So, what can it do that I cant do in Director? -----Original Message----- From: Kerry Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 13 March 2002 22:21 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: <lingo-l> My Crystal Ball
I saw the future last night--at least part of it--and it's Flash MX. I don't want to start another "Director is dead" thread (it isn't), but I think that if Flash isn't already in your repertoire, it should be. Macromedia showed MX last night at the San Francisco Multimedia Users' Forum (SFMMUF), and I was pretty darned impressed. It's not going to replace Director, because it's still slower and more limited functionally. However, the improvements they have made will mean that more and more smaller jobs that used to be Director/Shockwave will be going to Flash developers instead. Here are some of the high points I took away from the meeting: - Video. No surprise here, but I was impressed with the quality vs. size you can get. Also, you can have a live local video stream. - Smaller file size. The engine is about 100K bigger, so the initial dl will take longer, but the swf's are smaller. You can even take an existing F 5 .fla, publish it in F MX, and it will be smaller. - Export as Flash 5. Swf, of course, but now also fla, for a colleague using 5. - Coding. Some major improvements that coders will really like, such as breakpoints and nameable objects. IOW, you can name a button, then use that name in your layer 0 script. E.g., name a movie clip "someClip_mc", and you have access to all the movie clip methods from one script. This may be a mixed blessing--you don't have to have your code scattered all about the place on movie clips and buttons. On the other hand, concentrating your code in one frame could lead to OOP spaghetti. - Speed. Array, text, and xml-parser methods are now in machine code, and dramatically faster. ActionScript will continue to be slower than Lingo, though--in fact I think it will be slower than ever. ActionScript has never been tokenized like Lingo, which means that there is a speed penalty for verbose code. Now, to get the file size down, and for security, ActionScript will be encoded--RLE, I think. My take is that now it will have to be decoded, then parsed. - Improved UI. Too much to mention, but all panels are dockable, and you can save a configuration. You can also put stuff in a folder in a layer--those 20 related buttons now only take up 1 layer. - Object library. The Flash equivalent of behaviors. Imagine a drag-and-drop address book, not to mention scroll bars, radio buttons, etc. - Flash Asset Xtra for 8.5. Yep, John Dowdell stood up there in front of everybody and said it would be out in about 3 months (JD, we haven't officially met, but that was me who asked that question, and who grilled you on support for Chinese ^_^ ) - Collaborative development environment. You can have different panel setups for the same movie--one for the coder, one for the designer. Sweet. - Text handling. A couple things stood out. You can break a text string up, and it stays text (previously, it was rendered into graphics). Also, really cool text deformation without pre-rendering--and it can be done from code, I think. - Deformation and masking. Greatly improved. There's other stuff that I haven't touched on, but I've got to get back to work. Director will continue to be my primary development platform, but Flash MX is a really cool product, and I, for one, am looking forward to using it, both on its own and in Director. Cordially, Kerry Thompson [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!] [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
