It’s a (Flash) MX 2004 World

Flash has seen significant development over the years in both capability and design. Consistently proven with each new release is that developers continue to push the technol- ogy into new territory. In its current iteration, Flash MX 2004 is advancing the successes of its predecessor, Flash MX. The new version offers more tools to create the latest breed of Web experiences, dubbed Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and Macromedia has added more authoring features to help the novice user learn the toolset.


We discuss the topic of RIAs in Chapter 2, “Exploring Web

However, Flash is no longer a single authoring product. Macromedia has made two versions of the tool available: Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004. Both editions share many core updates to Flash MX, including our following favorites:

Timeline Effects: A feature added specifically for new users, Timeline Effects enable you to quickly add motion and visual effects to your Flash artwork or text. Flash MX 2004 automatically creates all the tweens and symbols necessary for the chosen effect. You can change or edit effect settings at anytime while authoring your Flash movie. Learn more about Timeline Effects in Chapter 11, “Timeline Animation and Effects.”


Behaviors: Another feature added to help novice users, the Behaviors panel adds inter- activity to Flash buttons, components, and frames very easily. If you’ve used behaviors in Dreamweaver, you’ll find that using behaviors in Flash is very similar. Several exam- ples throughout this book use the new behaviors in Flash MX 2004.

Spell checker: You can now check the spelling of text within your Flash movie, includ- ing text in your ActionScript code.

Document tabs: If you’re using the Windows version of Flash MX 2004, you can quickly switch between multiple Flash documents .fla files) by clicking the document’s tab in the authoring environment.

Improved Actions panel: The Actions panel has an improved Script navigator, enabling you to edit the actions of any keyframe or instance in your Flash document. You can also pin multiple scripts in the Script pane, so you can quickly switch from one script to another. The Actions panel is discussed throughout Parts V and VII of this book.

Find and Replace: A highly requested feature, Find and Replace does exactly what it says: locates and updates elements in your Flash document. Everything from text to font types to colors to imported graphics and sounds can be searched with this tool.

Better graphics support for imported files: Macromedia dubs this “high-fidelity import,” which now enables you to import Adobe PDF and Adobe Illustrator 10 files with better conversion to Flash-equivalent vector graphics.

Video Import wizard: Continuing with Flash MX’s video encoding abilities, you have greater control over compression options and in/out points during the video import process. You can find more information about this feature in Chapter 17, “Embedding Video.”

Flash Player detection: Flash MX 2004 can create fully built HTML and Flash movie detection files for your Flash content. In previous versions, such automation was only available in Dreamweaver. Now, you can setup this detection process directly in the Flash MX 2004 authoring environment.