Well, lots of people say they hate stupid Flash sites, so we figured if we made it complicated then that would help everyone out...? ;-)

Seriously, features accrete over multiple versions, and old workflows must be retained to accommodate existing customers. This usually means that there are a few ways to accomplish anything, and that new abilities are sometimes added to old workflows. Every now and then there's a "let's make a simpler way" movement, so this is again a multiplication of methods. If you can design each version from scratch you've got a lot more UI freedom than if adding features for an existing audience.

If you're crashing, though, then check updates and technotes... shouldn't be happening by this point unless it's an abusive file or such.

I totally agree with you, Tim.
I WAS using Flash MX 2002 a few days ago, but then I decided I should update and dawdled on over the Flash MX 2004 site, spent five hours downloading the trial, and now everything I worked with in 2004 REFUSES to work in my older version (which I cannot find anywhere on the net, and had to revert to Flash 5, which also sucks), thus screwing me out of 5+ hours of hard work and a good product.
Seems to be lots and lots of holes in their software, and more keep burning on through.
And the interface is freaking annoying too.

I can no longer click on a keyframe and access the Actions (which lack the simple drag-drop mode), instead I have to go up to Window...Dev Panels...Actions every freaking time because the actions panel takes up so much space I cn't see my project..
And! Actionscript that runs smoothly generates a nice garbled packet of errors in test mode.
So, congrats to Macromedia for another fine product to add alongside Dreamweaver 2002. Thanks for screwing us all, yet again.

P.S.
Don't mean to be a prick here, John, but don't try to defend your company with confusing answers that us hardworking stiffs don't care about.

Yup, the new authoring apps' files contain features not understood by the old authoring apps. An old app won't open up a new file, true.

(You can export older deliverable files -- SWFs can be created in various versions -- but the .FLA native file format describes a range of things that weren't available in older authoring tools.)

I can't reliably parse "my actionscript doesn't parse", sorry... I'm not sure of the difference between that script and the scripts others usually use.

jd/mm

I can't believe how much Flash 2004 sucks! Holy crap! Even simple components like scroll pane REFUSE to work and just give me blank screens... this was never a problem in Flash MX, macromedia is retarded, they should fire their programmers and get someone with a god damn brain!

I teach Flash at a college in Florida. Am certified in Flash MX. This MX 2004 is a nightmare. Take my advice: MX was the logical conclusion of Flash. With MX 2004, it's just bloatware. The interface tries to be cute, but it ain't. The toolbar buttons try to be 3D. Instead they are blurry and hard see on the monitor.

Their "behaviors" panel is nothing more than a lame attempt to fix the shortcomings of their new ActionScript 2. We used to be able to drag and drop simple actions, like "stop," and "play." Those days are over. Now we get bloat.

Remember when Flash 4 first came out and we were psyched with all of this animation? It opened a whole new world up. Now the honeymoon is over and we are left with the sad realization that Flash is annoying, a tool of advertisers to implant their slogans and messages.

All of a sudden, plain old HTML does not look so bad after all. We have come full circle. Flash MX 2004 sucks.

I agree and thought I was doing something wrong. After a year of making quizes and pages in MX I have to redo the whole site since the new player and the development environment won't work in the stupid MX 2004 pro. None of the old actionscript nor the components work. I gave up for a long time but decided to look for another product. Did Macromedia get sold to some foreign company or what? It sucks BIG time and I am out of a lot of time and money. NOT tax deductible either.

I've been trying to use Flash for a project at work. I have a lot of ideas but as it turns out when I try and implement any of them, none can truly be realized as I had hoped. I agree that the Flash developers at Macromedia seem to be extremely bad at their jobs. I've had crashes, I was required to design stupid, time-wasting workarounds, and the end result really wasn't worth all the trouble. Flash was a great idea in 1994, but it hasn't evolved enough; I mean its 2005 for god sakes, thats almost 10 years!!!. Videogames have evolved from Super Mario World to Doom 3 in that timespan. By now it should be lightyears of what it is in MX.

Wow, I do not know what most of you are talking about!! Maybe it's because we use Macs and our viewing space is HD quality... The migration from MX to MX 2004 is, I admit, was more of a curve than from v. 5 to MX... But, if you are behind Flash every day and are avid ActionScript programmer you should really no issues. There are major key features in 2004 that are way better than MX. We still use MX but prefer MX 2004 for daily use.
Flash still has a market hold and is way ahead of the imitation appliation ut there, plus the best 3D apps, talk/export so that Flash can import...

Can't wait for the next Version!! Flash is and still will be the future app for pro-sumer consumption...

Flash MX 2004 sucks the big one.... I'm not very "action script" savvy, so I find the action script in mx 2004 impossible with out the "normal" mode. What were they thinking??? I haven't got time to become a programmer...ahhhhgh!

I have to agree on Brent with this, though I'm not a Mac user. The user interface sure makes things a bit more cluttered on the PC... but AS2.0 is quite a handy tool. Perhaps losing the 'normal' mode is trouble for the designers out there... but AS1/2 are relatively simplistic languages. I mean, if u're a designer.. chances are you probly won't be delving into remote shared objects, and XML too, and what-not. Normal mode only helps with the syntax... which are still an F1 (on Windows) away. Its all documented. Sure, its a bit more trouble... but civilization didn't come about by humans just lazing around and things happening mysteriously.

Trust me. A bit of effort really pays off. My only quirk is I hoped they didnt make the GUI so darn computing hungry. More power could have been left for actual work and not just to display GUI nicely :P Aside from that, minimal bad stuff, imho.

the worst thing i discovered is the actionscript thing.. not every flash users are programmers.. without the normal mode make one simple animation last 1hour rather than 15minutes

Charming Nutrox. I'm sure you're up for Flash Developer of the Year yourself. Or maybe you're just a hotheaded primadonna. Have a look around. The world of MX2004 is not all roses. It is in fact riddles with angry developers, many of whom still refuse to use it, many of whom have viable complaints.
Chris Collins made the point that matters here about 7 or 8 posts ago: Flash is developed by one company, and that company simply cannot compete with a world of developers pushing the envolope of competing technologies.
Don't tell me Flash has no competition. Flash is for making "rich" web content. "Rich content" is another way of saying "irritating content made by prima donnas (coincidence, I think not. Nutrox, you really are a Flash developer!!!)." It's just another way to make a website, a slow, cheesy, annoying way.
Go learn some CSS or something. Make a real website for a change. All of you. Get out of here, drop the stupid flash, and learn to make refreshing, useful, accessible, beautiful things. You're a bunch of Macromedia sluts if you think about it.
Let it go

Flash MX 2004 is nothing to me, I want something like design, drag action script, publish & play... not design, type & type & type & syntax error, again and again!!! Flash MX 2004 for the sucker like u....

I used to hear about this flash program a couple years ago then I started to do a lots of animations tutorials very easy to follow.In a very short of time i found out actionscript was the "big thing",the normal mode was a very handy tool for actionscript beginners.
"Macromedia screw it up so bad with the release of Flash mx 2004, they should consider having the normal action mode back in the next version"

Our office of 12 designers unanimoulsy agree Flash MX 2004 Professional is a giant step backwards. While we are not geeked-out programmers, we have built dozens of complext sites over the years. Stick with MX.

Speaking about the FORMS portion of mx2004. I've been a vb programmer since v3 and various other languages. It's a far cry from vb, as you have to use action script to do really anything a mid sized application would need to do. I say mid sized as the amount of data being handled.

From the pathetic datagrid, to the use of any of the canned components. Any data over like 1000 records and say 5 to 8 columns kills the commponents - ie. flash return with a message "This is a slow query would you like to stop it or continue with the possibility of locking up the application" THIS is displayed
to the users in the final .swf file.. haha...

The SOAP protocol is not useable as well with large datasets - to some of the books created for this mess I give some credits the authors that plainly state this in the beginning... NOT FOR LARGE DATA handling, maybe that is why all the examples are of like 100 records or less... doh.

The flash remoting actually works fast on large data.....

Flash Forms does not allow you to change the cursor easily like in VB or any other language and also no easy way to open a file browser to open or upload a file from the swf... I understand some securites but there ways to do this.

Also you can't change the printer object properties.. so if you know it's going to be a landscape etc you can't change it for just that print... arrrggg

The datagrid sucks.... period, it takes everything as ascii ... won't do much good trying to sort numbers. No text wrapping in it either.

Every step I take in development of a program takes soo many run arounds and clawing for each step to get a decent application.

Oh yes it's not resolution independant.

You need dual montitors (i have 2-21") to do any real work in this application as it's frames and layout size takes up alot of space.

The worst about all of this is the documentation is extremely poor. They don't give you enough information on how things really work. the dataset, recordset are black boxs... no way to tell how to access these components... the live docs are riddled with questions about squat and the examples are a joke, very little or comprehensive exmaples... or examples with bugs..

Very dissapointed here, I started with coldfusion mx6 and it was a pretty good development tool. I sold my local office with this and said we could go far with this forms version professional so i bought 5 copies of studio mx and 4 copies of mx7
and boy i'm busting my crack (have one other sucker working on this project with me) on making this whole thing work.

Not talking about cf7 flash forms... even worse of a mess - especially the documentation.

If any MM cares to email me and get specifics I can give you a long long list as I'm working on this "Real" web application for a my very large employer. :)

I have to say, Thank You! to everyone who said exactly what I feel - frustrated and screwed. Of course, why sit around on a web forum and complain? Can't we do something about it? Has anyone tried to contact Macromedia? My take on it is this: if you hire a contractor to do a job - let's say design an application for a large company - if the application doesn't work the consultant fixes it, right? And if the consultant can't deliver the product to the consumer as promised they refund their money, right? How can this be any different? We rely on the accuracy of these programs to make a living!!! Can't these monolithic companies be held responsible for designing dumb programming?

If I had known some of these MX professional issues before I bought the software then I NEVER would have bought it! Of course it's too late now. Don't these people test their software with a beta test team or something? Or do they sit around in their own little world and say - OK, how can I un-design this program so that it looses some of it's most important functionality, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost time and frustration and confuses the heck out of the majority of users - designers?!!

It's just shear insanity!! The definition of insanity is banging your head against a brick wall and expecting a DIFFERENT result - NO we want to bang our heads and get the SAME result - So who's the one insane?

Well, it finally happened. I finally upgraded to MAC 0S X 10.4 and was so excited to finally install Flash MX 2004 on my computer and begin running through the software and checking out the latest and greatest from Macromedia. However, I was highly discouraged with what I encountered. I teach graphic design, web page development, and interactive multimedia at a small community college in Western Maryland. I began using Flash back with Flash 4, moved through 5 and MX with little to no problem. Last semester, the interactive class used Flash MX in the lab along with Coldfusion in the Advanced Web class. Students who downloaded the software either legally or illegally forewarned me of the differences in MX and MX 2004. Their warnings were not complimentary. I know enough Java and JavaScript to be dangerous, but I too am a designer, and like most of my students am not too keen on wanting to become a programmer, at least not until now!! Removing the Normal Mode from the ActionScript Panel is the single most ridiculous thing I have noticed with this product. Sure you can handle the simple things through the Behaviors panel like dragging a movie clip around, but what if I wanted to check on a collision with another movie clip and change it’s property or get its current property to manipulate it? With that, I’m back to the ActionScript window for “Expert” programmers. With MX, I could concentrate on the logic of my commands rather than the syntax. Now, I find myself jumping back and forth to the Help Menu and I’m not nearly as productive. What gets me the most, is that we are upgrading to Flash MX 2004 for this coming Fall semester and even with the textbooks we use, the ActionScript portion appears to be, as some one else so aptly put it “lame.” A wise person once said, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” For Christ’s sake, if you wanted to type huge scripts with 10 to 15 functions, good for you, that’s what Expert Mode was for in MX, but for the rest of us, especially students just using this software for the first time, Normal Mode was nice option for folks daunted by the thought of scripting something in the first place. Please someone tell me that while Adobe and Macromedia our contemplating becoming bed buddies, that MM will admit to their error and create some damn plug-in or update to this ActionScript nigtmare before August!! Meantime, I’m reinstalling Flash MX!!

To all you frustrated Flash MX 2004 Users:
I recently stumbled upon this blog of angry and frustrated Flash MX 2004 users while trying to find answers to my own frustrating Flash questions (You can find my personal contribution in box 21) . But after posting my complaint I still wasn’t satisfied. I wrote Macromedia to ask them first of all, why did they do this? And second, are they gonna fix it? I really honestly didn’t expect a response but I DID get one (see below). I wanted to pass on this information and encourage everyone to PLEASE respond to Macromedia by filling out their online Feature Request/Bug Report Form:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform.

I think their response (listed below and on their website) to the issues of Normal Mode gone in action scripting is lame but if enough of us complain they just might listen to reason! I don't think improvements or added functionality in the behaviors panel is going to suffice. They need to put it back the way it was!!!! I mean, seriously!! (and let me vent here a little more) new car manufacturers don't move the gas peddle just because they think they like the design! Why the HECK did they move/remove the Normal Action Script menu!!!!

Macromedia’s E-mail Response:
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 02:10:03 +0800

Hi Dawn,

Thank you for contacting Macromedia Technical Support.

I understand that you seek technical assistance about the Normal mode in Flash MX 2004. Where is Normal mode in the Actions Panel?

In previous versions of Flash, you could work with the Actions panel in either normal mode (in which you filled in options and parameters to create code) or expert mode (in which you added commands directly into the Actions panel). In Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004, Normal mode is no longer available. Instead, you can use the new Behaviors feature to add groups of actions that perform common scripting functions, or you can use the improved, in-context help resources which provide detailed instructions for using each Actionscript command. Also, dragging commands from the Actions toolbox into the Actions panel or using the Add (+) button to add commands to a script is still supported.

For example, using the behaviors for playing a movie clip at a specific frame or label is much easier than using the Normal Mode equivalent. In this case, the dialog box that appears to allow you to select the options for the code is much more approachable to most new users than the Normal Mode. We recognize that not every action is replaced by Behaviors, but that will come in time as we expand this solution.

If you wish to have the normal mode returned on future versions of Flash, I suggest that you send a feature request using our feature request/bug report form available at

http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform.

Let me know if this information helps.

Regards,

-Cleo
----------------------------------------
Cleober Sinues
Flash MX 2004 Level 2 Technical Support
"Flash MX 2004 Emerging Issues"
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/mx_04_emerging_issues.htm

Dam I thought they had hidden the normal mode somewhere and not entirely removed it - what kind of idiot make something harder to use? Seriously where is this guy? Busy tying his shoe laces together? removing all the doorknobs in his house? Making teapots from choclolate?

Im a graphic designer, I was taught how to use flash and could make a competent website (handy for self promotion or a little bit of freelance work). Now with MX 2004 it takes me three times as long to make something half a good.

Why don't you people just take 5 minutes to learn actionscript? It is not a difficult script to learn, and the autocomplete feature should take a lot of the learning curve out. Flash 8 is bringing back normal mode - go buy that. I don't know who it was that thought there have been no advances in flash - most of the advances are from a dynamic standpoint - data integration and component binding. Flash is a powerful tool that just takes some getting use too. I would suggest sitting down, reading the livedocs, and making some great stuff!

You guys are a bunch of whinners your having a go at the software cus ur all crap and don't no how to use it. Just becuase that stupid twat didn't know you can only alpha sybols and that he doesn't get any of it doesn't been he has a go at the software you all suck u have no IT skills that's wot it is u aren't advanced enough to use flash so u just whine. Wanna know why it costs $700? just look at the awesome content PROFESSIONALS are creating with they obivously understand it and so do I as a 13 year old kid, doesn't that just say something about you people your THICK PERHAPS? Flash really ian't that difficult to suss out i've only used tutorials for action script everything else was pretty obvious to those of use WITH BRAINS so just SHUT UP YOU BUNCH OF JEALOUS WHINNING W*NKERS

Well I really don't give too much of a shit about the designer tools in MX 2004, I program in it, and the advent of ActionScript 2 has taken the programming aspect of it to a new level. For designers that are lost, I suggest, as someone earlier suggested, you try learning a couple of the command shortcuts, ie - want a button behaviour, open the Actions Panel and type esc-o-n to get a useful code hint. Of course, I wouldn't expect ppl to actually read this thread, just add their whinings to the chorus ;-).

That cheap shot aside, the iterface is a smooth looking user-interface travesty. A squillion palletes forcing you to use the mouse for everything is just pathetic. Anyone here who has used MM Director would have a meaningful conparison point, and be sorely reminded how hard it sucks. Mac or PC, take yr pick.

Luckily, for me as a coder, this is less and less of an issue, I spend less and less time in MX2004 itself, as the slack is being taken up with open source coding tools such as SEPY and Eclipse (I'm tending towards the latter, I'm on the Mac). Hell if you get MTASC / FlashOut working you may be able to keep yr $700 next time....

Given all the responses I have heard, I am thinking about sticking with Flash 4. I just have one question for anyone who is familiar with both. Is the new version of actionscripting (2.0) much better than the version you would learn for Flash 4? And, if I put my time into learning the version for Flash 4, if I am required at anytime to upgrade against my will, will I have a hard time learning the new version?

Any comments are appreciated.

Thank you.

Jennifer

Well well well!!!! I have been using computers for some 25 years or more and have come across many programs that are just no good and you can instantly tell when you install them.

Flash is quite different as it looks quite impressive when you open it up. That's where it all starts to go wrong. The user interface is most perculiar as nothing seems to work in a logical fashion and buttons/funtionality have changed significantly over the versions so most help refers to items that don't exist anymore.

I will persevere for a little while longer but I really don't have the amount of time to learn this very odd program.

Very frustrated in deed.

Hi

I did like your blog postings and comments. I am in big problem since many days. Any kind of help would be appeiciated.

I want some help to enter data into mysql databasefrom a flash form using coldfusion components ?

i’m using web services and simply want to pass data from my flash form to my cfc while staying in flash…

any actionscript (or coldfusion code ‘cfc’) that anyone could provide or even links to other ressources on this specific topic would be awesome…

if someone could help me with this process i would be greatful…..

thank you in advance…

Imran Hashmi
http://www.visionstudio.co.uk

I have just bought the new imac OSX v 10.4 with intel and am unable to install Macromedia flashplayer. Every time I attempt to install it, a window pops up saying that safari cannot install it as the software is a mime type application and that I don't have a plug in for this mime type. The MAC Helpline suggested installing stuffit but this has not helped.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Why o why would you want to make the flash program sound like it deserves to be buried underground for a million years?

Yes, you might want to learn by the books, but I have found that learning is best on your own. So the next time you want to blow something up with a shotgun, remember, toy around with it for a while so you can get the hang of it. Then you find the book, to better understand what you are exactly doing.

I learned Livemotion first way back in '02 and then learned Flash MX later that year while in college. It took me a long time to make sense of Flash because like people have said - it DOESN'T work like you'd logically think it would. Nowadays I can use the program pretty fast but it still makes my day harder knowing I'll have to mess with Flash.

Also, I refuse to use 2004 or 8 because of the crappy actionscripting ... I'm not a programmer and I don't want to learn to write syntax because the Flash developers didn't want to keep a few lines of code in from the old version. Heck, I'll probably be using MX til' 2010 if the next version of Flash doesn't fix this anti-nonprogrammer problem.