For the people buying mx (including me) i guess its time to kiss flash 5 goodbeye consedering the fact its coming out in a couple of days.
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For the people buying mx (including me) i guess its time to kiss flash 5 goodbeye consedering the fact its coming out in a couple of days.
Honestly, I think that with as different as it is, and with as many new features as it is, some people will make the switch gradually.
Think about designers and interactive designers/developers using Flash at their job, working daily on sites, client work, banners, etc. "being very busy." They can't just immediatly kiss it goodbye and have the same workflow on a new and very different version.
For that reason, I think if you were to know what's going on at design agencies across the world, they're all not going to make an instant 100% switch.
mg33
you can make the switch IMMEDIATELY if you want. not much reason to though.
F4 to F5 = big step, tons of changes
F5 to FMX = small step, lots of improvements, addins to things that already exist, the timeline is better, layering is improved with the new feature 'Layer Folders'! Lots of little useful changes like that as well as new features, tools, etc, etc... oh and components are soooo sweet! Watch when they take over the Flash Exchange ;-)
/: Ashley Michaud, http://www.FlashOutlet.com
Wait for the MX server and you will start learning the backend stuff. ;) But till then, enjoy the new Flash MX!
plenty of reason for us to, we make applications from flash for on line education and testing. faster XML parsing, incorporating video, saving files to hard drives we've pre ordered 15 copies
Has everyone forgotten about player adoption? It'll be a good few months before everyone bothers to download the FMX player...
doesn't matter, much of our products require an install anyway so installing the player is no problem
Wasn't referring to your work - actually, I'm thrilled to see that MX looks like a viable application development tool. :D
I hope that it makes my job a damn sight easier, allowing me more time to develop my skills.
Except in a one on one situtation!Quote:
Originally posted by Sons of Liberty
The Pen is mightier then the sword
I'm actually authoring a Flash 4 compatible movie right now because it still has greater saturation than F5 plugin for this piece's target audience. But, the interface enhancements and CD-ROM possibilities of FMX are certainly worth jumping on. And, hey, I will still be able to export to F4 if I need to.
|re: fmx|
/
wow. to start off, i hated each and every upgrade of flash. it seemed so pacific, so very content with itself that i thought it was the best thing in the whole world. apparently, macromedia didn't think so
future splash / flash 2: basic animation, basic as
flash 3: advanced animation, basic as
flash 4: advanced animation, intermediate as
flash 5: expert animation, advanced as
flash mx: expert animation, expert as
as far as i can see it, kids, macromedia has just cornered itself. macromedia flash 7 is NOT coming out. in the long run, you can kiss flash goodbye. but its legacy will fade for over 20 years and different (and better) apps will try to fill its niche. all macromedia can do now is integrate its authoring tools into one all-purpose swiss army knife. flash has finally become the EXPERIMENTAL - H4X0R L337 thing that macromedia meant it to be. its box is gray, for pete's sake! next think you know, it'll be distributed in little pills smushed onto a souped up floppy disk with a laser beam for retina recognition.
why people will switch is a question i do not dare to answer because frankly, there isn't reason enough. developers are happy as it is with their generator-loaded .jpgs. i'm still developing advanced applications with FLASH 4, though i find flash 5 an awesome tool for interface prototyping. flash drifted so far from its animation purpose. macromind and authorware(the other company?) weren't betting on some screwy gadgety bill-gates/steve-jobs/steven-hawking/some-genius-kid tool as the savior for web presentation. an app advances bilaterally, advancing in both directions. the graphic abilities of fmx are a 5, the scripting abilities are a 9. the only thing preventing this tool from becoming its own programming language is its name. its imbalance is what drives people off course. i'm definitely not switching to fmx until i create my own application, because if macromedia wants to create a compelling app, they've gotta create the thing right the first time, but if they want to go to 2G, let 'em come up with a good name.
/
[Edited by aevium on 03-08-2002 at 05:45 PM]
Quote:
Originally posted by aevium
wow. to start off, i hated each and every upgrade of flash. it seemed so pacific, so very content with itself that i thought it was the best thing in the whole world ...yaddayaddayadda .... wants to create a compelling app, they've gotta create the thing right the first time, but if they want to go to 2G, let 'em come up with a good name.
uh...what?
So by making a product better, they are shooting themselves in the foot? Don't guess I understand that line of thinking. :confused:
|re: follow-up|
/
people rarely understand me.
what i meant to say was that macromedia is hanging the whole flash thing by its neck from a tall tree. another version of flash, the noose is tightened, and flash is integrated into a suite. photoshop used to be an independent app, then it got integrated into dozens of "packs." flash will not die, it will advance to 3G or 4G, but it won't have the same independence and sense of freedom, because it kills its own purpose of being graphic.
to put it simply, long-term suicide for Flash is coming, and if a MM rep tells me i'm wrong, i'll rent a crystal ball, because like it or not, flash is dying.
/
yikes.. you have a good point there aevium!
Aevium as far as i can see you havent made a single valid point :P Youre like me, you have an idea and you wish to express it but in the end you end up covering the whole genre rather than the single project you intended to discuss. Hell you might even start discussing politics.
I honestly cant see the "death of flash" coming anytime soon. People are humans, they like shiny things with knobs on them, and as long as there is a moderatly simple way of giving them that with low loading times then i think we can guarantee its popularity for a while ahead.
Flash 5 was dying, mainly because of how bug-ridden it was, how slow advanced vector anim was with regards to the average household computer and how many polished Shockwave products arrived in very little time. It became a cheap quick solution for people who would do stuff for fun and nothing more. Newgrounds anyone? As a result flash was earmarked as unprofessional and low tech. Youd be hard pressed to get a job as a dedicated flash developer these days, at least here in norway. Its considered a "bonus" in hiring an employee more than a real skill.
I've worked on/off with flash game development for close to 2 years now, and i've been quite literally tearing my hair out at how utterly chaotic the development process would tend to get. I signed up for a Shockwave class but eventually couldnt afford it, so i stuck with flash. Now with Flash MX, which deals with pretty much all the problems ive had with Flash 5 (Layer folders people whahaha woho!) i honestly believe we can see a form of rebirth in the flash community. With the greater ease of the development process along with the additional power offered by most computers there days, the improved AC and the new player (runs amazingly smooth compared to the old),i think we'll be seeing a lot more professional content the coming years.
I for one am extremely excited =)
- Andreas R
innerwar productions
I must agree with innerwar
Flash is not dieing.
To kill Flash you must kill the army of developers using the software and there is no way that will happen.
Your saying Flash has now got to the point to where there is nothing to add... animation and actionscript is now top notch. First of all, This is a good thing... Flash MX is top notch which mean it's now ok to extend on the program not to leave it where it is. Think about it, there are several things not in Flash. Flash can not handle 3d like director, Flash can not do several things and has a huge wish list of new features that can be added. I feel the NEXT version of Flash after Flash MX is going to be beyond crazy. I can not even envision the direction in which Flash is going to take within the next year.
/: Ashley Michaud, http://www.FlashOutlet.com
|re:follow-up|
/
f5bt, i must disagree. flash could be killed by a budget cut (UNlikely), natural disaster (UNlikely) or shortage of users (much likely). people do like things with shiny knobs, but soon, those things become boring and monotonous. flash IS going to die quite soon, but its product line is not. perhaps it will be called another name or integrated in a suite, or even sold to a neophyte developer company.
flash, by far, is not considered anywhere NEAR low-tech. applications developed with flash could surpass the billions of lines of code that make up windows xp. bugs are not an issue. for f5, i work on a mac, for f4 i work on a pc. both have substantial system resource consummation, but neither in my opinion is low-tech. a barely-changed interface and a new box for fmx is like ie5 to ie6. there are advancements, from big to small. but there isn't much to hold it in place. people like yugop don't need a High-tech version of flash. they're already as high-tech as can be. compare flash to netscape. it was a pioneer, advancing over a long period of time, but now it became a background app. so has flash. why? because flash was used SO much that people became deathly tired of it.
fmx will keep coming for fmx2 and 3. but i am afraid that its status will diminish.
/
flash may be dying, but i'm gonna use it while it's alive!
i think there are reasons for adobe and microsoft to be the biggest software companies around -
they INTEGRATE their products, actually macromedia used to be a little messy with their different products, freehand
and flash are both doing vectors did you know?
i think a to streamline and integrate programs in a productline is not a mistake, if you dont get along you just use a specific tool for JUST THAT.
what i wonder is - when can i USE it - many people
still have slow computers and as a pro you cant just ignore
them, thats a bad thing about the great featureitis coming up...
give me a swiss armyknife and i´ll roast a sausage.
To the person that said MM were getting into a corner with the progression of Flash, making the animation improvments, well Flash has now got a bigger scope, somone making comics, and somone makeing an online shopping cart can both use flash. This makes more money, and then better products.
They can keep adding further support, untill they engulf the whole net, then they can slow down a bit :)
Vector graphics program + animation program + web page designer + programming interface (Actionscript) = Flash MX
k...I've been waiting a long time to respond to this thing about flash dying. Hate to break it to you guys, but flash is getting more popular. over the last year flash player propogation stats have gone from 96% to 98%. so, seeing as flash ships with windows, ie and ns downloads it's going to get even more popular as people upgrade their browsers/os/etc . The reason why flash has become so popular is that it's great technology. It can actually do a lot of things that Shockwave content can't...lets forget the cutting edge of web art and animation and talk about consumers- the people who ultimately need to be impressed for any product to continue. With flash, we deliver animated interactive content that takes less time to download than html pages that provide even a fraction of the experience that flash does. It really comes down to being a transparent technology, people install their browsers/os/whatever, and flash is there-they can see what you made. Average users dont really know what flash is... they say 'whoa..cool site' or 'really easy to use website, so responsive and interactive!'...and never question how it got there. that's what matters here, that's what ultimately drives development and product release. As long as people are doing business on the web they're going to want to impress their customers, flash lets designers/developers do that. I'll tell you what though, average joe who wants to, let's say, buy a car online isn't gonna wait 20 minutes on his [barely]56K aol dialup to download the latest shockwave 3d art piece, and probably couldnt care less about what yugop is doing. Bottom line is that people love flash, they like shiny things that move on the screen in front of them.
BUT FMX is a different issue alltogether. It's a better version of flash 5, it's the next step. now, there are some questions about the FMX UI they will be answered once you have the software, but it really is better. But the UI, illustration and animation features pale in comparison to the new backend support, new objects, etc. hmmm...imagine being able to render a gradient at runtime that came directly from data in your SQL DB that you took directly from a java object that you can now manipulate with flash! hee hee. nuff said.
Okay, for those of you who keep saying that flash is dieing, you're sadly mistaken, because really the only language that can do more things as a web-app is java.
A little difference with Java though: Java has plenty enemies, Flash has plenty friends... Not trying to politically incorrect here, but still...
all of you guys... aren't we forgetting an itti bitti crucial detail...... i never said flash was dying......only expressing my feeling towards what will happen when mx comes out! and buy the way i made a mistake on that sunject thingy... i meant to time to kiss FLASH 5 good bye. Have a nice day
flash 5 will probably be used less by developers, but i think exporting as flash 5 or 4 if thats all thats needed is pretty important until the saturation gets better. if you do a commercial site, and you need to impress people, most likely you wont do it by having them install a new player.
i was showing one of my friends on msn a link to some AS stuff i did, they asked if they should download this "Flash thing", most end users dont understand the concept of players or why content wont work after a while if newer players arent received.
and as for flash slowly dying by becoming a better product and integrating .. wont that just make it better overall for using different products together ? plus the fact theres hundreds of other swf production programs out there, and probably more since the swf file type will probably be updated, i really doubt flash 7 (mx2?) won't be released. i think until bandwidth and processor speeds are much higher, a non-vector based media program wont work as well (compare director > flash, flash is more common because its lightweight)
well.. thats enough rambling from me.
somebody said MX has minor improvements over 5?
If every forum post from a flasher newbie who wanted to make a movie that could load JPG's weighed 1 pound, we'd have tons of trash to clean up.
And that's just one of the new features.
How about the drawing API functions?
The possibilities opened by that alone are boggling my mind.
Flash dying? What underwater cave do you live in?!
Ridiculous exceptions aside, flash will be here at least as long as it remains the only vector based solution for the web. There are simply too many things that it does that can't be accomplished by other formats. I'm not sure what would inspire anyone to predict it's going to die. Maybe a bummed out Java expert?
yea,but we are try it now,cause lots of peaple are using f5,so we have to wait all to change their player.
D:)S
flash will only get better
A large percentage of the browsers being used out there support upgrade re-direction for the flash plug-in. If anything, it's not the flash designers rushing around trying to upgrade everyone. It's the browser/platform interest to rush that.
Surely this is why MM is trying to push the 'solid interface' capabilities of Flash? They are trying to move it away from the whizzing lines and flashing banners that it has become synonymous with. The interfaes that plague the web where it takes you 15 minutes to figure out what you are doing and by which time you've got a severe migrane/ epilepsy. MM seem to be pushing the more functional side of things judging by quite a few of the additions/improvements in MX
Y, and people have watched so much tv, they're gonna stop, cause they got bored..!!Quote:
Originally posted by aevium
|because flash was used SO much that people became deathly tired of it.
Think before you speak out.
And u seem to think flash is at the end of it's development??
I think u just lack vision. and BTW flash was never a graph app, its an interactive MULTImedia tool, designed to bring STREAMING content in the web.
The only thing that might kill flash is the bugs. I read another post saying that 6 player was slower than 5... so flash will only die if it suffers from netscape 6 syndrome!
Right as I'm getting proficient with 5...
I have a feeling that it will be a while before MX is widely adopted, assuming the adoption patterns follow those of 3-4 and 4-5. It was months after the relase of 5 before I felt comfortable releasing stuff commercially with it.
if you think it is dying, you are ignoring history.
People thought apple was dead. People thought IBM would be dead. People thought "Who the hell would want DOS when they can have the Mac OS"
People thought the futuresplash player was just a flash in the pan --
Flash is just evolving -- the greatest thing about it is the fact that it introduces application development to thousands of newbie kids that want a killer flash page for their CounterStrike Clan.
Flash is the best programming teacher I have ever seen. it takes concepts that are farily arcane and gives them real world accesibility. Try explaining how to create an applet that uses the AWT and has ton's of features and supports xml-- Flash can do all of that and it is easier to break down.
My first level programming students start with Flash and Javascript. I think it's the best way for them to learn -- and the additions in Flash MX just drive that point home.
Flash will grow more -- I think eventually it will ( hopefully ) merge with director (using both lingo and actionscript derivatives as it's language). Or it could go in a completely different direction.
You are seeing the beginning of a revolution. When all these kids eventaully learn this program, it will be even more pervasive than it is today.
or I could be wroing and we could all be unemployed next month.
Scott Fanetti
Sometimes people like to blather on a hunch, rather than formulating concrete opinions and supporting those opinions with facts. Anyways...
Just so you all know, 30 million people use AOL. AOL ships with Flash 4 support.
In other words, Flash isn't going anywhere... The compatibility is there for so many millions of people (beyond the AOL users, since Flash ships with other browsers too).
BUT...
Flash MX or 6? I'm sticking with Flash 4. I know it'll work on at least 30 million computers. Can't be so sure of any higher version....
I was in a meeting last week with a whole crew of people, most with no web experience. One of the topics we covered was whether to do a Flash or HTML site.
The creative director said he thought Flash was a lot more classy and slick than HTML. The AE asked if it was possible to use a complex database with it. The database programmer said he could easily incorporate his stuff with Flash.
Then someone asked if I thought Flash would be as stable as HTML for the long term or will it be obsolete in a couple years and replaced by some new technology. I told them that if I knew where the technology would be in 5 years I sure as hell wouldn't have been sitting in that meeting!