| Flash MX 2004 Professional Review | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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You can apply Timeline effects to any object on the Stage to quickly add transitions and animations such as fade ins, fly-ins, blurs, and spins. Find out more.
Behaviors B ehaviors are like those you use in Dreamweaver MX, now you can add interactivity to flash content without writing a line of code. For example, you can use Behaviors to include functionality that links to a website, loads sounds and graphics, controls playback of embedded videos, play movie clips, and triggers data sources. Find out more.
ActionScript 2.0 ActionScript 2.0 is an object-oriented language that follows the ECMA script language specification and supports inheritance, strong typing, and the event model. Find out more.
Templates Flash includes updated templates for creating presentations, e-Learning applications, advertisements, mobile device applications, and other commonly used types of Flash documents. Find out more.
Advanced components New components now support focus management to control tab navigation. Although the components have a new sophisticated design, you can easily reskin them to modify their appearance. For more information, see Benefits of v2 components. Find out more.
Flash Javascript (JSAPI) If you like the idea of customizing your flash authoring environment with your own set of tools, timeline effects, keyboard shortcuts you can now do so easily with this powerful new feature which is you do so by creating .jsfl files by copying a commands from your history panel for example.
3d party extension tools Now flash offers you a myriad of disparate systems of 3rd party extension tools. Including special effects and 3d. Find out more.
Accessible support in the authoring environment Accessibility support in the Flash authoring environment provides keyboard shortcuts for navigating, and using interface controls so that you can work with these interface elements without using the mouse.
Integrated Help system The new Help panel provides in-context reference, ActionScript reference, and lessons in the Flash authoring environment. Find out more.
Spelling checker The spell checker searches your text for spelling errors. This is good for improving your editorial work.
Document tabs Tabs for each open document are displayed at the top of the workspace so that you can quickly locate and switch between open documents. For more information, see Using document tabs for multiple documents (Windows only).
Flash Player Flash Player performance has been greatly improved, and ActionScript has been enhanced to comply with ECMA script language specifications. Also, Flash now tracks interactions so that they can be converted to reusable commands. Player runtime performance has been improved by a factor of 2 to 5 times for video, scripting, and general display rendering. Find out more.
Handheld support Flash player now supports handheld devices better by providing a new flash player lite which is optimized for lower resource consumption for ligther devices like i-mode mobile phones. Users of DoCoMo would most likely benefit from this. Find out more.
History panel The History panel tracks all your interactions so that they can be converted to reusable commands. 
Textfields image wrapper Flash MX 2004 now supports embedding images inside of textfields and wrapping text around images. You can load external JPEG or SWF files or choose to use an internal linkage identifier as your image source. Furthermore, these images can each be assigned an identifier to allow their properties to be manipulated individually. Content publishers can now be rejoicing for using flash. :)
Screen-based visual development environment A visual programming environment Flash MX Professional 2004 introduces a forms-based visual programming environment, which is ideal for developing applications similiar concept to using Microsoft Visual Studio. (Flash Professional only). This is a more intuitive working environment compared to the rigid methods of timeline editing in the past.
Slides-based authoring Slide screens include functionality designed for sequential presentations which is similiar concept to using Microsoft Powerpoint. Best of all it also provides the transition effects which are found in director. (Flash Professional only). Find out more.
Project management The Project panel allows centralized project file management, version control, and workflow optimization for teams of Flash users working together. (Flash Professional Only). 
Source code control Flash Professional provides source code control integration with plug-ins to industry-leading source control systems such as Microsoft Visual Source Safe. (Flash Professional only). Find out more.
CSS support Flash now supports Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in its TextField Object. Features like roll over link effect are very easy to implement. You can also load an external CSS document into flash and assign it to a textfield or define the styles within flash.
Check back soon, more info to come... |
