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amen. due to a project i'm working on, i was recently pretty much forced to become a flash developer. 700 bucks is an awful lot to pay for flash cs3, but i'd

amen. due to a project i'm working on, i was recently pretty much forced to become a flash developer. 700 bucks is an awful lot to pay for flash cs3, but i'd be willing to pay it, if it made my job easier. alas, it was the worst piece of software i've ever installed on my mac. eighty billion buttons and toolbars and palettes and menus, which completely takes over the screen, making it impossible to find what i'm looking for. i found a way to make do with the open-source flex sdk compiler, even though adobe has gone far out of their way to make that difficult. for example, the .swf file format is free and open, but the .fla format -- used to store gui controls and layouts -- is not. so i've decided not to use flash gui controls. me and my cohorts are using javascript controls instead.

snorkel 18y ago
Therein lays the problem. If Adobe would release an affordable version of Flash, or if any of the open source SWF compilers out there could keep up with the latest Actionscript specs, then more developers would get hooked on it. But I guess Adobe is fat, dumb, and happy with cornering the market on graphics tools that it doesn't need to concern itself too much about growing the Flash developer community. Adobe should think it over because the growing popularity of <canvas> and next generation HTML is going to take large chunks of mindshare away from Flash development.
- allenbrunson 18y ago
  i think adobe's position is: if they completely opened up the flash format, then they couldn't make any money off of it. they give away the player for free, so they make their money from the developer tools. if they opened up the .fla format, then they'd get killed by competitors, because flash cs3 sucks. so it wouldn't help them any to grow the flash platform, if they lose their ability to make money off of it.
iron_ball 18y ago
The Flash authoring tool is lousy. It's just a decrepit hunk of deformed aluminum. And I say this as an Actionscript programmer of several years now. Flex, on the other hand, is really damned nice, and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder is not terrible. Good debugger. Using jEdit for coding, Flex Builder for compiling and debugging, and Flash only for the bare minimum of FLA editing, you can have a very decent life.

snorkel 18y ago

Therein lays the problem. If Adobe would release an affordable version of Flash, or if any of the open source SWF compilers out there could keep up with the latest Actionscript specs, then more developers would get hooked on it. But I guess Adobe is fat, dumb, and happy with cornering the market on graphics tools that it doesn't need to concern itself too much about growing the Flash developer community. Adobe should think it over because the growing popularity of <canvas> and next generation HTML is going to take large chunks of mindshare away from Flash development.

allenbrunson 18y ago
i think adobe's position is: if they completely opened up the flash format, then they couldn't make any money off of it. they give away the player for free, so they make their money from the developer tools. if they opened up the .fla format, then they'd get killed by competitors, because flash cs3 sucks. so it wouldn't help them any to grow the flash platform, if they lose their ability to make money off of it.

iron_ball 18y ago

The Flash authoring tool is lousy. It's just a decrepit hunk of deformed aluminum. And I say this as an Actionscript programmer of several years now. Flex, on the other hand, is really damned nice, and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder is not terrible. Good debugger. Using jEdit for coding, Flex Builder for compiling and debugging, and Flash only for the bare minimum of FLA editing, you can have a very decent life.