Pet Flash Bug #1: No arrow key movement of individual points in grouped objects, sometimes!

One of my biggest gripes with the Flash Professional Sub-selection (the white arrow) tool, is that when selecting points within an grouped object, your arrow keys will lose focus, making it impossible to move these points precisely. What makes it even more frustrating is this only happens sometimes. Most of the times when you have spent a long time selecting points, and almost never when trying to demonstrate the problem to other Flash designers who said they have never experienced it. I'm only griping about this because everyone else seems to just ignore and accept it... this bug has been in at least 2 generations of Flash Professional... I will hunt for a bug report on this... so I can let this pet bug go, or at least find a name for it!

A case for the "timeliners"

Over the past couple of years, coding in Flash has grown with leaps and bounds, though this is great, it has created a certain gap between coders, and some of the more "hands-on" creatives, called "timeliners", those who still embed their objects manually on a stage, and use crazy things like tweens and keyframes. These days, if you want to do anything serious on the Flash "Platform" you are not going to be able to get very far without getting text-based and probably AS3'd for at least a little while. That is already a turn-off for many of the creatively-orientated people I know.

This doesn't change the fact that some of the most talented Flash creatives I know are timeliners and the way they think, create, innovate is visual/timeline based. Timeliners are a vital and necessary part of the Flash eco-system - it allows people to output their creativity in a way that is much easier for them, where they can physically see what is moving, in stead of having to imagine it and then start coding. Also in terms of fast prototyping, hands-on technologies are great in terms of getting people from different skill-sets involved. I am not going to force them to learn AS3 to express themselves, out of knowing how they normally create and respect for the distinct way of expressing themselves. If coders apparently will "quit their jobs if they have to convert timeline to code" it means that coders are taking some kind of technical highground here, and at the end of the day there's really no right or wrong - though this most Flash threads in forums clearly favours "smarter" coders.

A possible solution is in abstraction layers between coders and timeliners/designers (making it easier/automatic for timeliners to generate basic AS3 code). Some are already out there with their aim to bring the fun back into visual development with Flash - you can't force people to think a certain way to use Flash, that is one of it's great strengths - that creatives and programmers can work together - if you don't see the value in that, then you are missing one of the most interesting things about Flash.

There is no doubt that in a perfect Flash world we would all speak perfect AS4, but this is not the world we live in and Flash coders seem to be woefully out of touch with the diversity and richness of creative intelligence out there - expecting people to adapt to them, because they went through the pain of having to think like a code compiler - this is a completely natural tendency once there is a high barrier to entry to a certain grouping of people.

This barrier to entry can be quite intimidating to people wanting to approach the platform the first time - I think in terms of AS3, there will be some more simple IDE's out there to fill the gap if Adobe and Flash community continues to widen it. Awesome FlashDevelop and FDT have already lured many coders away from the Adobe Flash IDE, further increasing the gap - if Adobe is serious about bringing coders and timeliners together, they should think about making the their own IDE more attractive to coders too (or are the all supposed to use Flash Builder?). Projects like the "Hype" framework are some of the first examples of this happening from inside the community from the creative side. Adobe should support all these technologies and try to integrate into the standard developer experience when working with Flash the first time.

Things to install for Windows 7 Flash Lite Development

I seem to be setting up a few environments for Flash Lite development on Windows 7, especially on Macbook Pro 2010 i5/i7's with all the virtualization/boot-camping going on!

Some realities - the packaged Apple Nvidia drivers for Windows causes some Windows 7's running Aero to crash under strain - there is a fix with one of the links below. If you want to run something like Carbide.ui (for Nokia theme development) - it's VERY slow running something like parallels, and buggy it seems - you cannot avoid having a pure XP/Windows 7 environment for hassle free Nokia-orientated development. This might change in the future, but I don't think we are there yet. Paragon Software released something called HFS+ for Windows (Win7 64-bit supported), I have only been using it for a couple of weeks, so I'm not going to add in until I am sure it's cool. I have a feeling that it's not a good idea to keep files you will be accessing a lot from Windows on your HFS volume, things like forks are not currently supported.

These are the things that need to be installed on my Windows 7 (64-bit version in this case) machine before I can really start working (this is very much for my own reference, for future cases):

Flash Lite Specific:

• Adobe CS Suite containing at least Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge & Device Central
• Flash Extensions: Organize Library, Add Stop Frames, Name Objects
• AS2 Libraries: Tweenlite+Plugins, QueueLoader or PreLoadAssetManager
  
• Nokia Flash Lite API Bridge & Actionscript API Library
• Flashdevelop (Associate with .as files & I made this AS2 template )
  
• SecureSWF (Encrypt your SWF content)
  
• Symbian Carbide.UI (Nokia theme creation)
  

Other Apps & Utilities:

• Firefox / Chrome / Safari
  
• Thunderbird
  
• Thunderbird Add-ons: Stationary & Lightning Calendar
  
• Pidgin (IM from one app)
• Skype (Phone conferences)
  
• LibreOffice (Cross-platform & Free Office Suite)
• Notepad++ (Open source text-editor, powerful!)

• Dropbox (great for transferring files while you are setting up too)
• Evernote (sync your notes across your mobile and pc devices)
• FileZilla (SFTP support added)
• TortoiseSVN (64-bit supported)
• Explorer++ (If you want a more powerful Windows Explorer)
• 7Zip (Open-source cross-platform compression/decompression 64-bit available)
  
• uTorrent (Lightweight torrent client, get Vuze if you want to go crazy)
• Growl (Very popular on Mac, finally coming to Windows!)

Audio/Visual:

• Inkscape (My favourite Open-source SVG editor)
• Audacity (Open-source WAV editor)
  
• Quicktime Pro (Basic editing, conversion to MOV if required)
  
• Shark Coded Pack (Let's you play and preview in explorer)
• MacbookPro Aero Fix (Fix crashing Macbook Pro i5/i7 Nvidia driver issues)
  

• Winamp Lite (Lightweight MP3 player)
  
• Gnaural (Binaural beats below your music)
  
• Last.fm (Subscription service is awesome and cheap)

I am sure there are some better alternatives for some... I will update for my own reference when I find it.

Flash vs Apple - for us that actually develop Flash

I have seen fellow Flash developers go through highs and lows trying to imagine what kind of future there is for them, not just with the current dispute between Adobe/Flash and Apple, but in general over the past 5 years as mobile has become more dominant. Here are my thoughts, and when the next spat comes out, I suspect this might still be relevant:

I'm overjoyed about all the drama going on between Adobe and Apple - it's never wise to start a publicity war against the masters of PR (Apple). The most obvious thing is that Flash is getting much more attention since Youtube got them back in the game through video - and this has put some serious pressure on Adobe to sort out nagging issues they have been trying to ignore for the past few years.

As you might notice, I am not worried, we are the guys that have been working with "flash lite" one of the many flash-related technologies that Adobe/Nokia have actively/accidentally botched up the past 4 years. In certain aspects things are better now (with Apple playing a very large role in this) - but it just taught us the lesson, if you are working at the bleeding edge (which everyone seems to be doing these days), things are going to be shaky/uncertain, ALWAYS - that is part of the fun of it all - the fact at the end of the day you can only trust your own gut and there are really very few that can tell you what and how you should be doing it.

For us Flash has never been about trying to reach iPhone consumers. For us it has always been an extremely open programming AND creative fast-prototyping tool, that both programmers and creatives could work on together. I don't see that changing anytime soon, even if developers are all C crazy, you still have to get creatives to surrender their tools (which is not easy if you think that some top designers STILL secretly use Freehand) - the point is, you just don't change programmer's and creative's workflow overnight - it might even just wreck it. As long as a tool allows you to develop/prototype your ideas quickly and get actual people to use it, that's enough for me (at this stage).

I think one of the biggest fears is, especially with those who used to be comfortable doing Flash for the web, is that all of a sudden have to think "backwards" in terms of processing power and size, it's scary when things are changing, but Adobe/Apple got us all into the mobile space somehow, and if not prepared for the turbulence, maybe better to paddle out to calmer niches?

I think our saving grace has been that we have always been aware how capricous technology and hardware providers are, and that their sheer size and corporate responsibilities can make them do really stupid things... to expect otherwise is just being out of touch with reality, and will make you feel very angry/depressed. We have been there, our best advice is to get over it and see how you can make the best of it - all your competitors have to do the same, there are very few silver bullets out there!