Just read an article over at AppleInsider detailing how “people privy to private demonstrations of Creative Suite 4” have judged it to be a minor update. OK, I don’t know much about what’s changing in the other apps, but did they even look at Flash CS4???
All they mention is the new motion editor. Err…. did they not notice bones, 3D, PixelBender, sound synthesis, new text engine, new drawing API???
All of these are MAJOR new features. Any one of them would be enough for someone to get excited about. All in one release… and this is being compared to “a maintenance release rather than a complete new version.” ??? What the hell do they want?
Yes, I know that some of these are player features rather than tool features, but they do go hand in hand. Flash 10 is Flash CS4.
Others feel that CS4 sucks for other reasons. I honestly don’t get it. I think it’s just more “cool” to slam something than it is to praise it. Especially if it’s made by a big company. You know, the whole, “if it’s popular, it’s not cool” mind set. Well, go ahead, be cool and whine about it. I’m going to have me some CS4 fun!
I agree with you Keith, CS4 has some major features that will make Flash even more powerful. I don’t really get the “Adobe sucks” mentality. I think they have done a lot for the Flash platform over the last year. The only thing I wish they would work on is the vector renderer. Everything else has come a long way, but we are still stuck with the same old messy renderer. As far as Apple goes, they seem to have it in for Flash. I guess they must be intimidated by it.
Wait a sec, Keith. You’re talking about features of the player/actionscript. Let’s not confuse the language or the runtime with the IDE. You can access the features you listed without using Flash CS4.
I did mention that Steven. From the world at large’s viewpoint – those that don’t download nightly builds of beta players and hack flex builder to get them to compile – Flash 10 player == Flash CS4.
Keith,
I’d much rather be singing praises than shining a light on the bad decisions Adobe has made (what you refer to as “slamming”). If Adobe bothered to fix the numerous IDE bugs and application bloat they introduced in Flash CS3, I’d be the first to blog about it, and I’m certain I would not be alone. Many people are unhappy about the bloated behemoth that CS3 was.
It isn’t about it being popular or cool. It’s about Adobe somehow not having the foresight and wisdom to hire usability experts to make sure the changes they are making in homogenizing their UI across their suite of applications are well thought out and steps forward in terms of usability. The size of Adobe is irrelevant. They’re basically making a mess creating new toys and not cleaning up after themselves, expecting that the new toys will be good enough for us to ignore the mess. Unfortunately, the excitement of new toys wears off, and we’re left with the mess – a slow, buggy application that is harder to use now than it was before. 🙁
I’m disappointed, not angry.
Maybe the person that reviewed CS4 only knows main design app like Photoshop or Illustrator as Flash only came on board from CS3…
And a lot of designers I know, they don’t really use Flash that much anyway~
I’ll be the first to diss Adobe… in fact, I have several dozen satires that hit fairly hard. But, yeah, CS4 is a huge improvement. And, even if CS3 didn’t suck so bad, CS4 would still shine. I can’t speak for the stability of CS4… but, in this case, it can’t be any worse that CS3.
So, yeah, I totally agree–anyone who says CS4 is a minor update has some crazy expectation for huge changes.
Information about the bones functionality is pretty thin on the ground. Is it implemented in ActionScript or is it built into the Flash Player? Is it backwards compatible with FP9? How much control do you have of the bones with code vs. on the timeline? Can you use it to do facial animation or just arms and legs?
Iain, I think you’ll have to wait until it’s released, or at least announced next week. There’s a lot of people talking about CS4 who really shouldn’t be saying half the stuff they are saying. Not because it’s negative, but because they signed a non-disclosure agreement saying they wouldn’t talk about it, and for that they got to see pre-release versions. Now they are saying CS4 is this, CS4 is that. This may be the last pre-release version they see. Anything I’ve said personally is only from what I’ve seen at conferences or on the web.
Steven, respectfully, perhaps it would be more useful to give specific examples of what you don’t like and how you think it could be improved so that we as a community can give Adobe some actionable items.
While I know you just want to see the best for the IDE and see it grow/improve your comment in the past thread just came off of as more as a rant.
-erik
I won´t speak for anyone else but me so: No, i don´t bash something “because its cool to bash something made a big company” and i find it kinda sad that any concerns against a product or the flash platform evolution in general is often just disregarded as “those moan because they think moaning is cool” or “they just don´t get it” or “they are just not good enough coders/dsigners to appreciate it”.
Yes, to most people features of flash 10 player will be “introduced” with CS4 ide, that doesn´t mean the ide is awesome because it allows to use features of the new player.
How old and new features are integrated is important.
Where are propper additional drawing tools, where´s a propper coding panel people ask for since flash 6 and many more things people ask for for many versions?
Yes, IK/bones stuff is cool but years behind the state of the art tech in other tools and in its current form basically just a basic port from After Effects.
3D is nice, though way limited and laughable when thinking what´s possible with other tools and what many in the flash userbase are asking for for many years.
(Propper full on gpu support, no half baked, hey,usable with a handful graphic card types with some wmode setting for some limited rendering support only while still requiring a shader 2.0 specs grade card;also speaking of the ide side implementation: where are the nice tools/gui features for working in 3d?)
New text engine sounds great, i´ll praise that once i see it handles basic html text and other text features nicely that are buggy since their first introduction.
New drawing api? Nice, but not of much use for many designers (I know, great for many coders).
PixelBender and sound synthesis? Not usable like that for around 85% of the flash user base, from the top of my head i know around 25-50 people who´d use those at all, most others will at most use the stuff the few geeks who use it create.
If Adobe wanted to make Pixelbender be used by the majority of flash designers/developers they´d have support for actionscript based filter creation, if they wanted it to make sense that it runs in own pseudo C syntax (other than hooray, a customized syntax you can use in several Adobe tools and only there), then all pixel bender stuff should be full on hardware accelerated, as it is it runs at laughable performance.
Also unless Adobe missed it: A big chunk of the flash userbase dislikes AS3 and workflow coming with that and changes in the player (like different setup Garbage Collector), where are changes to that?
Oh,yeah, an unload command that only works in few specific cases.
I like their references on the appleinsider article…
“[Quote],” one person said.
Brilliant. Who is this one person? And why should I care what they think.
“Brilliant. Who is this one person? And why should I care what they think.”
ickydime, you should care because they have an Apple and it’s shiny and they wear a black polo-neck, that’s why you should care, because they set the trends round here… 🙂
@keith
I’m a big admirer of yours and I certainly don’t want to rain on any parade you want to have for CS4. At the same time, as one of the most advanced Flash developers out there, you have little use for Flash CS4 as an IDE, and far more use for the features of the 10 player, which you’re already leveraging.
By posting this on you blog for the world at large, but not for yourself, it implies you want to spark discussion on the subject. Maybe you secretly are disappointed like many others, and you’re hoping that by posting something so positive, your audience will naturally swing the pendulum back the other way and you can stay safely above the fray, accomplishing your goal whilst staying clean as a whistle. Sun Tzu would be proud. 🙂
Considering how little Adobe apparently listens to the people on their beta, and how they’re just going to go in whatever direction they want anyway, I really don’t care about jeopardizing my chances to join the future ranks of the ignored.
Quite a few people who are on the CS4 beta have had one thing to say and that is that the new GUI is disappointing, unacceptably slow, and the bugs introduced in CS3 have not been fixed.
Maybe it’s Mac people who are giving all the positive reviews. I mean, the Mac version of Flash has been so terrible for so long (news flash: it still is), that any improvement, no matter how minor, seems like a gift from the gods.
Steven, yeah, I have no interest in starting a public debate, particularly over the quality of a product that’s not even released yet. But to correct a couple of points, 1. I’m hardly “one of the most advanced Flash developers out there”. I’m pretty good at making stuff look good at code I guess, and apparently pretty good at writing about it so other people understand it. But thanks for the compliment. 🙂 2. Don’t make any broad assumptions on what tools I use or don’t use. You might be surprised at the vast quantity of FLAs littering my desktop.
As for sparking discussion, sure. I’m not stopping any. Discuss away. I just posted the article though because I thought it was pretty funny though.
Ok, ok, some people are bashing pre-CS4 stuff. I just wanna say, here’s just my opinion, man:
Every new version of Flash is way better than the previous.
Every new version of Photoshop is way better than the previous.
Flash: I love the upgrade of AS3 from AS2.
Photoshop: Wonderful improvements to the user interface.
I like to complain about stuff I wish they had added/fixed in each new version, but overall it’s a good product.
tomsamson. Again, I’m not going to argue about something that’s not released yet. But I did want to address one issue. You mention that things like the new drawing api, pixel bender, and sound synthesis will only be used by a handful of users. This is true to a degree. But look at it this way: Adobe had a choice in some of these features: A. Make a high level api that is easy to use and integrate it tightly into the IDE so that anyone can do it, or B. Make a low level API that is pretty esoteric, but extremely powerful. Choice A. requires a LOT more work and more testing and usually winds up dumbing down the feature to its bare minimal functionality. Yeah, everyone could use it but would it be worth using? Option B. requires the community to pitch in and use the low level tools to build higher level tools. And if there’s one thing I’ve seen over the years, the Flash community loves to pitch in and make stuff for the community. You’re already seeing this happen with Pixel Bender before it’s even released: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/09/17/creating-re-distributable-actionscript-libraries-of-pixel-bender-filters/ I’m not saying that’s super high level, but you can see where it’s headed. I have no doubt you’ll eventually see SWF panels for Flash that will implement these more esoteric features.
Now it’s really easy to criticize Adobe here with a quick catch phrase like, they are making the community do the work that they should be doing. I wholeheartedly disagree. I applaud their choice in this matter. It may take longer for those tools to get out to the lower level users, but in the long run, it’s going to result in better tools.
OK, so at this point, I feel like some kind of brown nosing, butt kissing Adobe fan boy. A quick search of this blog will find plenty of criticism where I feel it’s due though. 🙂
that’s quite a list tomsamson! Many valid points–but some are just not applicable. For example, complaining that the Flash isn’t as powerful as after effects or other 3d and modeling tools. Well, the one huge difference is that Flash produces runtime effects while ALL those other apps are for rendered fixed animations.
Plus the point about pixel bender not being in AS… I suppose someone could write a wrapper to let you do some cool stuff–I’m not 100% sure how filters get loaded in a runtime–however, I think it’s important to understand how shaders work and the whole foundation of coding a filter is different than coding to the core AS language or the player DOM.
Like I say you have some points–but generally, I think it needs to be in perspective.
Plus, the thesis of kp’s post was that calling CS4 a minor upgrade is an understatement. You agree with that part right?
Finally, I don’t think anyone here really means to say that if you complain you’re just bashing for the fun of it. Nor, would I think it’s fair to think positive messages is brown nosing.
I cant help but think the comments on AppleInsider are nothign short of ignorant – take for example the below
“The reengineered file format means that the Flash community, still split between ActionScript 2 and 3, will now be split with new source file formats,”
Has this not ALWAYS been the case ? I’ve never been ableto open Flash 5 files in Flash for, nor for that matter been able to open Flash 8 FLA files in Flash 7.
Personaly this all smells like it could be Steve Balmer trying to level the playing field for silverlight – anyone care to check the source IP address of the original posting. $50 says it’s source direct from Redmond 🙂
for me
Flash 10 player != Flash CS4.
Flash IDE == Flash CS4
If the Flash CS4 was scrapped from the suite, we’d still get the new player functionality.
@ tomsamson
“where´s a propper coding panel people ask for since flash 6”
That just aint gonna happen. Adobe provide you with a great coding tool (FB), they aint gonna try and reproduce that in Flash, the same way they aint gonna reproduce Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects inside the Flash IDE either.
Use the write tool for the right job!
As long Flash CS4 doesn’t crash 3 or 4 times a day like CS3 i’ll be a happy bunny!
Crashing 3 or 4 times per day? I use Flash CS3 5-7 days of the week, and I think I’ve got just a couple of crashes since it went out… I just do programming tho.
The designers of my company make rather large and complex animations with Flash, and although they’ve got more crashes I don’t think they’ve got more than 10.
I knew I was going to catch flak for putting player features in there. But I stand by it. I know there is a difference between the player and the authoring environment. Give me a break. But if you are talking about the differences between Flash CS3 and Flash CS4, you need to include the fact that with Flash CS4 you can do all these new things that you couldn’t do in Flash CS3. A few years ago nobody would have questioned this. You’d talk about how great Flash MX was because it now had the drawing API that Flash 5 didn’t have. Or that Flash MX 2004 had AS2. The introduction of other authoring tools has separated the player from the authoring more. But I still think that if you are going to talk about what’s new in CS4 you have to include the new player features. Just because some other tool also offers you that functionality doesn’t mean you should ignore it in talking about CS4.
And for the record, I think I’ve said a million times to myself or those around me that Flash CS3 sucks or I hate Flash CS3. There’s a lot wrong with it. Anyway, I’ll have a lot more to say next week after CS4 is announced. 🙂
Also, I probably went overboard in saying that people just like to complain to be cool. Criticism is good. Helps keep Adobe on its toes. And there will always be stuff to criticize and make better. I’ve just looked at some of the criticisms I’ve seen in the past couple of days though, and they really made me scratch my head and wonder.
Looking forward to CS4, it’s just a step closer to full hardware support 🙂
“where´s a propper coding panel people ask for since flash 6″
That just aint gonna happen. Adobe provide you with a great coding tool (FB), they aint gonna try and reproduce that in Flash, the same way they aint gonna reproduce Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects inside the Flash IDE either.
LOL – so the message here is… If you don’t use Flex Builder, Eclipse or other coding platform you are a doof and have to live with the Mickey Mouse built-in editor and IT’S NUMEROUS BUGS… Many designers could give a flying you know what about Flex Builder – it simply doesn’t figure into the workflow. Just because Adobe produces other tools is no excuse to leave pieces undone in a tool that is supposed to get the job done.
I like the new functionality, but I tire of upgrading each release hoping that things that are known issues will be fixed (which SHOULD BE FIXED with a patch release).
to Keith:
Doing things in a lower level manner is a (at least) double edged sword:
Yea, one gets more control and more performance, but people used to higher level workflow are alienated.
People have to write their custom wrappers/libraries, which in ideal case only take some time to come up with, in worst case are
such a pain to get going that again it doesn´t bring any help for the mass of higher level workflow oriented people
(which is still the big majority of the flash platfrom content creator base).
Its like with the AS3/F9 player´s forced workflow: All coders i know who are used to this more java like workflow get used to it faster,
don´t miss that many things from previous flash/AS versions cause they didn´t work in a workflow where they used that stuff anyway and hey,
if they get annoyed by having to write 3 times more code for some stuff then they just make their own framework with wrapper classes
that let one do many things more close to how it was in older flash/AS versions.
Again, people used to the higher level workflow are not used to that and can´t just make themselves the coder usability framework.
And yeah, many of the more oop centric coders say: what, you disike AS3 or some of the workflow changes it and the new player brings?
But then the next week i read a post where they ask for how one can now easily do a preloader or load and unload swfs often or controil nested mcs
or many other things that were super quick and easy to do in older flash versions but cubersome to get ging at best in AS3/the way the player/GC works now.
There´s some nice new functionality, some more forced structuring but at the same time many things possible in older flash versions are not possible anymore or
are way more cumbersome work. Way more time taking overcomplification on many, many ends.
Regarding the additions in effect creation/IK etc: I´m glad that they are made, they mostly just feel shallow to me due to the general
paradigm that hey, if you want anything to perform halfway ok, you have to do it in AS3 and since we don´t have propper gpu support implemented
even then it runs way worse than anything you code in lua/AS1/JS syntax in quick prototyping mannner in many other technologies.
If i have to code like in Java or C# then i expect performance and possibilities like with those, if i get performance worse than what others deliver
when coding in JS syntax although i code in AS3 syntax which is way more time intensie to get going,then yeah, i´m disappointed at least.
to Tink:
Yeah, that´s where i see another major mistake in Adobe´s/Macromedia´s paradigm shift and continuation of that shift since the last few versions of tools:
Flash ide used to be the tool where one could combine coding and media creation/integration.
Flash IDE´s coding panel/functionalities were so lacking though that many wanted something better and some created some standalone tools
or eclipse plugins etc for that. Macromedia/Adobe instead of addressing the lacking sides propperly creates a seperate tool for coding.
Now i understand that some code centric people like to have an own ide, so i don´t say trash flex,
but yeah, doesn´t make sense to not develop the flash ide´s coding features on propperly anymore and yes, many will moan about that until its addressed.
Yes, some things are good coming with AS2/AS3 additions/workflow changes, like i often hear the example:
Have you ever had to open a fla only project made by a designer and search for all the code in there?
I agree, not nice. (Though one CAN have a good project setup even when just working with a fla and some.as files also again the lack of propper code search functionalities could be blamed,too)
But its also not nice to have to open the project someone else started,then have to get the project set up in the coding tool that person used, maybe install some more tools for debugging or whatever,
then have several flas still next to that for the media side of the project and at the end of the day i end up with needing 5 tools with 4 plugins to work on the project.
In some cases (mostly code centric/only projects) i like to work in a coding tool only, in others, actually many flash projects since they are usually media heavy i dislike it to have to use
flash ide and a seperate coding tool,debugging thingy etc etc.
Anyway, let´s just wait and see till CS4 is out and most people used it for a week or two,not just the handful testers.
The biggest issue as I see it is that they keep slapping on new features without regard for bloat. Macromedia didn’t seem to have that problem. Flash 8 was faster and better than MX2004.
These new features in CS4 account for less than 10% of what you spend your time doing on a daily basis. The whole application slows down to introduce new features you may never use. This is a seriously bad trade-off.
If Adobe released a new version of Flash that had no new features and instead made it run extremely fast and efficiently, and fixed a majority of the outstanding bugs, do they think nobody would buy it? I would be first in line. I would be singing praises from mountaintops. Make Flash do everything it already does much faster. That would be something worth buying. Fast, efficient software.
I know designers who refused to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 because it ran so much slower than CS2, and they looked at the new features and said “These aren’t worth slowing down my workflow”. That’s how I look at Flash CS3 and CS4. If the IDE isn’t helping me, it’s getting in my way.
I mean, I had to buy a top of the line GAMING computer to be able to run Flash CS3 and get reasonable performance. Kind of ridiculous.
As far as the crashing goes, that’s mostly a Mac issue, but the Mac version of Flash is really terrible anyway. For Mac, CS3 was apparently a huge step forward from Flash 8, but it’s still a piece of junk. It crashes, is extremely buggy, the Flash Help is basically broken, it’s slow, etc. I don’t expect this to change, though. Adobe knows where its bread is buttered (Windows users far outnumber Mac).
Steven, I do see where you are coming from on some of that. First of all, saying that Flash 8 was better than MX 2004 isn’t saying much at all. 🙂 MX 2004 was pretty bad. And I could give you a list of things about CS3 that make me want to punch my screen. But I don’t think the answer is to not add new features. People always say that kind of stuff: “don’t add new features, just fix the stuff that’s there” about all kinds of software. But no software company is going to do that for a whole release. Well, some might, but it’s hard to market “it sucks less than the last version!” And adding new features is not the same as bloat in my book.
So again, I’ll have more to say next week. Good and bad, I’m sure.
Flash CS4 is broken in an incredible way, the program looks sweet and the new features are alright but Adobe has raped us this program is far from being a release worthy application. I have yet to open up a CS3 file in CS4 and get decent speeds; it lags in such a terrible way that editing a movie clip takes at least 30 to 45 seconds on decent files. On semi sized web applications editing text is next to impossible so implementing it in a professional work flow is completely out of the question. If you start a fresh cs4 file it runs ok till you add the sufficient amount of items to be able to call your project anything close to a rich media application or a web application then it breaks down and the slowdowns are immense.
The application is unstable and unusable even with more than twice the suggested system requirements. My firm has tried it in both the PC and MAC environments and in neither does it run worth a crap in semi complex projects or multi element animations. To open a CS3 file sometimes the wait time is close to 3 minutes. This is not acceptable this is not what we as a supporting community of professionals pay for.
My friends this is not my personal opinion but the actual proven facts.
Some of the online forums in the Flash community have ran into the same problems including an individual who is known for his professional flash animations that have been featured all trough out the world and has won an array of prized competitions.
here are two examples
http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=780172
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=311761
We lost a 3 days of valuable time installing testing and uninstalling a piece of software that is hardly even ready for beta testing 3 days we will not get back Thanks A Million Adobe!
And this is coming from an Adobe fanatic and supporter.
You people are lucky you aren’t using Adobe Director 11 — what a piece of buggy junk. At least Adobe puts resources into Flash.
I’m very disappointed with CS4. We currently run CS2 in a workflow environment and we were considering upgrading to CS4 as we were under the impression that CS4 was a matured version of CS3. How wrong we were.
I think it is now more feasible for our upgrade path to go to CS3 while we can still get it or stick with CS2.
CS4 is worthless to me. I’ve spent more time trying to fix things or get around quirky new IDE “enhancements” than I have been able to actually create paycheck-producing content. Been back on CS3 since the day I bought CS4. LAN performance is horrible, bugs, crashes galore, the list goes on. Even the simple act of enabling and disabling Filter effects is a joke, you have to select the effect then go down to the bottom of the panel and either show or hide the effect, wtf is this? Should we even talk about the online reference guide replacing the offline version? Production efficiency would go thru the floor if I was forced to use CS4. Boo Adobe! WAAH!
Flash has always been a great tool and I love it. The downside of Flash CS4 is that it crashes multiple times daily. Again: multiple times daily. An absolutely unacceptable fact! That gives enough reasons for the negative criticizers to act.
A debate of features is useless, for whoever is willing to pay more for any greater or smaller number of new features, has the right to do so and be happy with it. Otherwise don’t buy and don’t complain.
BUT – a STABLE piece of software should be mandatory from such company as Adobe. Otherwise make it BETA!
So in that point of view, the release of Flash CS4 is Ridiculous!
All this bickering, but I just have the simple problem of not being able to open my CS3 fla in CS4! I never heard of an upgrade which is not backward compatible.
I’ve been using Flash for 5 years now. We’ve been using Flash CS4 for a couple months now… God. What a piece of shit!
Performance isn’t nearly as much of a problem as making the damn UI work properly! The thing is utterly useless.
I am fully aware of all the new features… but give me a UI that can streamline my workflow. Can’t wait to see what Adobe does to CS5. Or should I say CS$
I have to say that this article doesn’t begin to address the real fundamental issue with Adobe’s upgrades. It isn’t all about new features. It’s about software doing what it does best better. If that results in new tools then great. But in the case of Flash CS4, it’s hard to appreciate anything new when everything that used to work doesn’t. I have just upgraded to the CS4 and my experience has been terrible. I have been developing Flash content since Macromedia Flash 5.
This current release has crashed on me 5 times in a matter of a few minutes for completely random and unrelated issues. It has already wasted hours of my time remaking content and trying to figure out what is crashing it. The new organization and UI is far from intuitive and efficient. Not to mention what others have already mentioned like replacing the help system with probably the most laughable form of online help support for a desktop application. I’d rather buy a third-party printed reference book than deal with the irrelevant search results and slow online performance.
Adobe needs to focus on refinement and stability foremost so that we can appreciate all the icing (new features) on an already “rich”(refined and stable) cake(Flash).
Hint: Adobe should consider releasing beta software for people to test and criticize before releasing absolute garbage and charging people before they realize how ripped off they were.
My team hates CS4 as a whole. And my programmers hate AS3, It takes twice as many lines of code to do anything. Flash became popular because it was and special combination of animation and EASY scripting that allowed for a very creative development process. It is becoming a wreck of a tool and a wreck of a development environment, and old bugs that have been there since Flash 6 are still showing up. We only use it because there is not a better alternative at the time. But we hate it.
I made a huge mistake upgrading from pshop CS3 to production premium CS4. I think that Adobe has engendered such deep hatred across the board in the mac community that we should all organize and laugh in the face of their next release, or demand that the upgrade be free. Premiere is such a disaster I’m using imovie, which does many things Premiere doesnt. I want bulk export so I have to get FCP instead of FCE, but at least then my video editing flow will be settled, since Encore crashes everytime I try to encode dvds. I will never open that program again.
Pshop lost its web gallery function to BRidge, which is a bridge to nowhere and fails incessantly. After Effects is still a respectable piece of software, but has been passed by on the pro level by Nuke and even the newest version of Motion, since Adobe is sitting on its hands, offering nothing extra. AE is crashing as well which I never saw in CS3. Reading these problems with Flash horrifies me that it, too, is a disaster. Adobe needs to fire its CEO and anyone involved in the mac version, or just give up on making software for the Mac. I think we all should file a class action suit and demand our money back. Software is supposed to work, and anyone who says CS4 works on the mac is a shill for the company.