I have received and installed Flash MX, and a cursory glance at the new interface shows it has much improved in that regard.
The Drawing tools are the same as before, quirky as ever, but I think anyone who wants to do serious vector drawing now does it in Illustrator or FreeHand anyway and then imports into Flash for assembly and programming.
What is really intriguing, and deserving of deep investigation, are the new additions to ActionScript, the ability to grab external images off a server during runtime, and the Flash 6 player’s new video playback capabilities.
Since there aren’t any books out yet on Flash MX, and those that have recently appeared are now somewhat deficient, the only thing to do is generate a new little project that will help put Flash MX to the test. I am off in search of a programmer who wants to stretch his ActionScripting skills.
For those of us working in online advertising Flash MX will not find a place in producing ads yet. It will have to wait until the Flash 6 player’s penetration reaches that of Flash 5. However, we have barely begun to explore the potential offered by the version 5 player, so that is no great loss.
Major destination websites are a different story. When a reader comes to a website that promises much, they are more inclined to agree to download a small plug-in in order to get its full benefit. For Windows users the plug-in downloads fast in the background anyway, even on a dial-up modem connection.
Those people accessing the web through their employer’s broadband connection, in the firms I have encountered where their IT department has terrorized them into fear of Flash and forbidden installation of the plug-in on threat of God knows what, are something of a lost cause, except at home.
I have yet to begin to comprehend what goes on in the minds of so many corporate IT decision-makers, and still don’t understand why they dictate the things they do to innocent, unsuspecting users. I have known some good people in the IT industry, but the people with the knowledge are not necessarily the ones with the power.
Walk into a number of networked corporate workplaces, as I did last week, and observe how the machines constantly break down, how the technicians have become permanent fixtures, how the users are constantly frustrated in the simplest of tasks, and how they concoct bizarre belief systems built upon the web of lies they are told.
11:40:23 AM 
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