Flash CS4 - a bit of a nightmare experience

I never do a post just about somebody else’s blog post , but after reading this - http://kevinsuttle.com/found-and-lost-the-flash-ide I felt compelled to react.

I fully agree with the author about the majority of the points he makes in this article. Adobe, and many other users of the flash platform, seems to think, there’s a clear distinction between flash user : developers and timeline artists. Developers use flex / flash develop, artists and animators use Flash IDE and perhaps Flash catalyst. Unfortunately that’s not the case, especially if you work in advertising or e-marketing agencies (such as myself) and create rich media, experience campaign microsites. You have to do a lot of coding while integrating timeline based animations and graphics. There is really no way such sites can be build in Flex. Or purely in Flex. Take my latest project - Gap1969. It’s a good example of highly visual , stylised experience microsite for which Flex would be completely inappropriate tool. There’s quite a few instances of using timeline z-depth positioning of the assets, the transition timeline (3D renders) is a png sequence that needs precise control with labels etc.. Now just to clarify, I don’t use the Flash IDE for coding of course, that AS editor is a joke unfortunately. I use FDT 3 set up to compile in Flash CS4 IDE. Also for the record, I use the updated version of Flash IDE - 10.0.2.

During the course of development of this project I observed the following :

1. Flash was crashing at least 1-2x per hour.

2. Flash compiled a project with some weird visual (sometimes also code) errors, like some sort of red square in the middle of the screen, my object positioned in 3d space were suddenly shifted by couple hundred pixels of screen. Without changing any code, just restarting the Flash, recompiling.. suddenly everything was working fine.

3. Flash compiled a file with 0 bytes. After flash restart , and recompile it was OK.

4. After clicking on the item in the library and getting it open in flash IDE took about 6-10 seconds. Very slow. (I use 8 core Intel Xeon HP computer!)

Yes, the main Fla file was quite big - 72 MB - producing about 13MB swf and it seems like flash was running out of the memory quite often, but I do have 4 GB RAM,  I did decrease levels of undo to 10, increased the system swap file to 8 GB. How much more memory flash needs ??

So basically I had to save my project every 1-2 minutes to protect myself from loosing work due to the frequent crashes, restart flash IDE probably 10 - 15 times in hour… Many times I couldn’t copy over frames from another flash file as I got out of memory error message, although there should be enough memory available.

I spend quite a lot of time hunting for bugs that weren’t there, only to find out , after restarting flash everything was OK again.

It was quite a frustrating experience , to put it mildly..

All of that would be acceptable if this was a free open source tool in beta version, but this tool cost a LOT of money, especially if you live in the UK.

I really wish Adobe would stop assuming real developers doesn’t use Flash IDE, and stop concentrating all the effort on developing new tools, but rather made sure

their (still main/flagship) tool works smoothly, reliably and fast!