In reply to your first Q, although I can only see 2 little dark squares, it usually has to do with the positioning of your elements - you must make sure that all of you elements, including type, are positioned at whole integers - i.e. pos x = 40, y = 150 - no decimal points. Also, never resize photos in Flash; always create them the right size to begin with, or you will get loss of quality.

Not too sure about the second prob., as I don't have access to MX right now - I do know that they had to mess with the GUI a lot and for the worse, in my opinion. (Got sued by Adobe, apparently.)
Go to the forums here for more info:


http://www.flashkit.com/index.shtml

Thanks for the anwsers! I also figured out the second!

If you want to jump to a specific frame number, use:
gotoAndPlay(15); //enter the frame number where the 15 is

If you want to jump to a specific frame label, use:
gotoAndPlay('label'); //enter the frame label where the 'label' is

Those two commands will take the playhead to the specified frame and continue playing. If you want to jump to a specific frame and stop, use the same as above but it would now be:

gotoAndStop(15);

or

gotoAndStop('label');


BTW CtrlAltDel, I think it was Macromedia that sued Adobe (for using there tabbed windows style).
In MX + they got rid of the 'basic' actionscripts panel and only provide the advanced view... I think the language just got too robust to support that feature?? Either way, the way it's set up now really helps commands and syntax stick in your memory.

There you go...

I've just been working frantically for the last 2 weeks on 6 banner ads for the network's website. They gave me a shiny new copy of MX 2004. Having worked in Flash 4 + 5 for the last 5 years made finding the actionscripting stuff in MX more than a little frustrating at times!

I could easily answer your second question now! Case is right-once your used to it, it becomes much more logical than previousl versions)

(You may be right about the lawsuit thing, casedsgn. I'll see if I can find out!)

Yeah, learning a new scripting language is a daunting task...but once you dig in and start doing it, everything starts to makes sense.

LOL, .. I found that lawsuit thing ... They sued eachother and both companies won.
www.macminute.com/lib/020729adbemacr.shtml

To get rid of the blur on images dblclick the image source in the library and turn off image smoothing. With high quality or best it anti-aliases images with png optimization.