Flash MX 2004 Complete package > Reviews (1)

Flash MX is a program that allows people to create simple web based animations.

THE LAYOUT:
Firstly you have a time bar at the top of the program, each little box in this time bar is a key frame, here you can create a keyframe (a key frame is where you draw something or animate and object).
Below the time bar is the page (this is where you will do all of your drawings and so forth).
Further down the screen we have the options section, this will display all the options for the object or what ever you have selected.
Now on the left hand we have the tool bar this is very similar to such tool bars of photoshop or paint (paint is the basic built in paint program on most windows operating systems).

REQUIREMENTS:
Im not sure what the system requirements are for this product but the package did run on my old computer, this was
1.5 GHZ pentium 4
256 RAM
45 GB hard drive
32 MB graphics card

So from these specs you can see it will run on computer aged from now to six years ago.

EASE OF USE:
I wont lie and say that this package is easy to use, in fact its far from it, i have used it for some time and have even done a short course on it. However i still struggle with it, creating pictures to animate is very easy, if you are fimilar with photoshop and paint. How ever its when it comes to animating objects it gets tricky.

The major problem is that certain objects must be grouped together and some must be broken apart for them to aniamte in two seperate ways, this makes it akward to use.

However with the layer system (photshop) you can create multi objects on different layers to animate them, this is rather easy to do.

Im not here to give you a full description on how to use the product so im sorry if i dont go into to much detail, other wise i will start writing one.

OVERALL:
This is a good package buts its not great, it has flaws like i have mentioned about animating plus loading in sounds can be tricky two with the media libary system on this package.

Animation is slow and akward i find it hard to use to create complex animations, but it can be done ive seen some good expamles on the net.

The built in language is rather akward to learn to its not similar to any programming language i can think of.

Only computers with macromedia flash player installed can actually see the animations that you have made.

Though its comatiable with a range of other macromedia products such as dreamweaver and director making it easy to use with other programs.

I would buy this software as its good fun to learn and can be used to good effect with time and effort.