flash 8

[tg]

so, i'm about to install studio 8 onto my work station, and i hope not to destroy any of my work in progress....

has any had any problems with flash/studio 8 messing up flash 5/mx/mx2004 programs?

[CyanBlue]

Yeah... I'd love to know this as well... :)

[annexion]

I've got both and seems to work fine. In fact, I sometimes accidentally click the MX 2004 icon and end up having both at the same time.

Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2

[Cota]

So all in all, is 8 worth the buy?

Annexion.....long time...things are well I hope...

[thephosphorbox]

The only issue I've had working on my projects from previous versions in Flash8 was on account of my own screwups.. but this might help other people who made the same mistake.

For some reason, I never capitalized "math" when I was working in MX and it always seemed to work. Flash8 does not like it uncapitalized. :D

[tg]

yeah... all versions after mx are case sensitive.

[tg]

well, any way, i've uninstalled mx2004, and installed 8. interface seems pretty much the same, with some minor changes so far. only problem is, that the mx2004 remoting classes i need weren't included in 8, so now i wonder if i can reinstall them, or if i do, they will be installed back into the mx2004 dir, instead of the 8 dir..... i guess i could just move them over to the 8 dir, and hope i don't mess anything up.

[Cota]

In theory it shouldnt mess anything up, but in reality its windows based software, so you never know. I'm still using MX, never moved to MX04, but considering moving to 8...just not sure if its worth it at this point.

[jjbilly]

Stability... had it going for a couple of weeks and it feels like 7.0, crashing most days. Anyone else?

[tg]

the think i noticed right off the bat, is that it is using more resources, and i often have flash and dreamweaver open at the same time.... i may have to boost my ram a bit.... or at least thats what i will tell the boss. @ cota, if you move to 8, and use the mx04/8 class structure and import, i definitley think it is worth it.... and since you didn't go to 04, then you wont have the problems i am... the classes for 04, and 8 are stored in different directories (on windows at least), so that is the root of my problem right now.

[Cota]

tg, how much ram are you running now?

[tg]

512 on an older dell laptop.

[Cota]

I'm running 52mb on a Sony desktop. Guess I'll have to up it 1g...

[BadBadNeil]

Studio 8 is running SO much better than MX2k4 ever did on my machine. Everything loads faster, the panels work better. Exactly what I was hoping for.

I just upgraded to 2Gigs myself because 1GB just wasn't doing it anymore with PS CS2 / Flash 8 / DW 8 / bridge / web open all at once. World of difference.

[CyanBlue]

How's Flash Players working??? I assume that F8 installs FP8 for the browsers and you are stuck with it when you need to test your F7 content in the browser, right??? Any way to get away with this problem???

[Cota]

Not sure I like all this so called new security stuff with F8. I installed Flash Player 8, and when I went to use help in Flash MX I started getting security warnings from flash...telling me I have to change security settings to allow help to run....thats alittle annoying.

[CyanBlue]

Yeah... I've seen that several times while I had F8 trial installed on other computer at work and it totally screwed up lots of my old F6 projects... I know it is just one additional click, but that is not going to be what the users will think... They will think that I am scamming them or something... :(

[Cota]

my question is, doesnt that kill getURL's and Loadvars unless you change the settings?

[CyanBlue]

Um... Obviously I cannot answer that question well... I have tried two products which extensively use loadMovie() to load external images and they both worked fine as long as I click on that security box... But I cannot really comment other than that... I am assuming that it's got to work because I have not seen anybody yelling why their old product is not working while MM was doing the backward compatibility test, but I cannot vouch for everybody... Anybody??? :)

[jjbilly]

CB, I've got player 7; I can't remember whether I had an option not to install 8, or whether I use the uninstaller on 8, then reinstalled 7; if you need to do the latter, search the developer site at Macromedia.

[CyanBlue]

Yeah... You could always uninstall the FP8 and reinstall FP7... That's not the problem... The problem is that sometimes you need to be selective...
For example, you are working on the F8 project for FP8... You will not have problem any problem if you have FP8 installed, right??? What if you have a F7 project for FP7??? You will need to accomodate the unnecessary steps to test on FP7... Something like that might be a problem... Know what I mean???

[jjbilly]

Yes, testing is going to be a pain in that set-up.

If you're testing in browsers, and you trust the consistency of the players across the browsers, then I guess you can select your installs by browser... but there I guess I'm not saying anything you don't already know.

j

[jsebrech]

Just use multiple copies of portable firefox (http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/), and install different versions of the player in every copy. You can even run those at the same time.

[jjbilly]

Thanks for the tip, looks nice

[CyanBlue]

you trust the consistency of the players across the browsers
You know that never is going to happen... :D :(
I think that's Macromedia's job to provide better way to test the application for the developers but they are not doing the right job...

That's very interesting one, jsebrech... It does look good but I think it still has big limitation when it comes to those people who has to develop for IE for whatever reason they have...

I think the ideal situation would be somebody creating a shell for the Flash Player and read the version of the SWF file and then load the right DLL and render out the SWF file... Somebody??? ;)

[jsebrech]

Probably the best way for IE would be to have multiple vmware sessions, but that would require some beefy hardware.

[CyanBlue]

Yeah... VM sucks... Well... I know it is good one to test, but it's so slow it's better have multiple computers than VM with multiple OS installed... :(

[tg]

this may sound like a dumb question, but is there really a difference in the output of the flash player from one browser to another? on the same platform?. i have not seen any differences between how flash works between the firefox player and the ie player.... i mean thats one of the points of using flash right? so that you don't have to worry about cross browser compatibility, right?

[Cota]

I'm kind of with tg on this one....I thought flash was universal.

[CyanBlue]

Well... I did have several occurances when the Flash code in IE does not behave the same as in FireFox or Netscape... It did not have happened many times, but it definitely happened to me...
I am not arguing that Flash should be compatible in many browsers in one PC, but it is not 100% guarantee, unfortunately...

Of course, it is another story when Flash in PC does not work the same in Mac... :(

[Cota]

Differences between PC and Mac are expected. Damn macs! I'm assuming the flash dll is developed differently for the two platforms, it would have to be. But cross browser shouldnt be an issue, but it sometimes. I've had situations where Loadvars worked fine in IE but just wouldnt work in FireFox, until I refreshed the page. Makes no sense sometimes.

[CyanBlue]

Well... I guess that's why the term 'unknown feature' is so popular... :(

[Cota]

But I'm afraid of the unknown....:eek:

[tg]

well, just makes me happy that i just develope for the intranet.... with very few non-ie boxes out on our network.

[Cota]

Lucky you...I think every one needs to get together and just make one damn standard for browsers.....or die trying.

[jsebrech]

Flash on IE and on firefox seems to handle wmode differently. I forgot the details, but I remember that to be the reason I abandoned using wmode. I assume there are more differences. Also, flash 8 has different calculation of _width and _height when compared to flash 7, which messed up some automated layout code I had written.