The Missing Wrench: Adobe’s Easy Flash Editor

Chad Udell
Posted on July 22, 2008 Category: Discover

The Missing Wrench: Adobe’s Easy Flash Editor

This seems like a recurring topic for me. The lament of the modern Flash Designer/Developer. The quandary is a deep one with no easy answer. Has Adobe’s near completion of Macromedia’s vision for Flash as a modern, powerful virtual machine robust enough for application development left the designer in the dust? Where is the missing wrench in the Flash designer’s toolbox?

To find some answers, obviously search this blog. But also, topics like this pop up in Grant Skinner’s blog here as tangential topics and mentions in the comments, and serve as the root subject of some of Colin Moock’s recent posts here and here. This is obviously a concern of Adobe’s, likely forming the base concept of Bordeaux (which I believe is defunct) and definitely influencing the progress on Thermo.

To get some context on this issue, let’s reflect. When Flash was taken over by Macromedia, it was meant to provide an easy path to the web for artists and animators that didn’t feel at home in Director’s somewhat fearsome IDE, myself being one of them. Why was this needed? Well, Lingo was hard for many! It was a real programming language. Compared with Hypercard or the Apple Media Tool, it was like rocketscience. Even with the addition of behaviors, I wasn’t really comfortable there at my state of programming skills then. It was not like Photoshop or Illustrator or After Effects, it didn’t feel creative. Then Flash hit the scene and the much lighter plugin provided a better way to get your content seen. Sure, it had little support for external media, lacking extras and the oomph that Director provided with heavy duy bitmap sprites and the like, but it sure made pretty things easy to make. Creativity on the web blossomed.

What really made me think about this today was the current state of our candidate search for developers. You see, I have spoken to a couple developers that write Java as their primary language, and I mention that we do most all of our stuff in the Flash platform and they tell me that AS3.0 looks pretty familiar to them. You read that, Java developers say they could feel at home writing Flash content. Wow. Please remember that Flash is a tool in the Creative Suite. The Creative Suite.

I’d like to see somethings happen to remedy this situation, and it needn’t be all of them. Some things I’d like re-examined to help ease designers into Flash:

  1. The addition of drag and droppable behaviors to Flash. Links, GoToFrames, Load Media, Load XML, Load Video, Video Controls, etc. These could live in a panel, be icon driven and do an automatic import of the needed classes and even write the appropriate frame scripts. Easy peasy. I could see this being a huge selling point as a new feature for Flash’s IDE.
  2. The possible re-forking of Flash into Professional and Standard versions. Give the Standard version the standard mode code editor of yore (Was that Flash5 or Flash MX?). Get rid of a bunch of the more advanced and UI components. Add GetURL back in! Heck maybe even a *gasp* Flash 4 style modal dialog box to give designers an easy way to write AS3 code. Creative Suite Web Edition could have Flash, Creative Suite Web Premium Edition could have Flash Pro.
  3. Creation of a more animation pure-play application. Add solid vector AfterEffects output options maybe? What are cartoon artists supposed to use in the Adobe toolset? Flash CS3 is like a battleship when all you need is a dinghy (and due to lack of proper cameras etc, like a dinghy with one oar shorter than the other) in this arena. Remember LiveMotion?
  4. How about a Swish-like program? I used to use Swish back in the day to help with text effects, etc. It had fairly decent animation controls then. I haven’t kept up with the tool at all, but I am sure that creating a basic Flash experience is probably easier in Swish than Flash. Why shouldn’t the Creative Suite have a gateway Flash drug?
  5. Build out the underused and underdeveloped Slide authoring metaphor to allow for Gaia Framework like creation of simple node based Flash experience sites, complete with easy customization of transitions and loaders. Write the AS behind the scenes and no one will be the wiser.

Now granted, I like AS3. I do. It took a while to warm up to, but man, I won’t go back now. The thing is, writing import statements and forcing designers to know what classes are seems really anti-creative. I’d bet you agree. I want a way to bring the designers back into the fold. An equalizer. How about you?

Comments are closed.