Customer Reviews

Flash MX Professional 2004

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

update 9/29/04 - i just wanted to chime in regarding the 7.2 updater that was recently released. macromedia has done the right thing and released a massive and free update to the horrendous mx2004. though it speaks volumes about the initial release's quality when i say that despite hundreds of fixed bugs and performance enhancements, mx2400 is still a not very good. unless you desperately need a feature of mx2004, i would suggest waiting for the next release, which macromedia has promised will focus on performance and stability.

--

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.

Don't be mislead by people who say this is a bad program, they most likely don't know how to use it. Flash MX Professional has helped me a lot with my website, it made it look better and made it better. With this you can also make cartoon animations like the ones on newgrounds and flashplayer, it took a long time to make just a short animation that had good graphics.

9:29 AM 12/31/2004

Amazon Review
I HATE MACROMEDIA FLASH MX PROFESSIONAL 2004

That is the best way to describe how I feel about it. I mainly wanted the newer version of Flash, and now I regret the purchase.

My problems with it are a little different than some of the others who left reviews. First of all, I initially became acquainted with Flash through Flash 5 and have primarily been working with Flash MX over the past few years, so I'm accoustomed to how it operates. With Flash MX Pro 2004 it seems as if they've made everything harder to use, even with all their new features.

1. First of all, they got rid of 'normal mode' for the actionscript panel. I've heard a lot of programmers say that they didn't use it, but I found it a lot more convenient than the cumbersome 'behaviors panel' they have now.

2. They make it difficult to save files in the old Flash MX format, requiring you to select 'Save As' from the file menu, even if the original file was made in Flash MX, and then they have a dialog box come up to comfirm your selection. I'm not familiar with Actionscript 2.0 so I don't use it and would like portablity back to Flash MX, especially since you can only activate the software on one system. So if you have a desktop and a laptop, decide which one you want to develop on or be prepared to buy it twice. They should have made it possible to set the default save format in the preferences and allowed individual users to put the software on at least two systems.

3. The reference library seems more convoluted than helpful. I know they added more things, but they should have been able to figure out a better way to organize it.

4. My biggest problem with this software is that they took the 'Actions' out of the Timeline context menu. It boggles my mind as to why they would do that. In Flash MX if you right click on a frame you could bring up the actions panel. Now you either have to keep it docked, hit F9 or select it from the menu bar. All these other options inhibit workflow. I can't understand it and it frustrates me even after almost a year of using the software, that I keep wanting the bring up the actions panel from the context menu.

Maybe it would be alright if you've never used Flash before, you won't miss anything. I would suggest that if you're happy with Flash MX, don't even bother with 2004. However, I actually bought Flash MX Pro with the entire Studio MX 2004 suite. This is the first time I've used Dreamweaver and Fireworks and actually, I have come to enjoy using them (I'm more into programming and haven't found any use for Freehand yet). So it wasn't a totally loss, but still...

I HATE MACROMEDIA FLASH MX PROFESSIONAL 2004

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.

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.

I couldn't be in more agreement with the previous reviewer. This is an incredibly horrible version of Flash. Not only does it crash incessantly, but it makes everything unstable. You can't even use it together with Dreamweaver, becuase one of your programs will disappear. That's right, they just disappear and you lose all your work. No beep, no warning - nothing. I can't believe this was actually released this horribly and so rushed to market. They released updaters, but they don't really fix the problems. Hell, I can't even run some of my other software at the same time (won't even start, let alone the Dreamweaver thing). I don't know what's wrong, but between all of that and activation, the suite in general (including Flash) is just a mess.

I agree with the other reviewers who voiced their complaints about Flash MX 2004 crashing. The timeline effects will work flawlessly a couple of times and then when you try it again it'll pop up a script error message. Also, it will crash unexpectedly right in the middle of you doing something and you'll lose all your work. Didn't anybody test this program before they released it? Also, what's up with two different versions of Flash? Flash MX 2004 Professional and Flash MX 2004 for Nitwits which includes half the features as the professional version. Macromedia laid an egg on this one.

Flash is a great platform, and Flash MX was a great piece of software. This upgrade is terrible, crashing incessantly on Mac OS X. Everyone realized this, so Macromedia quickly rushed out a .01 updater... and it really didn't fix much, if anything. I'm so completely disappointed by Macromedia, especially with the new Adobe products out that are so very much better. If only Adobe made Flash!!! Definately, definately do NOT buy this software, even though it has some neat new features, it's a terrible waste of money for the upgrade. Macromedia needs to realize they made a mistake and FIX IT!

Flash MX 2004 Pro.

No doubt about it. So far this morning it has frozen my tablet (what's it doing with serial ports?????), refused to initialise the panel set i just saved, crashed 100% of the time with a single layer on the timeline and very few objects when i try to test the fla (using flash 4 player compat).

Not acceptable! Downloading the latest updater has made it worse if anything.

I'm just about to reinstall flash 5.

Macromedia have tried to make a Visual Studio 2005 type leap here and have failed miserably with the quality control. I'm sure there are heaps of users getting along just fine with it, but i don't care - there are no other apps on my systme that run this way.

Flash gets better with every step. I can't wait till the day they hopefully merge Flash & After Effects.