Comments on: The Missing Wrench: Adobe’s Easy Flash Editor

By: FLIR B50

FLIR B50 — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 19:53:32 +0000

Great effect generator, thanks. I love the wrench in the picture also. My dad uses 72″ aluminum pipe wrenches on off shore oil well rigs, even being aluminum the thing is dang heavy!

By: Neticule

Neticule — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:35:03 +0000

Hey that effect generator is pretty neat!

By: raulpopa

raulpopa — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:16:24 +0000

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?

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:20:33 +0000

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.

By: raulpopa

raulpopa — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:37:25 +0000

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

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:44:44 +0000

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.

By: thawootah

thawootah — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:35:57 +0000

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.

By: raulpopa

raulpopa — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:13:31 +0000

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.

By: ckeene

ckeene — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:27:09 +0000

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.

By: Chad

Chad — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:27:49 +0000

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.