Difference among Flash mx, mx 2004, 8

First: Macromedia Flash MX(6)

Released with Flash Player 6, new features included: a video codec(Sorenson Spark), Unicode, v1 UI Components, compression, ActionScript vector drawing API.

Flash MX(6) has evolved into a robust environment for developing online advertising, electronic learning courses, user interfaces for enterprise applications, and multimedia content. In addition to animation and vector graphics tools, Flash now includes video support for MPEG, digital video, MOV , and AVI formats. You can edit, manipulate, and animate video objects or use scripting to make your videos interactive. You'll also find new graphic design capabilities such as Bezier curves, transformation tools, and pixel-level snap control.

In addition, Flash's ActionScript environment has undergone significant improvement. ActionScript Editor is now customizable, allowing you to configure text display properties (font, size, and color), syntax coloring, and toolbox panel content. Code formatting, code hinting, and an ActionScript debugger can aid in developing dynamic, data-driven Internet applications. You can even integrate your Flash applications with any application server that uses URL-encoded or XML data.

Second: Macromedia Flash MX 2004(7)

Released with Flash Player 7, new features included: Actionscript 2.0, behaviors, extensibility layer (JSAPI), alias text support, timeline effects. ActionScript has experienced significant evolution, from the earlier days of drag-and-drop programming seen in Flash 4 to the robust and standardized OOP language.

Macromedia Flash MX Pro 2004 included all Flash MX 2004 features, plus: Screens (forms for non-linear state-based development and slides for organizing content in a linear slide format likePowerPoint), web services integration, video import wizard, Media Playback components (which encapsulate a complete MP3 or FLV player in a component that may be placed in an SWF), Data components (DataSet, XMLConnector, WebServicesConnector, XUpdateResolver, etc.) and data binding APIs, the Project Panel, v2 UI components, and Transition class libraries.

Macromedia Flash MX 2004 combines the most useful tools for multimedia authoring into one powerhouse of a program. The integration it facilitates with other programs and languages promotes better Web content.
Flash content is not only found on the Web. It is used for CD-ROM authoring and business presentations, for example.
Flash MX 2004 can publish Flash Player 7 movies that consume data from Web services. A growing number of free data services support SOAP, such as weather look-up and language translation services.
Flash continues to develop its programming language: ActionScript. This release of
Flash distinguishes two types of coding: ActionScript 1.0 and ActionScript 2.0. Most of this book focuses on the use of ActionScript 2.0. Carefully planning your projects before you start development in Flash will undoubtedly save you time and effort in the long run. Flowcharting is an essential tool to adopt in preproduction.

Third: Macromedia Flash 8

Released with Flash Player 8, this version of the product has limited support for video and advanced graphical and animation effects, focused on expressiveness, quality, video, and mobile authoring.

Macromedia Flash Basic 8, a less feature-rich version of the Flash authoring tool, targeted at new users who only want to do basic drawing, animation and interactivity. New features included Filters and blend modes, easing control for animation, enhanced stroke properties (caps and joins), object-based drawing mode, run-time bitmap caching,FlashType advanced anti-aliasing for text, On2 VP6 advanced video codec, support for alpha transparency in video, a stand-alone encoder and advanced video importer, cue point support in FLV files, an advanced video playback component, and an interactive mobile device emulator.

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