New for beginners in 2004

Flash is such a massive program in what it can do, so many beginners have a hard time getting started. MX 2004 has several new features for this user group such as Timeline Effects and better organized menus.

Timeline Effects
Just the word 'tweening' is intimidating to someone starting out with Flash. Animation requires you to understand a bit about time, keyframes and the Flash timeline and most beginners have problems grasping these concepts at first. Timeline Effects wil let you draw or type something and then apply animated effects using Wizards.

Designers and programmers can create new Timeline effects (using the new Flash JavaScript API) and distribute them via Macromedia Exchange or other sites. Flash MX 2004 ships with a small selection of these, but new effects are easily downloadable. You just click the "Get more Commands"-menu and Macromedia Exchange pop open.

Behaviors
Just like in DreamWeaver! Click a button, add a "Go to Web Page"-behavior and you're done! Several are installed, more will be available as people start playing with the Flash JavaScript API.

Better logic
The menus have been reworked so that i.e. Convert to symbol is in the Modify-menu and not in the Insert-menu like in Flash MX. Slightly annoying to experienced users, but a great improvement to new users.

HALO UI elements
HALO is a set of buttons, widgets, windows, boxes and so on with a unified look and feel. They are available across the whole MX 2004 product line, so making professional looking content should be much easier. The HALO elements looks beautiful and you can see them in action on the Macromedia cover page or the Exchange.

Auto-updating docs
The first time we fired up our Beta, we got this nice box saying that new documentation was available and if we wanted to download it? Of course we want imortant stuff like documentation and examples to stay updated! With Flash MX, one could only guess when new stuff was available at some obscure page somewhere in the Flash support area on the Macromedia site, so you had to check back often if the docs were insuficcient (and they really were that!). Great feature and from the looks, it works flawlessly.

 

 

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