Another Flash CS4 review

First off:

Thank you Adobe, for continuing to provide amazing tools which incite and inspire me to be creative. I am sure there are many reviews out there so this is just my opinion; and I have learned that they are subject to change with time. For e.g. now I really like the new icons that sent me and many others into frenzy a while back. I think I likened it to the change of Coke to Coke Classic, fixing something that wasn’t broken. That was absurd of me and I apologize. Frankly, I’m still wrapping my head around AS3 design patterns, Gumbo libraries and complicated (for me) valueObject data models, but I know I am well qualified to talk about the Flash UI having started with Flash 3. This review is geared toward looking at the product from an Animator perspective rather than Developer - since when I'm developing code I don't use the IDE often. I am using the CS4 Master Collection on a Dell Precision 490 dev station with two dual-quad Zeon chips (air conditioned), 8 gigs of ram, Windows XP Pro and a snazzy graphics card. This box is 64 bit capable and I can use up to 32 gigs of ram, however, I am using the 32 bit version of the Suite.

Pros:

THE STAGE:

Finally, I can opposite-click an object on the stage and find in the library! I say ‘opposite-click’ because I use a left-handed mouse and although ‘right-click’ covers 80% + of users, is an inaccurate term. I’m over it - don’t fret. I have wanted a ‘find in library’ feature for a long time, added to the ‘wish list’ so thanks! I still do animation and prototypes in the timeline quite often so I am not always using Flex Builder or Flash Develop for AS only projects. I’d say I’m 50/50. I have found this feature does not always work though if you have assets nested folders in the library. I had to try a few times, close and re open the library to get it working when I was showing someone the feature.

SPEED:

Publishing is noticeably faster even with large, bitmap heavy and code heavy swfs. Kudos!

SEND:

Send To feature. This is great! File > Send pops open your email client and attaches the current FLA even if you still have it open (this surprised me that you can leave it open and not get a Windows error).

ANIMATION:

Of course the new 3d, bones, inverse kinematics, motion editor are fantastic. It takes bit of getting used to after doing it differently for so long but I like it and know behind the scenes there is a lot of heavy lifting going on that I no longer need to do. Perfecto!

LIBRARY ASSETS:

You no longer get the alert “Are you sure you want to delete these items from the library” because it’s undo able instead of a revert. That is great. However, I would like more control of the tabs within the library. I don’t use “how many times an item is used” and want to customize the library fields to remove that one. And not sure if anyone else got this before.. but when I used to import bitmaps they would come in at 75% and I'd have to change them. Now they are always 100%. Nice.

SCRIPT TIMEOUT:

Although 15 seconds was pretty generous…if you’re making Flex components or large scale enterprise apps this feature can come in handy.

LIBRARY IMAGE PROPERTIES:

Deblocking for jpgs. Sounds good, however, it does not seem to work for me. I do not get the option to click it and not sure why. Any clues?

PANELS:

Overall they are more flexible and that's good. Only wish I had to option to use the property inspector of yore insted of the new one.

CONS:

APPEARANCE:

I’m sorry but I really at this point do not like the visual appearance of the UI and the flat gray colors. Why? Because I cannot discern what the heck is what easily. The panels and windows just blend into one another and it’s frustrating. I understand the objective is to unify the UIs across other programs in the Suite, but the flat shades of gray are really slowing me down. If you click an object on the stage to see where it lives in the timeline, good luck. The ever so slightly grayed out single frame requires much visual hunting and that is not good. I can find the layer quickly yes…but the single frame where that object lives..not so much. I would love to see the Flash UI be more like AE/Premiere where you can adjust the visual appearance and add/remove gradients and adjust the brightness. I would like to change window colors in a perfect world.

PROPERTY INSPECTOR:

This is a bit too big for me (as in either wide or tall with too much unused real estate). I felt CS3 nearly nailed it and now I think we’ve reverted. I do not want to use drop arrows to hunt where to add a filter, or to change the alpha… I was pretty shocked by this change that slows down production. Between this and the Motion Editor,you really more than ever need two monitors for Flash. Don't love the scrubbys but I'll grow to accept them for x,y,h,w in the Property Inspector. I notice it now jives with the Flex Builder horizontal style x,y,h,w fields. I'll make a few hundred mistakes by inadvertently changing the X and Height instead of X and Y, but I'll learn. Side note, would be nice to be able to force Flash to place images on whole numbers only so I don't have to change 10.2 to 10. I often move elements using these boxes or now scrubbys. I'll actually probably never use a scrubby to enter the exact coordinates I want - would be far too slow.

MOTION PRESETS:

Although there are some cool features for quick and dirty blurry and bouncy animations… some of them really are dirty especially when it comes to adding these to text fields. Make that text field dynamic, add a hyperlink and watch what happens: The text becomes blurry and the size changes. If you use these presets on animated hyperlinked text and look at the generated source..there is a hyperlink entry for every single frame bloating your export file sizes. I'm sure there's an excellent reason for this I just do not understand.

SAVE AS CS3:

Still as annoying as last few versions. I’ll learn to deal with it.

MAIN and CONTROLLER are now pretty much useless.

I guess rather than fix what was obviously a problem docking the Main toolbar (the one with Save, Open etc..) they decided to just make it non-dockable now. I used to stick the Controller and Main pallets in the uppermost part of the UI but often it would magically appear at the bottom (bug). I liked it atop because I would rather click once to Save than two clicks File>Save or to lift my hand off my (left handed) mouse and use ctrl-S. Just an ever so slight speed differences but they add up over time. Double-clicking the Menu or Controller chrome as it’s floating actually throws an error for me “An Invalid Argument was encountered”.

LAYERS:

I would like to not have to use Guy Watson's tool extension to duplicate a layer. Nothing against Mr. Watson, of course, just think that should be standard at this point.


DOUBLE CLICK BACKGROUND TO OPEN A FILE:

I thought for sure this would make its way into Flash. In Photoshop, you can double-click the gray background to browse to and open a file. I would really like this functionality in Flash since it’s a time saver.


COLOR PALLETE:

Not sure if this is by design.. but I imported about 20 images into my library and the color panel made swatches of them all. Is this a feature or a bug?


LASTLY:

Amazingly, Keith Peters' bit-101.inviso button tool extension STILL works after all these years! I've disabled it for fear it could be the cause of some of the funkiness I've seen but it's a handy little sucker for quick prototypes.

FINAL ANALYSIS:

I do love It and I’m sure I’ll get used to the Property inspector and maybe even like it more some day soon. Perhaps I’ll grow to love the bland flat appearance that I find it hard to navigate.
I do enjoy the interoperability with other CS4 Suite products: AE, InDesign, Premiere. Keep up the great work Adobe and thank you.


If anything I've said is my own user error - please feel free to correct me.