Just to give equal air time to my apparently scandalous post proclaiming how much I liked Flash CS4, let me say that it is not perfect and there are some things that bug me about it. Still, overall, an awesome release, but just to prove I’m not an Adobe robot, here we go. Note, these have to do with the OS X version. Not sure about Windows.
It takes a while to start up. The splash screen comes up and stays on top of everything while it launches, rendering your computer relatively useless while you wait for it to finish. No way to click on it or otherwise make it go away.
I love the new single window UI, but something odd happens all too often. Maximize the window, create a new FLA, then Cmd-S to save. A save dialog pops up from the bottom of the screen. Escape to close that window. The whole UI slides down about 1/4 way down the screen and you have to re-maximize it. Grrr.
I mentioned this before, but the live stage preview thing really irks me. Essentially, there’s a Flash player running in the stage full time. Just create a new FLA and your CPU jumps up to an unacceptable level for a program that is sitting there doing absolutely nothing. Up to 12% for me. CS3 in the same situation is under 1% CPU use.
Window management needs a bit of work. It’s not bad, but I have one workspace set up with just about everything closed but the Actions, Output, and Compile Errors panels, with the Actions panel taking up about half the screen. That’s my “Code Monkey” workspace. And another workspace with tools and components and align/info/transform/color, etc. etc. showing. When I switch back and forth, about half the time the Actions panel in the Code Monkey workspace has minimized or is at least much smaller than I set it. Can’t get it to stick the way I want it.
Library Panel. Various weirdnesses. If I close the library and reopen it, I often get something like 4 extra library panels opening up. WTF? Also, I feel that in the library list, the selected library item is not highlighted nearly obviously enough. It’s really subtle. A slight shade of gray different from the unselected items.
Focus issues. I really often run into a case where I switch to another program such as Mail or Adium to check something, then click on Flash to go back to it. But Flash doesn’t always get focus when you do this. I’ll start typing something, thinking I’m typing into Flash, and instead I’m sorting my mail, or typing into an Adium window, or doing something random in some other application. Repeated clicks in the Flash UI absolutely refuse to give it focus. Only by Cmd-Tabbing to Flash does it get focus.
I suppose I should officially log these as bugs with Adobe, but I’ve been utterly unsuccessful in logging into the public bug base. Never sends me a confirmation email, then says I’ve already got an account, but my password is wrong, ask for new password, it never arrives. It’s a long sad story. Hopefully someone at Adobe is listening and can either fix my bugbase account or log these things as bugs for me.
But again, overall, I love CS4. With these things fixed, I would love it even more.