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Summary of this Resource:
Monday, August 25, 2003 — Macromedia announced the first major upgrade to Macromedia's Studio MX product line, featuring major enhancements to Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and a major forking in the Flash product line, with both a standard and a high-end "Professional" version of the product released for the first time.
Many of the enhancements in the Flash product are available only in the new Professional edition. Key among these is a forms-based way of creating applications in the Flash environment, as opposed to the timeline metaphor that Flash has traditionally used. Forms allow users to visually lay out their applications as a series of screens instead of in the continuous, unbroken movie format. Users of Flash MX Professional 2004 will have the choice of using forms or timeline for their applications. Jeff Whatcott, Senior Director, said the company hopes this flexibility in Flash will attract a new audience of developers, particularly those familiar with the drag-and-drop, forms-based approach pioneered in Microsoft's Visual Basic, and now standard in most modern IDEs, such as Visual Studio .NET, Borland's Delphi, IBM's VisualAge family, and the open source Eclipse project. |