Macromedia announced that a free update is available today for its Flash Web applications program Flash MX 2004. The update, version 7.2, applies to both Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004. Customer input helped in developing the update which reduces launch and compile times. As a result, the application is lighter and runs more efficiently.

"The Flash community has been very engaged in helping us deliver this update," said Mike Chambers, product manager for developer relations, Macromedia. "The result is a significant collection of changes that substantially improve the developer and designer experience." Over 400 additional code examples are included with this update, with new chapters on creation and customization of components.

"I'm thrilled to see Macromedia's commitment to improving the Flash authoring experience," said Colin Moock, co-creator of Unity and author of ActionScript 2.0 Essentials. "This new updater's extensively updated documentation will really help the community create compelling content."

This update also has improved support for international fonts and requires less disk space to run Flash. This last improvement will be of particularly interest to educational and volume customers with multiple user configurations.

Current Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional customers can download the update at
http://www.macromedia.com/go/updates.

Macromedia expects to offer localized versions of the update later this summer.