Interface Changes
Flash MX, announced March 4, 2002 and shipped in April, is the sixth major release of Macromedia's web animation tool. This release marks the fourth time the program's user interface has been substantially redesigned. This has led to some complaints that this need for relearning makes for a tough learning curve for existing Flash developers. Chris MacGregor, a Web designer and creator of Flash critique site Flazoom, is quoted in a News.com article as saying, "this is the fourth version of Flash to come out with a completely new interface. To me, that just makes the learning curve much steeper. Developers are going to have to focus on learning a new application."
I will counter this argument by noting that I've personally taught Flash to classes full of novices and I've had plenty of opportunities to see that the program is occasionally far more complicated than it should be. One group of students, for example, picked up the basics of Adobe LiveMotion in a few hours and were soon producing professional looking animations and web page interfaces. The same group took more than ten times as long to achieve the same level of proficiency with Flash. Indeed, when LiveMotion first appeared, I was able to start using it almost immediately, with little or no training.
I still get confused by some of the convoluted processes that Flash forces upon its users. Taking adding sound to a rollover button, for example. The way this procedure is described in the Flash manual, it requires nine steps. In LiveMotion, it's one step: drag and drop. In my opinion, that's exactly how many steps it should take.
Admittedly, there are some Flash capabilities that are worth the extra effort. Until the release of LiveMotion 2.0 in Feb. 2002, Adobe's program couldn't handle certain types of scripted events. This powerful feature in Flash 5.0 was perhaps the most obvious differentiator between the two programs. (Ironically, the tables have turned substantially with the release of LiveMotion 2.0. It now provides a fully scriptable authoring environment, allowing any series of steps typically coded by hand to be automated with JavaScript. Flash cannot do this.)
One of the Flash advantages over LiveMotion 1.x was Flash's ability to embed one Movie Clip animation in another -- for example, to create a spinning propeller on an airplane and then fly that plane across the screen. This is not exactly easy to do in Flash, but it's practically impossible to accomplish in LiveMotion 1.x. (Here is a sample we created in Flash.)
I haven't yet tested LiveMotion 2.0; it will be interesting to see whether Adobe's interface design gurus were able to elegantly implement a similar capability with the program's new Movie Clip Group feature. Although it's hard to judge from Adobe's promotional literature, it at least sounds easy. LiveMotion 2.0 makes Movie Clips groups automatically whenever a clip is grouped. It does, however, concede that custom animations for button hit states are not possible, so this remains a Flash advantage, as does the ability to load SWF files -- perhaps the most serious weakness in LiveMotion. At any rate, Adobe is positioning LiveMotion as an enhancement to Flash, rather than a replacement for it. Thus, the designer can take advantage of the key strengths in each program.
Although both Flash and LiveMotion provide vector (outline artwork) based effects, text and animation, LiveMotion goes considerably further in its support for bitmapped effects, including support for Photoshop layers, soft drop shadows, re-editable text (possibly our favorite feature!) and many other other effects simply not possible in Flash (See LiveMotion and Flash- How do they stack up? for a feature comparison.) Macromedia fans often counter that these features generate larger files than Flash's primarily vector-based output; however, I think it's great to have these additional options. It's up to the designer to decide how to use them.
MX: Code-oriented UI Tools
If you fancy yourself a designer rather than a programmer, you may find some aspects of Flash MX a challenge. MacMerc expliains: "I was thrilled to see pre-made combo boxes and scroll bars. I dragged one onto the canvas - and that's where the romance ended. I double clicked it. I right clicked it. I scanned all my palettes, but the combo box wouldn't heed my will. I came to find that to actually get it to do anything I had to open the Actions palette and hand code some cryptic ActionScript."
Compatibility Caveats
The main problem web designers (and/or programmers, as the case may be) typically encounter, when designing pages incorporating Flash (SWF) elements is the inability of any version of Netscape to display the graphics on a transparent background. this, it is not usually practical to incorporate SWF elements on a page with a (non-Flash) background graphics, or within an area where its "bounding box" rectangle overlaps any other page elements. While both Flash and LiveMotion support a Transparent window feature that allows exported files to display Flash images or animations on a transparent background perfectly in Internet Explorer, there is currently nothing that can be done -- short of a clumsy export as a transparent GIF -- to reproduce the same look in Netscape.
It's also worth noting that, although IE and Netscape/Mozilla make up the bulk of the browser market, these two titles are by no means the only browsers available. There are many other browsers that simply won't display SWF files. Thus, you should be careful to provide alternate means of access to your site's links, if you are planning to target users of handheld PCs, "smart phones" or alternate platforms.
Most interface designers advise providing a secondary link to an optional page of "plain HTML," to address this issue.
Among the new features of Flash MX:
Flash MX retails for US$499. Upgrades are US$199. A free version of Flash Player 6 is freely available. (Note, however, that the version of Flash 6 player initially released by the company had some serious security flaws. Get the latest version from www.macromedia.com to address this issue.)
A free, 30-day trial version of Flash MX is available for download at www.macromedia.com. (Windows: 18.5 MB; Macintosh: 25.7 MB)
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