Flash MX

What makes it worth the upgrade?

[korkus2000]

Now that it has been out for a little while I was wondering what everyone thinks. I still use 5 but I am considering the upgrade. Is the compression better? How is the support for mp3's and video? What is the new feature that you can't live without?

[korkus2000]

Tumbleweed blows through

[knighty]

There was a thred that already discussed Flash MX and its merits.

Go to the Macromedia site and take the Feature tour it shows you all the coll new features available.

[mivox]

Sorry about the weeds... I keep meaning to do my spring cleaning, but I hate to sweep. ;)

Doesn't Macromedia have 30day trial downloads for their software? A test drive would give you the best idea as to whether the download was worth the cost to you.

[korkus2000]

Ya I am going to do the download I thought maybe some of the people on the board have been using it for a while might have some insight. I guess they are like me and can't afford the upgrade at the moment. I just wanted to see if there was some over seen aspect that made it worth the upgrade.

knighty
The tour is not that impressive. I won't upgrade if thats all there is.

[monolift]

I have been using MX for a little while.

The problem with upgrading in the past was that the new player takes a while to spread it's way around to all of the end users.

MX, however, has made a lot of improvements to files published for Flash 5. They've added things like run time shared libraries and runtime image swapping - it's good stuff.

There are also a lot of new components for Flash 6 like premade scroll and form elements. These aren't super useful however, because, as you know you can make them yourself.

[mivox]

the new player takes a while to spread it's way around to all of the end users

That's the problem with any bleeding edge (or even halfway-lukewarm-new) web technology/standard... the end users software needs time to catch up. I ran into the same problem when I designed an interactive calculating form in Acrobat 4: I discovered none of the Windows machines in our office had their Acrobat Reader updated in over a year!

Because I fear that sort of upgrade laziness is not at all uncommon, I personally would wait at least a year after the introduction of a "new web technology" before actually implementing it on a commercial website.

Wouldn't implement any new capabilities of Flash MX on a live website until next summer (which gives you plenty of time to get really slick using them... ;) ), when people have had a good chance to upgrade to the new player.