Flash MX Professional 2004

Rating:
Summary: If you are new to flash STAY AWAY from this version.
Review: Ive read through the numerous user review here and am apalled by the fact that there are actually a couple of positive reviews. apparently, these reviews are from Macromedia employees.

Heres a rundown of the horrible unavoidable flaws in MX 2004:
1. Tutorials are WRONG.
right out of the box, if you have never used this program before and try to learn by the tutorial, you are screwed. The instructions in many of these tutorials are just plain wrong and will not work, period.

2. Help documentation and reference materials are WRONG.
we're not talking about minor errors and omissions here and there, rather out and out incorrect documentation all over the place. dont even attempt to use flash remoting based on the macromedia docs. I have never in my 12+ years of computing come accross documentation problems this severe in ANY application, even shareware. Heck, i dont think ive ever had any product in my life with documentation this horribly incorrect.

3. The Software is extremely buggy.
import/export is an unpredictable nightmare. i cant even begin to list the number of keyboard shortcuts that just dont work at all. even some of the most basic, commonly used shortcuts just do not function.

4. The installer is buggy.
I have seen several cases where the installer places things in the wrong folders. This wont effect many users, but anyone going for more advanced uses will have nightmares when including files/libraries etc. again, this will make you crazy if you try to use flash remoting.

5. Extremely poor performance.
On a brand new screaming fast dual 2 ghz G5, this software runs as if its on a bogged down 50mhz machine. flash 5 runs on my old g3 233 with 32 megs of ram more responsively than MX 2004 on my fual 2 ghz with 1 gig of ram.

6. Macromedia support is very poor for this product.
The forums are a joke. the support staff is not answering most technical issues, those that are answered are not in any sort of timely manner. support documentation on the macromedia site is severely outdated - even though it is labeled for mx 2004, it is clearly for some preivous version. When it comes to actionscript 2.0, the macromedia site is very unreliable.

I have confirmed these and almost all other errors mention in other user reviews here on a wide variety of Windows and Macintosh machines including various versions of windows 2000 and xp, and Mac OS X 10.1, 10.2, 10.3.

I have been a very strong supporter of Macromedia Flash since version 3 and continue to produce a wide range of flash applications from the most basic intro animations to complex multitiered web applications. Flash MX 2004 fails horribly for every use. The only plus of this version is the actionscript 2.0 language, but better to wait for a more useable release. If you are new to flash, STAY AWAY from this product. If you are a fairly proficient user already, with the help of google and the flash newsgroups you can learn this app and make it useable, but prepare for immense amounts of debug and research time for even the most menial tasks. The MX Professional Project management tools are a nice new feature, but very poorly implemented. Whenever Macromedia decides to make this software work , it will be very nice. until then, it is a vacuum for development time. Unless you can bill by the hour for using it, dont even try to use this for business purposes.

If you doubt the reviews here, do some digging on google groups. It wont take you long to realize probably 99% of the development community wants to lynch Macromedia for this release. It is truly sad, because until recently, Macromedia was typically fairly reliable and well documented software. Guess they are taking hints from M$ nowadays.


Rating:
Summary: Flash MX 2004 is very unstable
Review: My experience using this program has been horrible. As soon as you attempt to do anything complex you run into errors left and right. Random and unpredictable freezing, crashing, etc. For example, the new time effects seem to work fine when you first implement them. But then, for no apparent reason, if you try and implement them a second time, the program becomes erratic and crashes. I don't know how Macromedia could possibly release this in good conscience.

Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: the two eariler reviewers are quite correct, flash mx 2004 is a very poor release from macromedia. performance is unacceptable, even the script editing, which is little more than a text editor, is sluggish; crashing is constant; adherence to OS human interaction guidelines is mostly ignored. the new "features" added are buggy and not implemented very well at all making them all but useless in many cases. unfortunately this is indicative of the current state of software development from macromedia (many of the complaints against flash can be lodged against dreamweaver and fireworks as well). they enjoyed their most successful year following the release of the original MX studio, which while flawed was at least usable and relatively stable. MX 2004 was very obviously pushed out by marketing/accounting far too soon and they are now reaping the rewards of their greed (macromedia missed their quarterly earnings because of the "slow uptake of studio 2004" and the stock has suffered). one can only hope that the financial sting of releasing a shoddy product will encourage them to pay attention to the little details in future releases. though the quality of the recently released 7.0.1 updater does not leave me overly confident.

Rating:
Summary: not sure yet.
Review: Well, I have only been using flash for about 2 years, but I thought I had a pretty decent knowledge base, Though I find Flash MX professional very confusing compared to just Flash MX 2004..... with regard to actions and interactivity even, it seems like the help menu and tutorials i have been able to find only apply to Flash 2004. So!. I guess you really do have to be a professional!. ha. but. it has worked ok for me so far, no crashes or anything, I still think Im gonna go back to MX 2004 for my next job.


Rating:
Summary: Crash & burn part deux
Review: What more is there to say... I keep losing work! It crashes an average of 2-3 times per day.

I have the 7.2 update for my Mac OS X.3... it doesn't seem to help any.

Rating:
Summary: What's Wrong with You!?!?!?
Review: What's your problem!! Flash is the Coolest Animation Software Out there!! MINE HASN'T CRASHED ONCE!! I don't know what these other people are talking about but if you're parinoid then go to Macromedia.com and download the demo!! You won't regret it!!