Software developers may produce applications and video games using Adobe Flash Builder, FlashDevelop, Flash Catalyst, or any text editor combined with the Apache Flex SDK. It allows streaming of audio and video, and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera input.Īrtists may produce Flash graphics and animations using Adobe Animate (formerly known as Adobe Flash Professional). Flash displays text, vector graphics, and raster graphics to provide animations, video games, and applications. outside ChinaĪdobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. After that, you must buy one of the company’s expensive support plans.Active only for enterprise users and all users in China, discontinued everywhere else, i.e. Unfortunately, Macromedia allows just two free tech-support calls within the first 90 days of the initial contact.
Online support for Flash MX is both copious and well written, ranging from downloadable manuals and tutorials to technical support via email. Our tests with both versions revealed a minimal number of bugs, although applying a transition effect sometimes hogged the CPU and slowed our entire system to a crawl.
The $999 (~£634) Professional version of Flash MX 2004 adds advanced data handling to ActionScript, better form-development tools, and a number of additional prefab components. And the annoyance of having to search through a complex project by hand for instances of an object has been eliminated with a new find-and-replace function.
There's also a spelling checker to minimise the danger of creating a visually spectacular site with embarrassing errors. New time-saving and usability features include an improved video-import wizard, which now allows you to edit or trim imported video so that you don't have to fire up a separate editor. We know of none that exist so far, however. The other major behind-the-scenes improvement is the new Extensibility API, which allows third-party developers to create plug-ins à la Photoshop or QuarkXPress.
ActionScript 2, the new version of the programming language behind Flash, has been brought up to compliance with the ECMAScript 3.0 standard (an offshoot of JavaScript), which allows for object-oriented features and casting. There are also new pre-made components and support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which should allow you to blend Flash and HTML more smoothly. Timeline Effects eliminate some of the dirty work involved in writing blurs and the like, while Behaviors relieve some of the drudgery of programming interactive controls. Some tasks that used to require programming in the Actions panel have now been automated. The real changes in Flash MX 2004 lie under the surface. The Help menu has also been rearranged a bit, but by and large, the interface modifications are slight. We found the help content far more useful and informative than the previous version's. Now, however, the Answers panel has been renamed Help and reworked to match Windows' help function more closely. The face of Flash remains the same powerful but rather complex one found in the last version. You can activate automatically over the Internet or use the company's 24-hour activation hotline and avoid giving any personal information.
But Macromedia assures customers that it's only comparing serial numbers to see if a copy is pirated. A professional version that offers morere not big fans of this form of copy protection, because activation schemes could eventually be used by less scrupulous companies to collect personal data or worse.
It's a must-have upgrade for current users, thanks to its new support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), an improved (and ECMAScript 3.0-compatible) ActionScript 2 programming language, and a new API that allows third-party plug-ins.
Although beginners might not find it as easy to use as Adobe's cheaper LiveMotion, MX 2004 is a uniquely powerful program. Macromedia's new $499 (~£317) Flash MX 2004 Flash animation designer requires less programming, boasts a much improved help system and offers new usability features such as an improved video-import wizard with editing capabilities, a spelling checker and a find-and-replace function.