© 4-19-02 Joel Davies

• Product Name/Version: Flash MX
• OS X ?: Mostly - problems with font management in 10.1.3 and 10.1.4
• Company: Macromedia
• URL: http://www.flash.com
• Category: Interactive design
• Requirements: Mac OS 9.1 or greater, OS 10.1 or greater; 128MB RAM, 1024x768 display
• Date of Review: 4/19/02
• Rating: Overall: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

What is MX anyway?

That's the first question I asked myself when I heard about Flash 6, er, MX. Made for X? Marketing Xtravagance? Of course, MX immediately made me think of the old MX Missile - which seems appropriate considering the bomb they just dropped on the competition.

Rest assured, this upgrade to Flash is more than just OS X support. Rather than recounting the MAssiVE list of new or improved features, I decided to just discuss the features that I found particularly impressive from a designer's (and light programming) point of view.

New Features

Immediately apparent when launching Flash MX are the improvements to the user interface. Flash MX now includes a property inspector, much like Dreamweaver. This context-sensitive palette is a dramatic improvement over the old paradigm of using several different panels to control symbols, graphics and text in a movie. For example, in order to effectively and efficiently manage movie elements in Flash 5, I would need to keep the Frame, Instance, Actions, Effect, Info, Character, Paragraph, Text Options, Library, Fill and Stroke panels open and accessible. Because I can control most frame, symbol, text, and graphic attributes right in the property inspector, I now just have the property inspector, actions and library panels open on the desktop. Not only can you control attributes from the inspector - it also provides quick launch icons for the actions and accessibility panels where appropriate.

The Flash MX property inspector. With a line of text selected, you can adjust every property of that text without additional panels (typographers rejoice). Of course - it is context sensitive for any object you select.

The timeline is also much improved as evidenced in two simple, yet incredibly handy enhancements. First - Flash MX follows the lead of Photoshop 6 to create layer folders. Layer folders allow you to better organize and visually condense your timeline. Drop a bunch of related layers into a folder to keep easy track of animations or buttons that belong together visually or conceptually. Then collapse the folder to save screen real estate and minimize scrolling up and down the timeline.

Break apart a line of text, distribute the layers - and you are ready to animate individual letters.

The second (kind of) timeline improvement is the distribute to layers command. If you are like me, you sometimes forget to keep making new layers for objects in the movie - or later find you need individual layers for certain objects. Now, you can drag a ton of symbols, text, broken text, whatever to one layer, select the whole lot, and use the distribute to layers command under the Modify menu to create a new layer for each object. The really nifty feature to this command is that the layer names will reflect the names of symbols or text used in the objects.

Of course, I can't get too far into this review without mentioning QuickTime and video support in Flash MX. This is potentially a huge addition to flash capabilities, but there is room to grow in this area. It is quite simple to add video to any Flash movie under the Import menu. However, all QuickTime video and audio options are not supported, so it's not a bad idea to have a copy of QuickTime Pro to re-save or re-export a movie to more Flash friendly formats. basically, make sure any references to streaming are not saved into your file, and it should be fairly easily imported into Flash.

Compression using the Sorenson Spark codec looks pretty darn good - at 90% quality - a QuickTime movie I imported was reduced from a 4MB movie size to a 1.8MB .swf file - at the exact same frame rate with audio. The audio and video quality seemed the same - playing the original movie and Flash movie in side by side Flash Player and Quicktime. At large compression rates, you can dramatically reduce the size of a movie, but prepare for some giant pixels.

The downside to presenting QuickTime movies in Flash is going to be the folks that go WAY over the top on download sizes using Flash 5 - I can see the 4MB intro movie just around the corner. I'm more excited about the CD-ROM and presentation applications - media that don't require downloads for rich content. You can also link to external QuickTime movies rather than embedding a movie into a flash file, but it requires the final file be saved in QuickTime, rather than Flash, format.

The video import window is fairly simple to navigate and use. A handy tip - make sure you set the frame rate for the flash movie to your desired setting BEFORE importing video. This is maybe not the optimum sized file to import, however...

No Jedi were harmed in the making of this review. The acid test of the Spark compressor in my book is to really see what it can do with HIGH quality video. The video quality of the final .swf was excellent - but the sound was a little tinny. I imagine tweaking sound settings in the Flash publish settings tab will remedy this, but a 24 MB (!!whoa - but what did I expect!!) .swf takes a LONG time to generate. Of course, being a true Star Wars geek, I had a lot of fun viewing individual frames in the timeline.

For those of us who are rabid about not embedding every possible bitmap and sound inside a single Shockwave Flash movie, you can also now load external images and sounds directly into Flash - making updating this type of content a snap. My students who have been learning how to create external .swf files that can load into movie clips as targets are going to be both ecstatic and angry. This saves in original download size, and mimics the conventional HTML download on demand format.

An interesting and overdue programming feature that I'm excited about is accessibility for users who use screen readers. Web designers tend to concentrate on visual content - at the expense of the visually impaired. Flash MX has the ability to add support for assistive technologies - basically allowing the content to be read aloud to the visually impaired. While this will involve some adjustments on behalf of designers, accessibility features are quickly becoming mandatory, and I'm encouraged to see support from Macromedia in Flash MX. In the Using Flash area of the Help menu, there are some good guidelines for providing accessibility and links to Macromedia's online accessibility overview.

Aiding in the interactive user experience are named anchors. Named anchors in Flash allow users to jump back and forth throughout your movie using the Back and Forward buttons in the web browser. While this seems initially a minor improvement - you must consider the case of inexperienced web users that constantly hit the back button - taking them off the page with the Flash file altogether. Setting up named anchors is terribly simple - after naming keyframes, you need only check the named anchor box in the property inspector, and publish an HTML file compatible with named anchors and Flash 6 - an easy selection in the HTML tab of Publish Settings.

The free transform tool makes distorting shapes very easy - and kind of amusing.

I'll wrap us this introduction with a few more nifty additions for designers. The addition of a free transform tool to a program that specializes in vector graphics is also long overdue, but welcome nonetheless. You can now skew, taper, distort and apply perspective angles to shapes in Flash - a welcome change from simply rotating and scaling shapes. There is also an envelope distortion option under the new free transform tool that allows you to really twist and distort a shape. The only down side to the free transform tool is that it only affects shapes and "broken" text.

Flash MX also detect missing fonts when you launch a document - and will allow you to specify a "substitute" font so you can work on a movie and still kind of read/control typography. If you have ever forgotten to take a font home with a document, this is welcome news. If you use a substitute font, the original missing font information is stored in the file - so when you return to work with the correct font - the original font information is still inside your Flash movie. Although the option to permanently switch fonts ala Quark would be nice - this feature will let designers "work on the road" - even without some otherwise necessary files.

Once you've launched this panel, you are half-way to adding drag and drop user interface components to your movie.

Finally - Macromedia has shipped Flash MX with a set of pre-built user interface components - scroll bars, list boxes and various other goodies that can be applied to text and the movie timeline. COOL. In just about the time it takes you to read this sentence, you can select a text box full of copy, convert it to dynamic text with a mouse click, and drag a scroll bar onto the text box. Drag the scroll bar off the text box if you need to resize the text box, and then plop it back onto the text. Test your movie to see a scrolling text box. COOL. I don't even want to mention how long it took me to figure out how to program a scrolling text box in an older version of Flash.

As if including pre-scripted components wasn't enough, these component are also fairly easy to customize - just follow the directions for how to edit the skins of each component.

The Verdict

Overall, Flash MX is a massive upgrade to an industry standard. If you are a serious Flash user - you should have already ordered this software - once again, Macromedia has redefined the phrase "it's a whole new ball game." Luckily - the ball game isn't all that new, as most users familiar with Flash will be able to quickly settle into the latest version.

Unfortunately, OSX is also a whole new ball game, and has some bugs to be worked out. As of publication, I am waiting to hear on a technical problem I am suffering with Suitcase 10.1 (and 10.1.2) in combination with Flash MX under Mac OS 10.1.3 and 10.1.4. Any font that is activated by Suitcase in these operating systems is not being anti-aliased in Flash - resulting in some pretty ugly screen issues. I don't know what is causing the font problems - so I'm not going to blame anyone at the moment. It is a bit distressing - considering what a type freak I can be. Even with this type issue (which should be addressed soon) I have to give Flash MX my highest rating, and Macromedia and sharp salute for raising the bar yet again.

Aside from this technical issue - I have only one gripe about Flash MX. It's getting too easy - pretty soon, everyone is going to be using it.

Final Rating: PURE LUST

-Joel Davies

What do you think? Talk about it in our Forums...

[an error occurred while processing this directive]