The Missing Wrench: Adobe’s Easy Flash Editor

Filed under Flash, Industry by Chad | 11 comments

This seems like a recurring topic for me. The lament of the modern Flash Designer/Developer. The quandary is a deep one with no easy answer. Has Adobe’s near completion of Macromedia’s vision for Flash as a modern, powerful virtual machine robust enough for application development left the designer in the dust? Where is the missing wrench in the Flash designer’s toolbox?

To find some answers, obviously search this blog. But also, topics like this pop up in Grant Skinner’s blog here as tangential topics and mentions in the comments, and serve as the root subject of some of Colin Moock’s recent posts here and here. This is obviously a concern of Adobe’s, likely forming the base concept of Bordeaux (which I believe is defunct) and definitely influencing the progress on Thermo.

To get some context on this issue, let’s reflect. When Flash was taken over by Macromedia, it was meant to provide an easy path to the web for artists and animators that didn’t feel at home in Director’s somewhat fearsome IDE, myself being one of them. Why was this needed? Well, Lingo was hard for many! It was a real programming language. Compared with Hypercard or the Apple Media Tool, it was like rocketscience. Even with the addition of behaviors, I wasn’t really comfortable there at my state of programming skills then. It was not like Photoshop or Illustrator or After Effects, it didn’t feel creative. Then Flash hit the scene and the much lighter plugin provided a better way to get your content seen. Sure, it had little support for external media, lacking extras and the oomph that Director provided with heavy duy bitmap sprites and the like, but it sure made pretty things easy to make. Creativity on the web blossomed.

What really made me think about this today was the current state of our candidate search for developers. You see, I have spoken to a couple developers that write Java as their primary language, and I mention that we do most all of our stuff in the Flash platform and they tell me that AS3.0 looks pretty familiar to them. You read that, Java developers say they could feel at home writing Flash content. Wow. Please remember that Flash is a tool in the Creative Suite. The Creative Suite.

I’d like to see somethings happen to remedy this situation, and it needn’t be all of them. Some things I’d like re-examined to help ease designers into Flash:

1. The addition of drag and droppable behaviors to Flash. Links, GoToFrames, Load Media, Load XML, Load Video, Video Controls, etc. These could live in a panel, be icon driven and do an automatic import of the needed classes and even write the appropriate frame scripts. Easy peasy. I could see this being a huge selling point as a new feature for Flash’s IDE.
2. The possible re-forking of Flash into Professional and Standard versions. Give the Standard version the standard mode code editor of yore (Was that Flash5 or Flash MX?). Get rid of a bunch of the more advanced and UI components. Add GetURL back in! Heck maybe even a *gasp* Flash 4 style modal dialog box to give designers an easy way to write AS3 code. Creative Suite Web Edition could have Flash, Creative Suite Web Premium Edition could have Flash Pro.
3. Creation of a more animation pure-play application. Add solid vector AfterEffects output options maybe? What are cartoon artists supposed to use in the Adobe toolset? Flash CS3 is like a battleship when all you need is a dinghy (and due to lack of proper cameras etc, like a dinghy with one oar shorter than the other) in this arena. Remember LiveMotion?
4. How about a Swish-like program? I used to use Swish back in the day to help with text effects, etc. It had fairly decent animation controls then. I haven’t kept up with the tool at all, but I am sure that creating a basic Flash experience is probably easier in Swish than Flash. Why shouldn’t the Creative Suite have a gateway Flash drug?
5. Build out the underused and underdeveloped Slide authoring metaphor to allow for Gaia Framework like creation of simple node based Flash experience sites, complete with easy customization of transitions and loaders. Write the AS behind the scenes and no one will be the wiser.

Now granted, I like AS3. I do. It took a while to warm up to, but man, I won’t go back now. The thing is, writing import statements and forcing designers to know what classes are seems really anti-creative. I’d bet you agree. I want a way to bring the designers back into the fold. An equalizer. How about you?

Posted on July 17, 2008

11 comments

1. mh Jul 18

   I agree and said as much in my response to Moock, but why dont we have a design tool for developers. You know have a “wow factor” method, or a make snazzy property, or how about a “polish” utility class?

   Only joking but you see my point?

2. Chad Jul 18

   mh, absolutely see your point and love the humor.

   as long as were are adding things to this lets add a typography package with “sanitizeComicSans”, “removeWidows” and some things like that…

   Some others: makeGradientSubtle(), ensureGutters(), makeNegativeSpace()

3. Paul Houle Jul 21

   Flash doesn’t have a future if they don’t figure out a way people can develop real interactive apps in it, rather than an endless stream of media players and RSS readers.

   As for being a designer, the fact is that your skill set has to change. In my mind, the “design” of a web site is the design of (i) an ontology for a domain, and (ii) a set of interactions a user has with the site over time. A beautiful appearance is important — it certainly opens doors, but web design is not like designing for print or even creating animated shorts.

   Upgrade your skill set. As a programmer I’ve been learning the Adobe Creative Suite in order to be able to fulfill my goals: I can’t draw, but I’ve learned a bit about color and composition, and how to trace ;-). Designers need to learn to think rigorously about web sites, if not actually learn how to code.

4. Chad Jul 21

   Paul,

   I believe Flex is the tool for building real interactive apps. The toolset there is fantastic for a developer. Using MXML and AS3, you can build pretty rich applications. That really isn’t point of this.

   This post is concerned with the other end of the spectrum of the Flash platform, the designer. Flash has added some niceties in Flash 8 with the blendmodes, and it looks like Flash CS4 may get some more with the IK and pseudo Z-axis, but overall, the last few versions have focused on adding a new developer friendly scripting language and a more robust virtual machine.

   Largely the timeline designer, the animator and the motion graphics designer have been left out of the equation since Flash MX, with the advent of the RIA push and the newer V2 and V3 components.

   While designers do need to understand some code, the equivalent parallel with your delving into the design pool, to expect a designer to understand classes and packages, interfaces and concepts like public, private, and static amongst others is simply not realistic nor a positive use of their time IMHO.

   Multidisciplinary competence is of course expected, but a jack of all-trades and master of none is not someone I really want on my team.

5. ckeene Jul 21

   Adobe is a complex company with many different constituencies to satisfy. This limits what they can do to satisfy any particular group.

   At the same time, there are an increasing number of open source products that are targeting the non-expert developer. Examples of drag and drop visual ajax development tools include WaveMaker, Coghead and Aptana.

6. raulpopa Jul 22

   True all the way…
   Are you in the Flash CS4 beta already? I think your thoughts would be very much appreciated by them. If you’re not in the beta, let me know and I’ll drop some of your thoughts on their private forums.

7. thawootah Jul 22

   There is so many things wrong with CS3. you spend most of your time in reference manuals instead of developing or designing. i agree they should have made it less redundant for everyone.

   Plus CS3 lags big time. I find myself going back to flash 8 constantly. Oh and the tool panel disappears every time i test a movie and debugging is only used as a last resort.

8. Matt Jul 22

   I recall talking over drinks last year at MAX Chicago with some Flash reps about the desire within Adobe to produce just such an application. They were saying that Flash has become too dependent on a knowledge of complex programming concepts and that a creative who may not have any interest in code feels overwhelmed when first coming to the program.

   I don’t think Thermo is going to fully solve the problem, but it’s a step in the right direction.

9. raulpopa Jul 23

   I personally spoke with the product manager for Flash and the guy that is product manager for Thermo, at FlashBelt and FITC this year.

   Regarding Thermo, it might be successful since they might release it for free finally as a tool for designers to accommodate scripting or interactivity easily within their design… however after showing him our FlashEff component/platform for Flash CS3 and CS4, he concluded that it is targeting the same audience and the way we managed to handle buttons and animations for designers is exactly what they’re looking to find with Thermo.

   The Flash PM, gave me a pass for pre-release beta, to make FlashEff and other third party components work for Flash CS4 also gave me some statistical information as follows:
   about 1,5 million active Flash users. (even if there are over 2 million people that acquired the license, some in creative packs and they are not using it), about 1.2 mil. are using Flash CS3.
   about a “couple” of hundreds of thousands of Flex users, and growing “fast” as he said… but I can’t agree, due to exactly the same reasons stated in this article… very hard to use by designers or visual creative people..

   From my talking with them I appreciate that Flash is Adobe’s second most used product and in the future, neither Flex or Thermo will take it’s place. Also they started to advise the use of Fireworks again, in tandem with Flex… I think that they should focus on improving Flash, mostly the interface, how people interact with it, mostly beginners and non-coders…

   The most amazing stuff about CS4 is by far the z-axe control, zoom and rotate, everything else is a mess, this is why they still in beta and are not very sure how to say that they’re not ready. The platform itself is NOT more robust than CS3, and the IK that they are evangelizing so much, are done in a very rough way, still need to work on them..

   Regarding you question about Swish-like program… there are a lot of similar stand-alone apps, actually online applications that outputs flash (swf) content that are for beginners and so, however swish itself looks very unprofessional to a lot of users… have you seen FlashEff? (not that I want to advise, but it solves some of these usability problems) Most of these online apps for animations are using TxEff or FlashEff embeded, of course they use a distribute-rights version.

   Also, check FlyPaper.com to see how many things that previously could be done only in Flash can now easily be achived with a third party stand alone, and you can output both video or flash content.. very cool

10. Ed Jul 23

    Also have a look at http://www.effectgenerator.com/ - this helps you build simple flash effects very quickly, and the site itself is also in Flex.

11. raulpopa Jul 30

    i haven’t seen effect generator before, but it looks that someone spent a lot of time with it.. however, it is a totally different thing, but i understand your point.

    do you know why this application is so counter-intuitive?

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