Very disappointed in MX 2004

[lastboss]

Originally posted by PAlexC

If you ran out and bought or trialed MX2004 and installed it on a development machine to "test it out", there's no room to complain. If your bread and butter is Flash developement, you should never, ever, just upgrade anything, including the player without going through testing on another box.

Thanks for the insight, now I'll be sure to run out to the millions of people that see my clients work all completely ****ed up with their upgraded player and tell them to downgrade.

Oh, and not only that - but, I'll be sure to put in the hundreds of hours of work into horrible "Oops, this site only really works in Flash MX" roadblocks into the site.

Sorry, Flash2004 is essentially a virus that will be feeding on it's host, MX.

It's simply unfathomable to have a product that has such a loyal userbase trample on them when they are essentially at the shrine. All the new features are really swell, but they should be *OPTIONS* and they should not interfere with the mechanics of the previous versions...

... autoupgrade, what a treat! Where is the "auto fix all my newly broken files"?

[circle282]

hahahaha omg. Flash is a virus?

[lastboss]

Originally posted by Aria
Some people here seriously need a chill pill (or 2)

I could get jumped for what I am about to say but here it goes anyhow - I personally feel this is a great and innovative product that any developer who is serious about his/her work and development process would embrace and would be here posting and sharing something a bit more constructive than throwing tantrums. This isn't some competition about who gets to master the next Flash upgrade first. Yes there's a new learning curve 'cos the tool has evolved as it should be and you in return get a more sophisticated product that'll enable you to become more efficient - in other words you get value for money. Furthermore, there's another option--> you dont have to upgrade if your existing Flash version meets your existing needs and requirements.

We used to come here after each upgrade and share work and solutions to make this and the next release an even better one. This is what the community used to do and MM always listened and still does.

I came across a viewpoint in another forum which I happen to share: I really do feel that MX2004 is ahead of its time - Perhaps a year too early? I'm certain MM spent an enormous amount of resources to make this upgrade possible. Get some books and go have some fun.

a

... just curious, what was the percentage of files you were forced to convert to Flash 2004? And of that percentage, how much of it converted flawlessly and required no work?

In trying to maintain calmness, I can say I honestly could care less about any of the new features when the importability of certain older files is going to require a ton of microadjusting, which is only more annoying by the 'fun new' differences in the interface.

The push is the forced upgrading, the kick in the teeth is the horrendous interface that we're forced to learn and make do with when going over work that was fine until just recently.

I don't mind learning curves, I mind getting tossed into them headfirst.

[FPChris]

Originally posted by mxgen
when you guys decided to go against upgrading to mx2004, and said that mx is solid... do you guys mean that you want to go as far as FLASH MX, an that's all?

i'm sort of referring to the second post in this thread...

i am using FLASH MX, and i have never used flash 5...

and i do not want to upgrade to FLASH MX2004 either...

I think most of us 'want' to upgrade but not in its current state.
I hope MX won't be the last good version. I'm sure things will
eventually get on track but that may not come to pass until the
next major release unless MM breaks from tradition an releases a
patch in the near future. Thankfully MX will still do what I
currently am in production on and I don't have to upgrade
until I want too.

Chris

[MG315]

can someone link me to a site that has these problems you keep referring to that spawned from the "flash 7 virus"? I've had the flash 7 plugin since one of the first beta releases of it and I haven't seen any problems with it (although I havent been going to all the flash sites I can think of, scouring them for little glitches). Could it be system dependent and only affecting a few people or am I just not seeing these bugs.

[FPChris]

I also haven't ran into problem with the player.
So hopefully the player won't cause any real trouble.
At least the player regularly gets patched.
Now that people report this I'm gonna play it safe
and do some deeper testing.

Chris

[lastboss]

I'm regretfully not at liberty to provide examples of our own internal chaos - but a few of the links on this thread show an inability for audio to maintain synchronization... which is a huge problem.

cheers.

[FPChris]

Thought I'd put this over here due it being hidden over
in the coffee lounge.

Posted by Mike Chambers from MM wanting feedback opinion
on MX2004 at MM's blog. Go here...

http://www.markme.com/mesh/archives/003360.cfm

Judging from what I read we're not alone with what has been
voiced here. I am glad to see MM is listening at least.

Cheers...

Chris

[keyone.it]

I must say that it's weird how they constructed the new silly features...like effects and behaviours, as the first ones are a very ugly copy of what third party softwares do much better...and behaviours are just crap...why should I keep a panel open, occupying my desktop, and have to move to it to insert very elemntary actions?? It's just ridiculus.. Already since MX the workspace was quite badly designed, but at least with a bit of conscence you could tune it up to cover quite little space, but now buttons and fields are even bigger, it look like an interface for spastics (or designed for high res screens...and what if you have less than 1600x1200..you can barely view the stage..).
Just luky I have a dual-head on my low profile machine, as I added another small screen to move the panels into.

Come on...I work with many different softwares (Maya is just an example), which have a hell of a lot of features and commands to keep under the fingertips...and they have a much better designed workspace (ok...I'm talking about 5K+ worth packages...but this doesn't meen Macromedia has to eat my screens like this.).

On the other side forgetting about the history issue (which doesn't actually annoy me that much, due to the way I work with Flash, but it does annoy me any way), I must say that the way Actions are managed is very, very cool.
Pinning scripts so I can swap from one another with one click is fantastic...this is somthing I was dreaming for, and it will save me a lot of time..

Must say I haven't had many problems opening old files (MX only), nor FP7 compatibility with Flash 5 files, or software conflicts (and I'm running on a quite unstable machine with the crap WindowsXP pro installed on it - Microsoft gave it to me, and I didn't want to pay for another 2000 pro license....).

And the overall I must say that I'm pretty much indifferent to the MX2004 release, as the only seriously useful features can be easily achieved by coding without enhancements in FlashMX. So I won't be sad if I have to switch back to it.

Cheers!

[S2mega]

i personally have only had one problem with the authoring environment : http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...0&pagenumber=4,

(right at the bottom)

but the flash 7 player seems to run a lot slower than the previous.

and from the vast majority of comments here, i have made up my mind -

how do you remove player 7 from your system and go back to player 6??? so that you may at least open up the mx stuff without sound syncing issues??

[Ask The Geezer]

http://www.macromedia.com/support/fl...faq.htm#remove

[S2mega]

ooh~ thanks very much

just to vouch for the additions - when i first opened it up, and saw some nifty little things, like the alpha chanel within fill colours, i thought, cool...
but when stuff start not working... well, we just hope it will, soon.

player 6 also had its share of misery - it WAS one of the biggest bugs, and it got sorted out.

so i guess this one's no different - i'll still stick around for some official word. cheers.

[S2mega]

ack, i just realised that even if i uninstalled player 7, my browser would still look up macromedia for the latest version each time i opened up a swf fill, right?

so i looked in macromedia for player 6 - and it seems that they don't have it. oh WOW. that's nice, they got all the way up to 5, but not 6. how do i get 6? since i don't have my copy of mx handy to install the whole thing over again...

[Ask The Geezer]

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/downloads.html

This is intersting, all the version 6 players in every language but English. They are sure making it hard to find the english version. Just a few weeks ago, 6.79 was easy to find. Gettin kind of pushy lately.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/fl...e_r79_all.html

And no, I uninstalled 7 and reinstalled 6.79 and have not been asked to update since. Altho when I had the latest version, it was asking me 20 times a day. One of the reasons I got rid of it.

[S2mega]

Originally posted by iaskwhy
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/downloads.html

This is intersting, all the version 6 players in every language but English. They are sure making it hard to find the english version. Just a few weeks ago, 6.79 was easy to find. Gettin kind of pushy lately.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/fl...e_r79_all.html

And no, I uninstalled 7 and reinstalled 6.79 and have not been asked to update since. Altho when I had the latest version, it was asking me 20 times a day. One of the reasons I got rid of it.

highly irritating. forcing it like this isn't really gonna get them anywhere. people will just take it like it's a FORCED thing and try getting it elsewhere. like i will, somehow...

and speaking of somehow, is the only alternative to downloading the non-existant player 6 re-installing flash mx?? or if i can understand chinese, why don't i get the chinese one? or does it not install under an english windows XP?

edit : oh hold on, i saw that in the first link there's a player 6 download - downloading now. so that should be fine, then. kudos to you iaskwhy

[murple]

heres a q for mike, why in the hell did they change the whole scaling interface for mx2004?
it used to be that regardless of the object being manipulated, the registration point(the objects 0,0 position) was the anchor point for scaling, which could be modified at will by changing the clips 0,0 position.
Now for mx2004...It now acts like this, DEPENDING on the object type (graphic, grouped object...), it may act like the previous way, BUT if you are scaling a MOVIECLIP it does this: regardless of what registration point you have selected when you created the movieclip object, it always scales from the center of the object out, no way around it! there is no more "edit center" feature anymore either! So now, tweens and scaling in general requires additional steps to get the desired effect that previously didn't require all this footwork. was this an interface result thanks to jacob???!!!!!
Another problem with scaling is if you are trying to make an object larger than the stage, you can't just type in the large percentage anymore..NOOOO if you do, it scales the object as large as it can without going outside the stage boundaries. And if you try multiple times to rescale to the larger size, the constrain proportions will turn off and your object will continue to stay scaled within the stage area but its proportions will be altered. I mean,, how stupid are your UI designers???? There are a number of issues i've seen so far where macromedia has taken the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" adage and THROWN IT OUT THE WINDOW.

I'm getting my money back for 2004 and i've already got IT from two of the companies i work with to do the same.

Back to happy MX for me it is, screw the "features" in 2004, it ain't worth it when your interface slows productivity to a halt. Take a page from SUN....A few years back, they changed the API to the solaris platform SLIGHTLY...SUN damn near lost 40% of thier clients because that slight change interfered with a previously solid running internal structure...It will happen to you too, if it hasn't already begun....

[goldndog]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by FPChris
[B]We've pretty much decided against upgrading to MX2004.
However, MX has proven to but solid and I suggest getting it
while you can. MP3 compression is hardly a reason to hold back.

I have no problems with MX actually I rather like it. For the past three days of trying the trial version 2004 MX I have been in a software nightmare. Although I am thrilled that I am not on a deadline or attempted to use it on a project.

The program is buggy and counter productive. This whole timeline effects is not as nice looking as the tweening I could do before. I will say that maybe I have not worked with it enough yet, but so far I am frustrated. A simple web ad that would have been done in an hour (completed in MX in an hour) I am was still messing with it in MX 2004 after 2 hours and quit.

My biggest concern is about the version 7 player. My clients are large corporations and moving to the 7 player will not be happening immediately. It is hard enough to deal with the fact that the final product was created in Flash. A battle I do not want to fight, because I will not win it.

I cannot even get the MX 2004 to run on one of my machines. Not a good sign. (yes it is a mac).

I am also thinking of not upgrading. This trial version is leaving a bad taste.

[murple]

Another thing that 2004 has a real problem with is remembering settings for petes sake..Anytime you open the program up, most of the panel settings stay in efect, but things like snap preferences (personally i have all of those bloody things turned off), and line connect... You know, that setting that keeps perpendicular lines from mixing all up and no longer looking like perfectly straight perpendicular lines...MX DOES have some "memory" issues in that regard also but nowhere near as badly as 2004. The IT guys just reinstalled MX on all the production machines this morning...ahhhh, its like drinkin a sierra mist, "good dog!" Too bad i couldn't keep the MX2004 box for target practice....

[ric frankland]

i'm giving MX2004 a go, and i'm going back to Flash 5...

the main reason is the loss of the Normal Mode for actionscript.

i'm a designer, not too great with programming, but don't mind having a go and messing around... now i'm completely lost!! it's taking me ages to put together some very basic script.

i understand some comments that it will push you into using the more sophisticated elements of MX2004... but what if i don't want to! i'm quite happy with good looking graphics (i think!) with simple actions.

can someone tell me if MX has Basic Mode, and is it worth considering over Flash 5?

[Ask The Geezer]

Yes, MX has Normal and Expert Mode for the Actions Panel. And, with MX, you have about 200% of the actions available in F5. Seriously, there are just about twice as many new actions for MX as there were for F5. I even counted them once.

MX is the benchmark in Flash now. Many people are unhappy with 04, for all sorts of reasons. I think it's headed over to the Director lot. Nice program, but too specialized for the masses.