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SAN FRANCISCO -- Promising Web developers sites that are easier to use and less costly to build, Macromedia delivered at its FlashForward2002 conference here Flash MX, the inaugural product in its MX series of integrated Web development tools.

"Rich Internet applications" and less expensive site development are possible with Flash MX, says Jeremy Allaire, Macromedia's chief technology officer. He and co-keynoter Kevin Lynch, Macromedia executive vice president, showed several sites that demonstrate Flash MX's capabilities. One is Etrade Financials' stock quote generator, which Allaire says loads at least ten times faster than its HTML-based predecessor.

"The user experience isn't good enough today," Lynch says, "and the cost of development is too high." Flash MX, available now, is priced at $499, and upgrades for existing licensees cost $199.

Familiar Tools

Macromedia has discussed its move toward a single interface for its various Web development products. The first delivery on that strategy is the inclusion with Flash MX of Dreamweaver's context-sensitive Property Inspector, which lets designers edit a selected object without having to open any new panels.

"We reduced the number of panels by 50 percent via the new Property Inspector," says Eric Wittman, Macromedia's director of product management for Flash. Flash developers will also find it easier to work with images created in the company's Fireworks program.

"We've improved our import of [Fireworks] .png files," Wittman says. "It works now."

Conference attendees were split about evenly between "coders" who develop applications using Flash's ActionScript scripting language, and "designers" who use Flash primarily to create animation and user interface elements such as menus and toolbars. But members of both groups were wowed by their first look at Flash MX's new built-in video capabilities, through support for Sorenson Media's Spark compression technology.

Using the video tools, you can scale, rotate, skew, and mask videos just as you would manipulate a bitmap image, and you can use motion tweens to animate videos. Just as with sound files and images, the animation can be loaded when the Flash movie runs to keep file sizes small and speed downloads.

Components Collected

Lynch and Allaire returned repeatedly to Macromedia's theme of doing more in less time, and at lower cost, with the MX version of Flash.

"By making it faster to create the basic elements, you can innovate in other areas," Lynch says of the more efficient development. Key to such innovation is the component model that lets Flash developers share their creations, notes Lynch and other Macromedia executives. Among the new predefined components in Flash MX are checkboxes, list boxes, radio buttons, scroll panes, scroll bars, and push buttons All of the components are customizable.

"This is a must-have upgrade for us," says Erik deBuhr, lead artist for Web design firm Northwest Media in Eugene, Oregon. "It adds most of the drawing tools I've been using in [Macromedia's] Freehand, so now I can do more of my design work right in Flash rather than importing it." DeBuhr's company creates educational animation that teach life skills to children in foster care.

"We only use Flash for the animations right now," deBuhr says. "But we'll use MX for all our site navigation, once we upgrade."

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