April 29, 2004

Some comments on MX2004 if you will..

First off, I have to say I am quite disappointed in the performance of FlashMX2004. I'm a dev'er so most of my work is in the actions panel and it is soooooo irritating to work in, due to the sloooooowness of it. *Especially* typing in Japanese. And when it gets over 150 lines of code or so, it's just not even worth using. Now I'm sure there are a few of you out there going "Did you install the updater?".. well, I just bought Studio MX2004 the other day so it should be the updated version, and it does say 7.01. Which brings me to a quick point about MM's Japanese online store... it sucks. I couldn't buy the upgrade. I even went ahead and registered (which I've already DONE on the US one) but no go. It kept telling me that there was no upgrade download version.. 20 mins later...I ended up going to the US/Canada one. Now I have to pay Visa's exchange rate on the USD.

Either way, for ANY major apps I work on, I have to go back to MX just because the actions panel sucks so much.. what a bummer. I do actually like the look of it though, and the data components rule! Though I'm not sure when a project that uses them will come in. Going to have to make something up. :) All in all.. performance sucks and I'm really looking forward to the next update (if there is one).

Moving on to Dreamweaver, I have no complaints whatsoever. This is a great upgrade in my mind. It looks good, clean, ..the buttons are a bit different and having the tabs on top threw me off for a bit there, but the performance is great, and I was actually pleasantly surprised to see all the pages that I had up when I closed Dreamweaver in a hurry when going to have dinner, and coming back to open Dreamweaver and they're all there. Nice touch.

I haven't messed with Fireworks yet just because I'm more of a Photoshop kind of guy, but I really like the inline (what is that word they use in the intro's on MM's site?) editing feature. It was good in MX, but seems much better in MX2004. For basic stuff I use Fireworks, so my tute pages are going to get that much easier to mess with.

I can't say I regret buying StudioMX2004 mainly because Dreamweaver has got just so much better, but if I were to rate it on Flash... Could it be my drivers? Don't other people have the same problem? I did hear from a fellow flasher that "FlashMX2004 rox!" so I'm assuming this shouldn't be a problem.

On a last note, has anybody noticed the difference when using the mouse scroller in the actions panel, and in the main panel when editing an .as or .asc file? I like the movement I get out of the actions panel, but the main one increments by like.. 0.5 of a line for every click my mouse scroller makes... quite weird.

If anybody has any tips for me on getting better performance out of the actions panel.. please post in the comments if you have a moment.

Posted by Graeme at April 29, 2004 10:09 PM
　



Comments

The problem that existed in MX, but don't know if it's still there in MX 2004 is if you have a component in your library selected. For some reason, it's constantly refreshing that little library preview. Therefore, I'll usually create a folder, and make sure my library always has that selected when typing in the actions window.

If you can update your drivers, do so, although, not sure if the language is a factor or not.

Hope that helps!

Posted by: JesterXL at April 29, 2004 10:28 PM

Thanks Jesse, I have noticed that if I close the components panel things are a bit quicker so I now leave that closed, but as for the ones in the library.. I don't think I had components selected while doing stuff but that's a great tip!

I'm wondering myself if it's a language thing or not. (it's not a computer thing as this comp is a 2.6 hyperthreaded 1.5gig of memory beast so...)

Posted by: Graeme at April 29, 2004 10:32 PM

We almost never use the Actions panel, except to type in stop() and #include "somefile.asi". Everything is done via includes or classes. We do this for a few reasons:

* To avoid the crappy Flash IDE editor in the Actions pane. It really isn't very good, and has lots of weird usability issues.

* To be able to use PrimalScript instead and take advantage of its Intellisense features. I come from a C++ and C# background and this is really key.

* For source control reasons. We check everything into Perforce, and Flash's binary .FLA format can't be diff'd.

* To permit collaboration. A .FLA is a single file, so if I want to fix a bug on the game board and Eric wants to work on the gallery, we have to wait for the other to check in the .FLA. But if all the code is in text files, we can work on whatever we like, even the same text file simultaneously and let Perforce worry about merging changes together.

* To permit easy sharing of code across projects. It's a lot easier to share using classpath and #include than to try to mess around with shared swf's and updating/publishing. Checking in a fix to one place can propagate to all projects, or we can let Perforce do that automatically with its branching.

Long comment, sorry. :)

Posted by: Scott Bilas at April 30, 2004 01:16 AM

Graeme,

Could you shoot me an email? I have a couple of qustions for you, but couldn't find a way to contact you directly?

>The problem that existed in MX, but don't know if it's still there in MX 2004 is if you have a component in your library selected. For some reason, it's constantly refreshing that little library preview.

Jesse or Graeme, or you still seeing this in 2004?

mesh@macromedia.com

Posted by: mike chambers at April 30, 2004 01:57 AM

Negative, not on mine, but don't know what it took to fix it, so offering up my shotgun approach of suggestions.

Posted by: JesterXL at April 30, 2004 04:03 AM

Unless its absolutely necessary, I don't use the Actions panel for coding except for #include commands and maybe the odd stop(); command when needed. I have my AS files outside flash ("/Includes") and edit them either in Flash as *.AS or sometimes in DW. I find coding for flash easier this way. I love MX and can't imagine doing web work on any other platform. my 2 cents...

Posted by: ac at April 30, 2004 07:42 AM

Thanks Scott, I would love to use primalscript (used it before) but it doesn't support Japanese, and if I need to put some text in for multilingual apps... Does anybody know a way to get it to support Japanese (double byte characters?) I did mess with the encoding and stuff but it never turned out right.. What's perforce?

Code in Dreamweaver? Does it have all the code hints? .... going to try that one!.... Thanks.

Mike, email sent.

Posted by: Graeme at April 30, 2004 10:21 AM