It's great to see the release of Flash MX 2004 Pro. After seeing the amazing animations, movies, and games made with the previous versions of Flash, such as Flash 4 and 5, it's hard to believe that it could get any better. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it has. See our banner below pulling the live RSS feed from our website.
With the new Actionscript 2.0 API and style of programming making your Flash movies is a lot faster and easier. The new style of actionscript uses classes and functions much like all of the most popular and powerful programming languages such as Visual Basic, C, C++, .NET, shall I go on?
Many developers have been complaining about the loss of support for their Actionscript 1.0 code as backward compatibily is usually very important with upgrades to a programming language. But, for the best reasons the new Action Script makes much more sense. It is truly object oriented and can run much faster by setting up an event to fire at runtime or by adding a listener to any movie clip, graphic, button, etc.
Most of the older functionality is still there, we just have a better IDE and style of code to work with now. I have been working on several dynamic Flash projects including a Actionscript validated contact form utilizing ASP or PHP, and several other items.