Re: FLASH: OT: All about the UI...

[John Dowdell]

At 6:11 AM 7/25/0, maxx wrote:

> I'm a smidge concerned about this unified interface that I read

> in your White Paper yesterday. Adobe went through this concept

> quite some time ago,


Actually, Macromedia went through it before that, in 1995... that's when

the desktop tools adopted the Macromedia User Interface (MUI) initiative.

Adobe followed up on it later, but they put it in all their advertising....

;-)


Flash already existed before the FutureWave folks joined Macromedia, and so

each version has become more like the other tools. Dreamweaver and

Fireworks instead consciously broke with the past, using metaphors that web

designers and graphics professionals would be familiar with. They tried new

approaches.


Now that all these tools have a few versions under their belts, it's time

to take the best of each, and merge the interfaces together.



Yes, you're right about finger gestures being critical parts of the daily

workflow. Director 5 took major hits because it was one of the first tools

to rework keyboard accelerators to common standards. In the meantime,

FreeHand's use of customizable shortcuts proved itself, and so upcoming

versions of Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver will feature customizable

keyboard shortcut sets.




> All I really want to know is how radical is this change going to be.

> I'm not so worried about Flash, as from the screenshots and

> descriptions, it's a total efficiency makeover. However, is this

> makeover going to radically affect FW and DW in that their interfaces

> will be radically redesigned?


I don't think it'll be totally radical, but I don't yet have screenshots or

examples, sorry... the group announced Flash 5 yesterday, and the others

are at different stages in their cycles right now. Flash 5's panels and

inspectors are much closer to what's already in Fireworks, for instance...

if anything, I'd imagine that Flash would have the largest changes out of

these three.


One of the biggest changes is in Flash's selection model, the sequence in

which you select an object and apply an action to it. Inspectors are very

useful, because they track the current selection: you can query and change

attributes and these changes apply to the current selection. It's a bit

more familiar than the way operations were applied in SmartSketch and

Flash.


(And yes, people here definitely learned from the Illustrator experience!!)




> A friend of mine, also a loyal MM follower expressed his concern

> as this: "I want the UI to reflect the tools, not the corporate image."


Thank goodness... could you imagine if we had that horrid navbar, and the

lower frame with the casino ads, anytime you were trying to work in

Flash...? ;-)



Any change requires feedback... it has to be a correct change, a useful

change. If you're interested in this area, could I ask you to consider the

Macromedia Beta Program, please? Each cycle we do look for trustworthy,

industrious, and concise people to help the devteam shape the tool... if

you're able to make a contribution here, then that would be appreciated,

thanks:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/programs/beta.html



jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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