Is Flash MX worth $500?

I’m pretty confident I’m going to wait until Flash 7 or 8 before I upgrade, but some of the improvements I’ve been reading about for Flash MX are kind of tempting… (I especially love how you can basically just go click-click-scroller… A lot of things seem to be MUCH easier…)

I have to ask the opinions of people that have it - is Flash MX worth the $500 price when you already have Flash 5 to do just about as much?

There are a lot of interface command changes, and i’ve seen very little that makes up for the retraining you need to do while working
deleting and adding frames seem to have been passed off as not important, now you have to right click instead of dragging/pressing delete
pretty dang annoying if you ask me…

oh, and even at 1024x768 the screen is too cluttered

Have you tried the evaluation version, Live ?

pom 0]

I agree about the screen being too cluttered… in general I found that very anoying.

It’s not 500 though it’s only 199, or something like that… for the upgrade anyway… I think that’s a reasonable upgrade price.

i’ve been working with mx and i have 2 monitors. i can’t even imagine working with all those palettes on just one monitor.
anyways, mx is totally worth the price - for several reasons:

  1. you can draw lines and fills dynamically.
  2. ‘createEmptyMovieClip’.
  3. movie clips have button events.
  4. ‘watch’ and ‘addListener’.
  5. buttons have instance names.
  6. dynamic loading of jpg’s and mp3’s.
    and so on and so on…that is only a tiny list of improvements in the code. the only problem i’ve had is that the ‘properties’ palette won’t dock with my other palettes in my second monitor (where i used to keep it in flash 5).
    if you work with flash you are hurting yourself by not upgrading. if you only play with flash then you are denying yourself a LOT of new fun!
    :slight_smile:
    jeremy

Sorry about editing out the signatures. I’m doing an experiment to see if one of your sigs is causing these computers to bomb here at work. (see my post in Random “has anyone else gotten fatal exception errors”)

I have a feeling it’s yours Brian… Sinfiniti has been posting here for a while and I’ve never gotten a bomb out while seeing one of his posts. Please bear with me while this experiment lasts.

I think I’ve got it. I had the techs here reset the graphics adapter on both of these two machines, which they did today. Without the sigs here, it seems that both machines are fine… but the problem is not with the sig, but with the settings that they put the monitors at… namely, 256 color at 85 mhz refresh rate. I’ve a feeling that both of these monitors can only handle 75 mhz. I’m still not sure why this would cause an error, but I’m trying various settings to see if I can illiminate the problem.

now you have to right click instead of dragging/pressing delete ** Brian**

That’s annoying. I always right-clicked to delete, anyway, but I still like to left-click to add…

Have you tried the evaluation version, Live ? ** Pom**

No. I’ve begun to realise that I obsess over things and then stop caring about them. Freud would say that when I was a child – well, let’s not get in to what Freud would say. Kind of disgusting.

Anyway, if I downloaded Flash MX and it’s even slightly better than Flash 5 I’d never be able to use Flash 5 again. So I refuse to download it. As long as I’m not exposed to anything new, my old interests can’t fade, and I need Flash for a year long project, so I have to make sure my interest in it never fades.

It’s not 500 though it’s only 199, or something like that… for the upgrade anyway… I think that’s a reasonable upgrade price. ** Upuat**

That’s good news.

** Sinfiniti:**

  1. ‘createEmptyMovieClip’.

Cool. … Although I can’t really think of a practical application. I could see it in an experiment or maybe a game, but I’m more interested in website construction…

  1. movie clips have button events.

Good, but isn’t that something you could do with Flash 5 with just a slightly slower process?

  1. buttons have instance names.

Finally. … Though, still, that’s not really a good enough reason to pay $200. I could always do that by putting a button in a movie clip (and then I’d get a cooler roll-over, too). It’s just faster this way. Doesn’t seem worth paying so that I can do simple things quicker…

** Two questions:**

  1. Can I attach an mp3 to the frames? Like, can I tell a movie clip with a music file in it to gotoAndPlay (12602) and it would skip to the 2 minute point in the song? Because I’d very much so like to be able to do that…

  2. When turning text into a button, does it give me an option to make the text box the area of hit instead of just the text itself? It’d just be a convenience thing, but it’s still something that’s always gotten on my nerves…

two answers:

  1. when you dynamically import a sound you control the sound object just like in flash 5. so you can tell a sound to go to a certain time and start playing. now with mx though there are sound object events: ‘onLoad’ and ‘onSoundComplete’. there are also new sound object properties: ‘duration’ and ‘position’. you can also have an mp3 stream in rather than load completely and start playing. another great addition to the sound object is that it has the ‘getBytesLoaded’ and ‘getBytesTotal’ methods - so you can have a progress bar for your sounds.

  2. flash has always had this option - it’s called the ‘hit’ frame. or in flash 5 you can have dynamic text fields that use the undocumented ‘asfunction’ method (macromedia website has some information on this).

:slight_smile:
jeremy


-Tom

(sorry sir… this is just a little too close to explaining how to hack the program. We allow no explinations here on Kirupa)

when you work for money you should pay for software.
:slight_smile:
jeremy

yeah when u work for it u should but if u dont like me u shouldnt or u should if u av the money i only got it for a tester and aint deleted it yet why pay for somethin when u can get exactly the same thing for free

-Tom

yeah when u work for it u should but if u dont like me u shouldnt or u should if u av the money i only got it for a tester and aint deleted it yet why pay for somethin when u can get exactly the same thing for free

The hell you shouldn’t. You should pay for something instead of getting it for free because otherwise you’re doing a little something called “stealing”. It doesn’t matter if you’re stealing from the rich or not, you’re still breaking the rules of every country and religion in history.

The truth of the matter is that the people who make Flash aren’t that much richer than we are. The people who publish it are, but not the actual programmers. And while you are screwing over the publishers and go you and all that crap, you’re also screwing over the people who made the program and really aren’t that rich.

Take pyrating music, for example. The average CD costs $2 to produce and is sold for $15. Sounds like the rocks stars are getting rich quick, right? Wrong. Typically, they get $1 a CD and have to pay the recording costs. Meaning that $12 of the $15 go to people who didn’t put anything even remotely artistic into the construction of the CD.

You want to pyrate illegal music? Fine, I guess you’re just screwing over the rich record company, but remember that you’re screwing over the musician who, unless they’re regularly at the #1 position in America, aren’t that rich. Meaning that if you’re going to get their CDs illegally, you’d better go to every single live show they do, or you’re screwing over someone who isn’t exactly Bill Gates.

I mean, let’s say I’m in a band of 4 people and I sell 100,000 records in one year. I’m pretty successful, really. I get $25,000 that year. That’s less than the average person. That’s why these people have to play live so bloody often.

But it’s different with programmers. They can’t play live. Meaning that the only way you can stop them from going broke, for now, anyway, is to help out the publishers too.

** Sinfiniti:**

Yeah, I know about area of hit. I was just thinking of a really, really lazy way of doing it by just having to select a button when you hit F8, but now that I think about it, not only would it save about 3 seconds in total, it would probably just be a nuisance when you combine graphics and text in a button.

agrees with everything above, just not the bloody price

who said it was $500?..thats not how much I payed :X
-vibe

Live, concerning the sound issue, I believe you can do that now. Skip 2 minute, I mean.

pom 0]

This is who said Macromedia costs $500:

<a herf = “http://dynamic.macromedia.com/bin/MM/store/US/product.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1915654148.1020103884@@@@&BV_EngineID=edadcecdiijgibeecgemcgcgj.0&category=/Software/Development/StandAlones/Flash&type=FULL”>http://dynamic.macromedia.com/bin/MM/store/US/product.jsp?BV_SessionID=
@@@@1915654148.1020103884@@@@&BV_EngineID=edadcecdiijgibeecgemcgcgj.0&category=
/Software/Development/StandAlones/Flash&type=FULL</a>

… but I’m now told that you can get a sort of “expansion pack” for about $200… Which is a better price, but I don’t know if it’s worth it if it’s mainly for convenience and has only a few real breakthrough additions that you couldn’t do at all beforehand.

The drawing API, for one thing, is something you couldn’t have done with F5.
Most of the components too would have been very hard to reproduce. AND, best of the best : Shared objects. Basically, it’s cookies in Flash. Very impressive.

pom 0]