(A little deviation from the
incredible annoying Mac series)
When I came to the UK in 2006 I was lucky enough to meet a Flash dev who was
not using the Flash IDE and was using MTASC + SWFMill + Flash Develop instead. During the last 3 years I've managed to spend 95% of my time using those tools (plus Flex SDK) and use the IDE only to double check a library item, a timeline based animation or some little thing like that. Lucky me.
I'm at the moment helping out the nice guys at
UsTwo with a very nice project and, long story short, had to leave Eclipse for a second and use the IDE again.
Brand-new-super-duper Flash CS4 that, if we believe the
busy marketing guys at Adobe,
is:
the industry-leading authoring environment for creating engaging interactive experiences
Well, I have 2 comments for the
industry-leading authoring environment:
a) Navigating through the library sets the fla as "not saved".
This has happened for ages. You open a fla file, double click on any of the items on the library and the Flash IDE sets its state to "not saved". This was only a little annoyance when Flash devs were not using source control systems but these days is a killer. You do nothing to the file and if you save it gets marked with a local difference.
I guess this
feature was thought as: "we will remember your exact position in the library".
Good idea, bad implementation. If I open a Word document I can browse it to any page, close, open again and Open Office starts exactly where I left. Please note that
I haven't saved the document but my editor stills
magically knows where I was. The state of the file gets saved probably somewhere on my disk instead of in the file itself.
Good idea, good implementation. I have not modified the document, I've only browsed it.
And to make things worst, if you are using CS4 to edit a CS3 file you have to use "Save as" to keep the CS3 format and doing so takes you to the stage of your file no matter where you were before. So you have to click on the library to go back where you were and... "not saved". The loop starts again.
b) ActionScript panel gets collapsed if the IDE loses the focus.
This is uber-annoying. Open a fla file, pick up an empty frame, press good'ol F9 for the AS panel, type anything you want, ALT + TAB out, ALT + TAB in back and,
BAM! when you come back the AS panel is collapsed.
Back in the days I remember this happening but slightly differently: the panel just didn't get the focus instead of being closed. So it was there with all your code, but you had to leave the keyboard, grab the mouse and click on it to keep on with your task.
And it gets worst, you don't even need to TAB out the IDE. Do the same but instead CTRL + ENTER to test your movie and when you close the test movie window, your AS panel is collapsed.
Why, oh thy Lord, why? It's OK if Adobe doesn't want to fit Eclipse inside the IDE, but this is just too bad.
- - - - - - -
Things like these, or the other
ton of bugs reported, or
the pain to swap your Win version for a Mac version, or
the pain of getting a trial, etc. they all add up to lower CS4 sales, not only the credit crunch (although it obviously doesn't help).
Adobe,
please, put yourself together and release a rock solid IDE. We all need it!