What do you think of Flash 2004?

I've been using since it came out, several months now.

As Comic Book Guy would say, worst upgrade ever.

I started wth Flash 3. The upgrades to 4, 5 and MX were all worth the money. When I got Flash MX I instantly saw that the UI was so much better, I never opened Flash 5 again.

We're doing all our work in MX and not using our MX 2004 upgrade - "the lads'll no take it captain".

There are new things in Flash MX 2004, but nothing to help Joe Flasher or to get his clients excited. We're a normal Web design company. When Flash MX came along we were able to tell our clients:

1. Your Flash content will load faster (They loved that)
2. We can put movie clips straight into Flash (They liked that)
3. Flash can load multimedia files remotely (They said "what"?)
4. Scrollbars, scrollpanes and other ultra-useful components now only take seconds to create (They said "do we get a discount?")

When Flash MX 2004 came out, we were able to tell our clients... Er...

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When Flash MX 2004 came out, we were able to tell our clients... Er...

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Umm..we can tell them...that NOW..it will take "US" longer to perform our normal duties..now that (unless you are a PROGRAMMER) most of the basic and USEFULL functions have been removed from FLASH MX 2004 Pro

Normal AS editor..GONE!..
Cant even do BASIC frame effects anymore (tweens)..unless its a "_X or _Y location tween.. These things PISS me off SOOOOO bad,..(not to mention the normal everyday bugs)...I will NOT buy another edition of FLASH until they come back...

I have been a tried and true FLASh user since 4..and have bought everything they hqave thrown at me..I support MM to the fullest as I think they produce quality work (except MX 2004...)... But now they have ruined this trust and belief along with lossing a lifetime customer.

-whispers-

I like AS 2.0 It seems a lot neater then AS1 or AS1.5.

but that's just me

:)

What is AS1.5 :rolleyes:

well, a lot of people call Flash MX (v6) Actionscripting 1.5. AS1 being Flash 5 and AS2 of course being MX2K4(v7).

Hiya peeps,

I also gotta admit i use my fmx version more then my upgraded 2004 version.

The workflow in mx is zillions times better and faster to me.
The automatically closing of the actionscript editor in mx2004 drives me completely crazy.( and thats a complete understatement!!)

Not being able to open the actionscript compiler on a right click is driving me completely mad too.

Those 2 things drive me up the wall and back and i can understand WHY MM WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY :confused:, just to bug us :eek:

i hate those things even more then that i love the new AS 2.

MM what have you done, :eek:

It's just the Demon of habbits :D :D :D Be flexible, loosen up, eat a :doughnut:

Just kidding ;)

hehe :D

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...hreadid=531008

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Originally posted by Charan
http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...hreadid=531008

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Are you kidding me? Seriously? Trying to highjack "THIS" thread? LOL..funny..

Post this in the correct forum and you might get feedback..oh wait..you already did?...multiple posting? :(

-whispers-

Well I think MX 2004 is a bad update, while this will prob piss 99% of the people off in here I must really say I dont like what they have done.

Do a search on the net and see waht ppl say, they are angry.
Mostly because of the way the Actions panel has changed. Now if you dont know ActionScripting, your screwed.

We cant all be buff's, so surely the updates should make it easier, not worste? :mad:

Ok my last two cents...

It seems there are those who do not like the new 2004 due to it being unsutable for flash newbies...

ok I understand that, but at the same time, flash is a professional tool, and I honestly believe if you want to learn a profession then you need to take a certified educational coarse to learn those skills, I'm doing that right now attending college to learn Multimedia which includes using the macromedia suit, at the end of the day I be looking to make money from this new found knowledge and in return I need to expect that clients are going to be willing to pay for my skill, if Flash is made to easy then any Tom, Dick or Henryetta can charge £9.99 for some piece of part time work done in there bedroom after they finished working at the local cafe as a waiter/waitress.(sorry not stereo typing :p )

OK i agree that there are some excellent part time flashers out there, lots with more skill then I have, and I agree that there a lot of users not wishing to use flash for cash and only as a hobby, but get real, flash is a tool to make money full stop, if you want to use it for a hobby then except the fact that a watered down newbie version is unrealistic for the future of flash, the more professional a tool flash becomes the more clients will pay the pro flashers, the more the clients pay will then reflect the cost of flash in the future ie more expensive, pro flashers will pay as they make money, less hobbiest means more clients have to pay more for flash and the loop starts again...

Hell I'm all for that. :D

Well I am with you there, all for money and money for all -

But lets just think about it for a sec in a different light. Sure Flash is a pro package, but cant that be said for Photoshop or Dreamweaver or the likes?

So why doesn't photoshop drop a hugely useful tool like the round mask from the tools pallet then, sure real pro users could work around it and you could argue it made the final product worth more, but that is just CRAZY...

Tools get easier, Flash is also a wisiwig tool, and that wont stop the wash-up's fiddling and making eye sore's to post on the web - hell, nothing can prevent that. You can be the biggest geek on earth with the worst taste ever, and that makes your work worth more??

Nope...

Dropping the actionscript editor wont stop more visual "designers" from working with flash, saying: "o well, it's a pro tool now for actionscripters only"

It will only piss them off, they will rally to get it back, and the end MM sells the product, more people buy, more revenue for them.
I dont think they give a wally how much you can charge for your work, only how it will affect their bottom line.

Making tools easier is what it is about, what you do with it determines if you can charge small money or big money.

while I agree w/ 1stBite about the pro guild (keep up with the pros) argument, I must side with Lotus Head. Flash's strengths in the past (in my mind) have been the unifiction of Frontend design and Backend coding. Most of my focus in this biz is centered on animation. but I script in expert mode. personally i don't mind eliminating "normal" mode, never found it to simplify anything. Expert mode gave me more4 script control. I'm wary to upgrade because I don't want my grafics work to be slowed down by all of the perfectly good features they apparently removed. Sometimes I'll tween an effect in because it's quicker and the rest of my project is tidy enough and I just want to hit the deadline.
Quality work is quality work. Plenty of people get paid pro to churn out the crappy banner ads I see littering the web. And if MM and/or the Pro community feels it needs to redesign the interface all the time to shake off the fleas and maintain an elitism, I'm not for it. It sounds like dozens of things were fixed that weren't broken. That can only slow down, hinder, and infuriate the Pro community. Subtle inprovements are good, if justified. Many of these so-called improvemnets don't seem to be. AS2 sounds good, but won't be usefull to me at the expense of solid, timeline based graphics useability.

Looking at all the discussion threads it sounds to me there are two groups of flash users: the designers at one end and the developers of complex applications at the other end and most of us find their place somewhere inbetween. While in the past two flash editions MX and MX2004 MM has done a lot for the developers they have not done much for the designers. Many programs 3d etc come from outside. I am a Mac user and most of the design programs nowadays exist only for PC users. In my opinion MM should improve the design part much more to become a bit independent of third party programs.
I like MX2004 and one main reason is that it cleans up all the dirty AS created in MX, which also improves the whole performance of a movie or I should better say of applications, since that is what I am interested in.

May be instead of having MX2004 and the Pro version (which I think was the most stupid idea of MM) MM should create Flash for Designers and Flash for Developers with different focus of tools. Of course one can purchase both programs and combine parts to create a movie. What do you think?

Hiya All ~

I see your point there as well cancer, sure it would seem the logical thing to do - but i hate to think of what that would do to the 'development community' as such, internally I mean.

I think development hinges on both technical and creative, fair enough but drawing a line down the middle to separate the 2 might be creating a divide that would not benefit either party. Why not try to develop both at the same time? Give the tech dev people what they want in a proggi, cleaner whatchamagigs for coding but leave the 'crutches' along the way for the others to follow and complete simple tasks...

As for taking out right click > Actions - How does that benefit anyone?? Right click > Scale that moved up to the top menu, HELLO?

I dont know, honestly I think they should listen up - cause they have really dropped a warm one on my plate...

The one thing that I don't like is that flash7 is not backwards compatible with v6. This was not the case with older versions of flash. (v4 to v5)

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Originally posted by jahu
The one thing that I don't like is that flash7 is not backwards compatible with v6. This was not the case with older versions of flash. (v4 to v5)

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Could you be more specific. All my f6 stuff works with f7. What I've been telling people lately is to check the case of their AS; that might be a problem.

Not doing anything specific, this happens in all cases on my machine.

If I start a new file in f6 and save it completely blank, then open that .fla in f7, I get an error "unexpected file format".

I am on PC > Windows 2k.

By any chance is there a setting in f7 that needs to be configured to fix this?

Under Publish Settings you can change the version player. Its under the PUBLISH SETTINGS > FLASH tab. Hope that helps if not post a question in the general forum and Im sure some of these flash ninjas know the answer :)