Fig 6: Plenty o' tabbed interface in LiveMotion. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
Fig 7: The contextual goodness of the Flash MX Property Inspector. Same Inspector, two different states (depending on what you have selected).

If there's one organizational area that Flash MX remains light years ahead of LiveMotion in, it has to be the Library. LiveMotion doesn't have an equivalent to Flash's Library to store all your assets, though it is kind of possible to fudge the process somewhat to emulate this feature by making an unused timeline with all of your project's files and pointing aliases to shapes in the live timelines, but this is kludgey and unreliable at best. Plus, the fact that you can publish external Libraries in Flash for use by any number of SWF files gives MX yet another edge.

Round 1 winner: Somewhat surprisingly, Flash MX takes the round here. I thought LiveMotion would improve the animation process enough in version 2 to stay ahead of Flash, especially since Flash 5 had so many discrepancies in this area, but MX's animation enhancements are truly profound and leave little room for complaint. Even though LiveMotion's timeline is a better model than Flash's, with the overall problems I outlined earlier, users frankly might find that buying After Effects itself would be a better use of their money than going for LiveMotion, as After Effects 5.5 with SWF export functionality arguably makes a better straight-up Flash animation tool than LiveMotion does.

Ouch.

Round 2: Interactivity
Let me start this round off with a caveat: I'm a designer by training, but over the years I've managed to become pretty adept at Lingo scripting in Director, and, more recently, ActionScripting in Flash. But please, keep in mind that I'm don't exactly get my hard-core programming freak on like some of you out there, so I may not hit on everything relevant to you (if that's your bag, baby).

Scripting Environment
Quick quiz for Flash users: What's the first thing you do in a new, virgin timeline? If you said anything like, "create two new layers, one called 'actions' and one called 'labels,'" you've hit on one of the real annoyances in the Flash interface. Unfortunately, this shortcoming hasn't been addressed in Flash MX. LiveMotion, on the other hand, has a script channel and a label channel built in to every timeline (fig 8). These channels are much easier to read in the heat of heavy scripting than the label and action flags in Flash, and it begs the question as to why Macromedia didn't add dedicated scripting and label channels in MX, especially in light of all the other improvements MX offers.


Fig 8: Ahh. LM2 gives you dedicated Label and Script channels in every timeline.

In both apps, even a newbie programmer has to spend a fair amount of time in the scripting window to get anything accomplished. To be frank, I couldn't tell any discernable difference in the way both programs handled their respective scripting windows (fig 9).


Fig 9: The scripting windows of Flash MX (left) and LiveMotion 2 (right). Pretty darn close....



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