Adobe MAX - More goodies...

[Ray Beez]

Watch this "Secret" video almost 2 hrs long showing all sorts of Flash CS5 goodies:

http://max.adobe.com/online/session/381


I've only watched 36 minutes so far, and already I see they have revamped text, they have addressed our complaints about poor AS IDE, by enabling using both Flash IDE and Flash builder and jumping back n forth between the two.

Addressed our complaints about newbies being left out in the cold by introducing drag n drop Code Snippets including "move with keyboard". That's right, he has a rudimentary game as an example of this! As well as improved code completion.

Also, calculated phsyics IK bone tweening (timeline) with Spring and Dampening (and hinting there is more to come).

Procedural brushes, including just drawing trees or particle systems (saw that in the menu, he didnt demo it--i doubt its animated)

...

[mr_malee]

how about a nice, stable and fast ide. That's all i want from CS5.

[Ray Beez]

stable? Yours crashes?

Anyways.....

I just found out Adobe is going to have a "Try/Buy" service for AIR, called Shibuya: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/shibuya/

Hello Casual Games business! (Kinda late for that market, but whatever. LOL)

[mr_malee]

every single day CS4 crashes for me. And there are so many weird bugs. Sometimes movieclips don't scale correctly after altering their size through the scale properties box. Ever since Adobe introduced live update to properties the renderer doesn't update the graphics visual size properly. The mouse can recognize the entire shape but the visual is wrong. So I'm left there clicking in empty space to open a movieclip which is very annoying.

Library is also very sluggish, scale values are always messed up (99.9888%). Can't rename anything without having to go into object properties. Takes 5-10 seconds to get a preview of a complex symbol in the library. Can't change the render preview option to anything other than "anti-alias-text", shapes will not snap correctly to other shapes if snap to pixels is on, this leads to motion paths functioning incorrectly. + lots of other performance quirks.

So yeah, fix the program before adding more features.

[bastrix]

ok ... might be a stupid question but, will CS5 already support AS4? or has this not been anounced yet?

[ImprisonedPride]

every single day CS4 crashes for me. And there are so many weird bugs. Sometimes movieclips don't scale correctly after altering their size through the scale properties box. Ever since Adobe introduced live update to properties the renderer doesn't update the graphics visual size properly. The mouse can recognize the entire shape but the visual is wrong. So I'm left there clicking in empty space to open a movieclip which is very annoying.

Library is also very sluggish, scale values are always messed up (99.9888%). Can't rename anything without having to go into object properties. Takes 5-10 seconds to get a preview of a complex symbol in the library. Can't change the render preview option to anything other than "anti-alias-text", shapes will not snap correctly to other shapes if snap to pixels is on, this leads to motion paths functioning incorrectly. + lots of other performance quirks.

So yeah, fix the program before adding more features.

Way to take a good thing and sh*t all over it.

[tonypa]

ok ... might be a stupid question but, will CS5 already support AS4? or has this not been anounced yet?

CS5 will support AS3. Nothing about AS4 has been announced so dont expect it for years. Adobe is still having trouble getting people to jump from AS1 to AS3 so they probably wont bother creating another version of language.

[bastrix]

CS5 will support AS3. Nothing about AS4 has been announced so dont expect it for years. Adobe is still having trouble getting people to jump from AS1 to AS3 so they probably wont bother creating another version of language.

Oh well, the good side is, if someone learns AS3 now, they don't have to worry about upgrading for years... And appareently they will be able to build iPhone applications with this knowledge, sweet....

[hatu]

Oh well, the good side is, if someone learns AS3 now, they don't have to worry about upgrading for years... And appareently they will be able to build iPhone applications with this knowledge, sweet....

I don't think there's gonna be a huge jump like AS2 to AS3 in a long time. It works pretty much like most modern languages now. AS4 will probably just make everything a bit nicer. So when you learn AS3 well, you can easily jump to C# or Java or whatever with just changing the syntax a bit.

[programicks]

Addressed our complaints about newbies being left out in the cold by introducing drag n drop Code Snippets including "move with keyboard"

Good. Yes I agree that the very basics should be done this way. Newbies should at least be able to do basics like collision, moving, buttons. This makes up for AS3 being too complicated for basic things.
Of course, I am assuming there will be a code snipped for mc clicks, rollover as I have not seen the video

[dandylion13]

Hey guys, a couple of obvservations:

- Flash CS5, Flash Builder and Catalyst should really all be one product.

- As demo'd the iPhone trick is unusable:

http://ragona.com/blog/flash-iphone-real-story/

Unless Adobe can fix these problems, it seems to be nothing more than a gimmick.

- AS4.0 looks to be a long, long way off. I remember a few years ago that "December 2009" was thrown out as a release date, but this is obviously not happening. The problem is the adoption rate of AS3.0 is so slow that nobody, especially us developers want to see another radical redesign of the language. From the rumour mill: when AS4.0 comes, it's going to be more of an AS3.1, so the learning curve is not going to be as dramtic as the differences between 1, 2 and 3. That's good news for us.

[Ray Beez]

Gimmick? It's version 1. They will improve performance and new iPhones will have faster processors. This is just like when Flash 4 came out, we were lucky to get simple puzzle games running at 20 fps tops.

[tomsamson]

Hm, i agree with dandylion in this case.
Many, many years have passed since flash 4, meanwhile there are portable devices like the iPhone where even the oldest gen has a gpu that allows to do more involved 2d and 3d stuff than flash player running on a highend desktop machine.
It wouldn´t be a good idea for Adobe to try to argue away bad performance with limitations of the hardware when daily tv commercials show what kind of 3d stuff can run on these devices when the right technology/ language is used to create the content.

Also the app store has an audience that gets lots of apps for free or a very low price and they have an instant review and feedback system on the sales page for an app.
So if an app runs at bad performance it instantly gets lots of negative reviews which has considerable impacts for the developer.

So, yes, either Adobe delivers something that performs well compared to similar content made with other technologies/languages or indeed their offering will be seeen as bad gimmick that only leads to more bad content cluttering up the App Store by everyone other than those who don´t care about how their apps are received.

[Ray Beez]

The same points you raised Tom could just as well have been made against Flash over the years, because we already had "Shockwave" 10 years ago delivering WAY greater performance for 2D and 3D games in a browser than Flash even does now.

My point was that we need to be patient and this "channel" will be come more viable over time, just like how Flash evolved. It's not "mature" enough yet, but to call it a gimmick is being very short-sighted.

[tomsamson]

I disagree again man (sorry =) ).
First: I don´t think the shockwave comparison is a fitting one at all. The main reasons why flash suceeded where director failed are(in my eyes) :
-The director tech had too high hardware requirements for abrowser plugin for its time. Back then a way bigger chunk of the web surfing audience had no 3d card and a way slower internet connection, both not ideal for delivering bigger 3d games that require a 3d card.
-flash allowed to code in AS1 javascript like syntax and combine animation and code in more designer/non coder friendly manner
-flash has been constantly developed further whereas director has seen its last good release with version mx2004 ages ago.


But then, how does all that that helped flash become bigger compared to director look today?
-Plugin penetration rates are irrevelant on the iPhone, so no plus for flash over using any other tech
-Even portable devices like the iPhone have a nice 3d chip in them and while in other technologies one can make full use of it for creating well performing 2d and 3d apps flash still uses only the cpu for most graphical operations making it a huge cpu hog and perform quite badly on machines without a high end cpu.
-When doing iPhone apps with flash only using AS3 is supported and even when using that Adobe presentations at the MAX conference suggested not using event handlers and marking classes as final and similar things to get it to perform "well".
And while flash was developed further it is several years late to the smartphone/ iPhone party and while other technologies allow to make direct or indirect use of the full iPhone sdk the flash solution will only allow developers to use those features that Adobe has directly implemented.

"My point was that we need to be patient and this "channel" will be come more viable over time, just like how Flash evolved. It's not "mature" enough yet, but to call it a gimmick is being very short-sighted."

Just like any other flash developer i would like to believe that Adobe comes out with something nice that would actually make flash to iPhone deploy a sensmaking choice, not just for people not caring about the side how the content actually runs on the device.
But Adobe has to deliver and they have to deliver something massively better than in the several years past.
What do you mean with "short-sighted"? How long should one wait till Adobe catches up on performance and feature sides to technology one can use today?
Till its released as final release version early next year? Or till the next flash version afterwards in 15-19 months? Or maybe rather 3-5 more years when cpus on such portable devices become so fast that one can get good performance for basic 2D stuff going with flash while the rest of the tech world can push over 100k polies around on them while coding in simpler javascript syntax?

"My point was that we need to be patient and this "channel" will be come more viable over time, just like how Flash evolved."

How has flash evolved when looking at other technologies? By still not making propper use of the gpu although people have asked for that since flash 6 days and instead Adobe has introduced AS3, Pixel Bender and Alchemy making their developer base believe it takes using those to get content running halfway nice (for flash terms, not compared to other technologies which can handle way more no matter in which language one codes).
Also to be honest i think being patient and waiting for some technology to evolve instead of using one that is a good choice today is a very bad idea. Especially when one sees how the markets, especially the iPhone App Store one will just get more and more crowded every day making it more and more difficult to compete.

To be honest, if Adobe hadn´t come out with flash to iPhone deploy feature announcment for the flash ide at the MAX conference i imagine most flash users would have seen this new flash ide version as epic fail (again regarding what they showd at the max conference).

Now Adobe has the big chance to deliver something that makes people think different about flash again, like, hey, maybe this isn´t the outdated stuff that runs everywhere but everywhere poorly.
But yes, let´s see when they release the public beta.

[dandylion13]

-The director tech had too high hardware requirements for abrowser plugin for its time. Back then a way bigger chunk of the web surfing audience had no 3d card and a way slower internet connection, both not ideal for delivering bigger 3d games that require a 3d card.
-flash allowed to code in AS1 javascript like syntax and combine animation and code in more designer/non coder friendly manner
-flash has been constantly developed further whereas director has seen its last good release with version mx2004 ages ago.

Yes, I remember what happened. The shockwave plugin was a nightmare for ordinary end users (mom, dad, little brother) to install. And because it was highly dependent on the GPU it was incompatible with a significant portion of machines. Whenever you started loading a shockwave site (which often took forever) you had to keep your fingers crossed that your machine wouldn't crash.

This wasn't Shockwave's fault directly but it was difficult to for developers to code and test all the permutations of multiple hardware configurations that the shockwave files would run on. There were other problems, such lack of good learning materials for beginners, Lingo was miserable to code with and finally Macromedia's lack of interest in the product. Its all a shame really because the kind of things you could do with Shockwave 3D and the Havok physics engine 10 years ago are way ahead of what Flash is even capable of even now. I work with a development company that still uses Director regularly becuase of its huge 3rd part Xtra library that allow for some really cool hardware interfaces used for interactive museum installations.

Flash started becoming popular because of the player's small file size, ease of installation and reliablity. The fact that it was crippled by not being able to access hardware was actually to its advantage because there was no risk of it crashing your machine. That's still at the forefront of Adobe's development philosophy and wisely so. Flash also attracted a young and experimental developer base who were struggling to get to grips with Director's mature but by that time hard-to-crack learning curve. Flash was fun and accessible.

Also to be honest i think being patient and waiting for some technology to evolve instead of using one that is a good choice today is a very bad idea.

I couldn't agree more. If you're already comfortable coding in AS3.0 it will just take you a few weeks to get up to speed on Objective-C, and it's fun to learn too. You can start building iPhone apps right now rather than having to wait till who-knows-when for a usable Flash based system.

It doesn't have to be a competition: Objective-C can cooexist with AS3.0 just as PHP and HTML can... it's just another useful skill to have, and each has its own strengths and weakness. It's just that at the moment, iPhone apps through Flash seem to be a big weakness.

I should add that I mean no disrespect to Adobe's development team by using the word "gimmick", and I apologise if it appeared that way. What they've managed to engineer and demo is an extremely impressive technological feat. However, from the point of view of an objective consumer who will be paying my $200 for an upgrade to CS5, I will never use this feature unless it approaches the performance of native iPhone apps.