Flash MX Pro 2004 - First Blush: 2 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back - What's Not to Love
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With this new release, MM has introduced online authentication which limits the number of installs a person can make with a specific serial number. This effort to combat piracy comes with a high price, especially for Mac OSX users. There are days when I am unable to access any program in my MX2004 Studio. I apparently have encountered a bug with the authentication service, although tech support told me that once a program has been authenticated, it is not supposed to continually check online for validity with every restart. However, I have witnessed Studio locking up as it tries to authenticate at startup. This freeze often requires me to delete authentication files and re-activate the programs. The problem is that with the authentication service, it will eventually appear as if I'm trying to steal extra copies of the program. While I'm in sympathy with MM's desire to end piracy, I've lost several days of work trying to regain access to my programs. I'm not happy.
Possibly the most frustrating aspect of this new release is the lack of documentation on the new features. For instance, I spent two weeks trying to learn how to globally address child forms in an application, only to find out that the methods for it probably don't exist without hand writing some OOP or Class referencing ActionScript. Few developers are bothering with forms or slides, so there aren't many answers on the forums. Documents on syntax structure for this environment are lacking. Since you only get two free tech support incidents, if you want information on how to use the program, you may have to pay extra simply because the company released the program without bothering to supply complete instructions. In order to use some of the new features, you almost have to be a beta developer and already know how to use the program. One developer I spoke to said that MM releases the program in raw format to the community and expects the community to supply the documentation. While someone more cynical said, "programmers have purposely made each release more difficult so that fewer people can use it - because there are already too many designers in a tight market, and it only gets worse if everyone and their grandma can do Flash." I said, MM would not benefit from fewer sales, but I'm starting to think the cynic was right! In terms of productivity and ease of use and available resources to learn how to use the new features, Flash Pro is seriously flawed. A lot of the documentation is written without much concern for instruction. It is written in dictionary format - by programmers for beta testers who are already familiar with the new methods for doing things and why they work as they do. Average users are losers.
I noticed MM's increasingly lax documentary support at the start of the economic downturn. I purchased a Developers Resource Kit (DRK) from MM for Dreamweaver/Flash MX Studio, which promised new functionality for PHP interactions. However, when it arrived, no documentation was supplied and you couldn't even guess how you were supposed to use the extensions. This problem has been compounded with the new Components in 2004. The bane of my existence has been the new TextArea Component, which supposedly allows you to load unlimited text with automatic scroll bars. After 3 weeks, I finally figured out how to use it, but it was not easy. I've 
talked with the author of a tutorial regarding problems we were both experiencing with the text components. It seems there is a bug in the component. Only a certain number of line breaks can be displayed before you reach a scroll limit and you lose the rest of your text. In addition, there was absolutely no documentation on how to load HTML or XML files into your TextArea from a file on your site. I think this is one area where MM really blew it. Components are supposed to save you time. Flash 5 was able to handle HTML text loaded into a text box with simple URL in the properties menu. You cannot do the same thing in the TextArea without writing a lot of extra code. In theory, the new version is supposed to allow you to control the look and feel of your site through CSS and XML. In practice, while you have more power, ease of use has really taken a hit. In Flash MX, you could use a component's property menu to set many of these variables like text source, background color, font color, etc. Instead, you must now code everything long hand and learn a bit of OOP, Class structure, and XML. Even then, the manual's documentation does not tell you how to add text from a source file! Something that was so simple and easy in Flash 5 or MX took over 3 weeks of my time to learn how to do in the new version.
Finally, my last complaint with the program is the lack of online support when encountering bugs or missing documentation. For example, Flash MX 2004 was released with a detection scheme that fails to detect the current Flash player [version 7] in Safari or Internet Explorer in OSX. It is a minor bug, but repeated attempts on MM's forums for explanations or instructions on how to fix the code drew no response from MM's team. Likewise, when I encounter undocumented features, it seems like the support staff doesn't know how to use the program either, since they fail to answer questions like "how do you load text from a URL into the TextArea Component?" Fortunately, there a few excellent tutorial sites which provide much of the missing documentation for things like Components and Behaviors (http://www.ultrashock.com/). Macromedia also produced a few excellent On Demand tutorials that give an overview of many of the new features like Forms based development (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash). On the downside, if you have a question on the tutorials, MM doesn't respond. It's sink or swim with the release - you are on your own as far as MM is concerned.
Next: Flash MX 2004: The Verdict >>
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