixed. I'll pay you back when they are. If history is an indicator of the future, I stand to be eating well for a long time to come on your money.

just my 2 though.

PS. You don't need to quote anyone in a reply to me... be original and come up with something smooth to say yourself.

[98svt]

"Flash for Jerks"?
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Does that mean that only Flash professionals are allowed to use Flash? If so, then why can anyone buy it? If anyone can buy it, then anyone should be able to use it.
As far as MX2004, I bought the Studio, I'm happy with everything except Flash MX 2004.
I adore Macromedia as well as their products but FMX2004 is kinda a dissapointment.
Still kind pissed off about the immature "Flash for Jerks" comment, but i'm an adult and can live with it.
Maybe one day, when I get big, I can be a Flash user too?

Mike

[MikeDowney]

OK, you pulled me back into this thread.

Originally posted by youschmuck
Did you just say you haven't seen ANY bugs yet? I have yet to find a program EVER that I couldn't find a bug in and I'm not even a tester! Were you there when they tested this on platforms??? Oh wait... ah... they didn't test.. gotcha.
[/B]

No, youschmuck (that's a reference to your username, not an insult) I didn't just say that. Take a minute to read again. Here's what I said:

I have yet to see a single bug, incomplete feature, or anything else that would lead me to believe FLMX04 is "incomplete." Quite the opposite, actually. I think there are an overwhelming number of new, complete features that have opened up all kinds of possibilities.

Big, big difference from what you're incorrectly stating.

Whoa whoa whoa... did you just justify Macromedia's OBVIOUS lack of help files and good documention by saying that YOURS were complete?? This really makes me laugh. "well.. I know the help files suck for you guys.. but mine were complete and that's good enough".. rofl.

Wow. Try again. Here's what I said:

As for the help documents, I know mine are complete. In fact, they were complete about 15 seconds after I first launched the app and was presented with a dialog telling me that newer help content was available - and *poof*, through the magic of the Internet I had dynamically updated docs in seconds. And guess what - the next time there is an update to the docs, I'll get that in seconds as well.

Funny how you took it out of context to rant. The help panel automatically checks for updates when you launch the app. There's also an "Update" button in the Help panel that will force Flash to check for an update. Which is why my copy of Flash's docs are up-to-date, as would yours be if you launched and/or hit the update button.

Hard to be objective when you just dropped $999 on a program that keeps telling you invalid format.

Not sure why you're getting this message. I'm looking into it and will post in another thread. I just received a message from someone who did recreate the problem with a specific release, then no longer experienced it after downloading and installing a clean copy from the trial site. (BTW - trial versions accept your serial numbers to unlock the full version)

1.) Random crashes.. no reason... just bam, DW, FMX 04, dead
2.) The dreaded, invalid format error... I didn't get it for a bit.. and now I get it on another system of mine.... system specs are the same on both comps.

I'm only seeing this on a specific type of install. Feel free to send me details of your hardware config. Also, if you've registered your software you're entitled to tech support.