Flash to the Future (Are you listening Adobe?)
Update: I should have waited to do this post (rather than do it at midnight). I could have just pointed to several other great posts that have some great opinions.
http://flashartofwar.com/2009/08/13/what-the-interface/
http://ncannasse.fr/blog/the_failure_of_as3
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The Flash developer community is up in arms (http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2009/08/06/this-is-an-outrage/). Although I don’t have any links, I am sure designers are too. Designers haven’t been too happy about AS3 after all. Lets face it, we all have dedicated a lot of our brain cycles to the Flash Platform. We have our reasons to love and hate Adobe. We all want the Flash Platform to become perfect. Are we asking too much?
If you look at posts like The Future of Flash (http://onflash.org/ted/2009/08/future-of-flash-platform.php) you get the feeling that as long as you are loud enough Adobe will listen. Lee Brimelow says (http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2009/08/06/this-is-an-outrage/#comment-174005) that there are too many wants and just not enough time. I for one believe them both.
The way I see it, the real problem is that there is no transparency around the future of the Flash Player and the Flash IDE. Maybe we have just become spoiled because we got info about Flash Catalyst long ago (Thermo at the time) and we get early beta’s of other tools. Heck, the Flex SDK is open source. You can pull down nightly builds of it. We are getting used to the idea that Adobe is open. Even Adobe wants people to believe they are open (http://www.openscreenproject.org/). So all this openness, but still very little information around Flash Player and Flash IDE comes out.
So, my first request is that Adobe think about being more transparent about the Flash IDE and Flash Player. If there really aren’t any changes coming, then say so. If you are going to try to implement a feature the community is asking for, let the community know. If it isn’t going to make the cut in the end, let us know. We can take it. Sure some people might get upset, but they already are right now because they don’t feel like Adobe is listening. While you are at it, why isn’t the Flash IDE’s bug tracker open to the public?