Help with decision

[FlashHungry]

Hi All,

[First Time Poster :D ]

I was debating on upgrading my Flash MX (6) with the new Flash MX 2004, or perhaps PRO. Also was thinking of just getting MX Studio since the new Dreamweaver looks nice.

My question is, is Flash MX 2004 worth the upgrade? If you make movies in it, will everyone need to download new stuff to see it?

Any thoughts are appreciated. Also, where can I find the penetration numbers for the flash player? I remember it being on Macromedia's site somewhere.

Is AS 2.0 much better? I do lots of ASing.

Thanks!

[splict]

There are a lot of thorough articles out there that could explain the new stuff about 2004 and its advantages better than I could. I can answer a couple of your questions though.

AS2.0 compilles down to 1.0 upon publishing. This means that you can program in AS2.0 and publish to the latest revision of flash player 6. Keep in mind that player specific changes would not be supported. For example, to use customised right-click menus you would have to publish to Flash Player 7.

Is it worth the upgrade? That depends on who you talk to. :D I like it a lot. However, a lot of the AS2.0 changes are cosmetic. Meaning, there are new, stricter ways of formatting code, etc. but those changes don't allow you to do a lot that you couldn't do already (and sometimes make it more of a pain :p ) Since they compile down, I don't think they would be much faster and this, of course, can make publishing a bit slower.

Also, certain things in 2004 are a bit buggy, so I've heard, and I, personally, have gotten very frustrated with the preformance and features of the new UI components. Skinning and styling things has become a lot more of a pain, too.

But, since these changes will be with us, I wanted to progress too. I knew that it would take me a long time to learn AS2.0 and I wanted to get started as soon as possible. Also, I did not want to develop things for MX that I would not be able to continue using in future projects. I'm glad I did get 2004 and I like it very much.

I presonally made the upgrade from Flash MX to Studio 2004 Pro. (Actually, to a DevNet subscription). The deal they were running at the time was just too good. For the price I paid, it was the same as upgrading flash and buying dreamweaver (which I wanted to do anyways) and getting Fireworks (which I really like) and Freehand (which I've never used :p ) and a bunch of plug-ins and other stuff for free. So I saved up, and IMHO I think it was worth it.

Hope some of this helped.

Welcome to the forums FlashHungry :)

-splict