Get Animated with Flash MX! (Macromedia Flash MX)

Member Name: karenroach

Product:	Macromedia Flash MX
Date:	10/06/09 (21 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great animation features

Disadvantages: NOT very user friendly for novices

Flash MX. Macromedia held a launch event in Manchester in 2002, I went with a contingent from the my ICT department. I was into the third year of a Computer Science degree at the time, one of my subjects was Multimedia, so I was a very interested party. Anything that would add a bit of pzazz to be upcoming Multimedia project was OK with me. When I saw what Flash MX could do, I was blown away. Up until that time I had only achieved a very rudimentary form of animation, using Visual Basic programming, based, on setting event timers.

Here was a piece of software which would allow me to achieve the sophisticated effects that are taken for granted on websites and in games today: Images appearing and fading away on screen, being replaced by new images; Images moving smoothly across the screen as if drawn by some invisible finger; Sound playing on a webpage, as the cursor goes over it, the list is endless. Everything in the application mimics the real life animators craft. Flash MX soon became Industry Standard for the production of web animation.

Working for an Adult Education Service, I devised a course to teach it to would be web designers and games programmers. It is not the most user friendly piece of software to learn and use. This is not surprising as, the more complex the end result, the more complex the software that produces it must be.

The user interface (what you see on your screen) contains elements that are not found for instance in the Microsoft Office suite that many people are familiar with. For example: Timelines that allow different thing to appear on screen at different times during the replaying of the animation: Layers that allow things to appear to to go behind something else on the screen: Gradients that make things appear to have depth on a flat screen. There is even a template for making quizzes.

There have been many changes to Flash MX since it first launched, has been upgraded many times since then, but Computer Profesionals acknowlege that it played a massive part in the development of the webpages we all use on the Internet today. If you were buying Flash today, you would be looking at Adobe Flash CS4, which does everything Flash MX did and more.

Summary: Animation software for web aplications and games development

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