The failure that is AS3 - time to act

[gludion]

It's funny to see that high-level gurus "dare" criticizing as3.
Sometimes it's good to try thinking independently, far away from the managers litterature and official Adobe newsletters.

Right from the beginning, as3 Adobe team showed sign of autistic attitude: by simply ignoring the fundamental features of Flash (for example gotoAndStop(), see for example this bug, as mentionned by Kakihara).

It was a bad sign for the (rare?) people who are both designer and developper.

Note: regarding the gotoAndStop() bugs, I've been watching them for months on the infamous https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/, and none of them shows the slightest activity from Adobe. Bugs are possible in a software. However, the problem lies in the fact that:

• those bugs are related to core features of Flash paradigm (nested clips, gotoAndStop)
• those bugs have not been fixed in 4 years.

Another example is the "blank keyframe" (which practically equals to removeMovieClip()) : although Grant Skinner had posted in 2006 an insightful reflexion about the implication of garbage collector, Adobe could only add "patches" for dealing specific cases (addition of unloadAndStop(), which works only for loaded SWFs).

It seems that experienced as3 developpers have concluded that the timeline is essentially "dead". Some of you may think "But timeline is *error prone* !!"

I'm not speaking about "timeline programming", I'm speaking about simple use of it, putting clips , nested clips, blank keyframes, gotoAndStop(), play().
Typical design stuff, but controlled by or related to as3 scripting (in external Classes, if you prefer).

But as a programmer, I also want to extend MovieClip and put instance in a timeline "by hand" and not by programming because it's related to graphic design choices and as a result is better done in the timeline.
Unfortunately, gotoAndStop() bugs when it comes traversing MovieClip instances though the timeline.

Another funny example showing that devs testing of play() was.. approximate. The play() function stops the sub-clips for 1 frame! (it's usually unnoticed because of high framerates, but in video game a frame is important .

As it at been mentionned in this thread, graphic designers are not very noisy regarding as3 and those bugs don't get many votes.
Thus it seems probable that the get the least priority by Adobe: "only" 1500+ bugs will have to be fixed before !!

As a result, using the timeline in conjunction with as3 is very tricky, not reliable, subject to unexpected (bad) surprises, and I observed that the most "broad-minded" as3 developpers (those showing consideration and interest for graphic and animation stuff) have devised their own "best practices" (the most extreme being re-coding custom MovieClip classes) regarding the timeline but it results as a loss of creative freedom.

Being VERY noisy, or knowing personnally some Adobe devs, beta-testing future versions of the crappy CS4, struggling to test the basic stuff Adobe can't or doesn't want to test, overall: working for free for Adobe, apparently gives no result.
It only helps Adobe releasing an over-priced "product" (not to mention what I think about the IDE... I'm quite pessimistic about CS5.)

[Squize]

Very good post gludion.

It's always been obvious that as3 is flawed, although it can't help but bug me that a lot of people bitc'hing about it now ( Not necessarily just the blogs linked to ) were people who jumped on the bandwagon at 8.5 and who declared it was on par with the second coming, are now wanting to have their moans be heard 3/4 years down the line.

Maybe it's just my built in dislike of people being sheep like, that when someone who is a "name" says something a 100 people appear to say "Yeah I thought the same, I'm glad you said it I love you" that switches me off from this new found noise.

The next version of Flash will give us some things we want, skip lots of things that drive us insane and that will be it. F10 was like F7, a nothingy release, so hopefully with F11 we'll get something good again.

In a way I hope very little comes of this, as it concerns me that less than a dozen people could have so much sway about which problems with Flash get fixed first, no matter how valid the issues may be.

Squize.

[hatu]

Still it's hard to say what are the real biggest issues with your average dev, I for one have no idea what percentage of Flash developers do games for example. Apparently not very many because Adobe doesn't seem to pay any attention to that.
A lot of people act like their personal annoyances are THE biggest issue in the Flash platform.

If we can get a big discussion from everywhere on the spectrum from banner makers to hardcore game/ria devs, hopefully it'll create some good results.