Radley Marx

10 ways to put “Creative” back into Flash CS5

As a response to Kevin Suttle’s post: Found and Lost: The Flash IDE, I posted a (slightly exaggerated) rant yesterday summarizing the recent shift to Flex that is taking place in the Flash world.

To follow up, I’ll start by asking you to consider this: At the time of the Macromedia acquisition the last thing Flash professionals expected from this glorious merger of multimedia masters would be a Java/Eclipse “revolution”.

I say meh.

We wanted more. We expected more. We imagined more. We dreamed the big dream: a magical mystical prodigal child borne of Flash and After Effects lust!

And finally it… kinda happened. Kinda. After Effects and Flash kinda work together. At least they merge well enough.

But the glow of Flash is fading and needs more creative fuel for our passion. So here’s my fix list for Adobe to revitalize Flash and the Flash IDE. I’m going to leave out the obvious stuff (code completion, webcam/microphone fixes, call it Flash Animator instead of Flash Professional, etc) and focus on solutions that would be a real revolution for media artists:

1) Buy Perian. Or at least work in some kind of FFmpeg solution. Flash video was revolutionary five years ago, but other codecs have caught up and have beat Flash in online broadcasting. As a media developer, I need access to professional web and broadcast video. If that means sucking up to Microsoft to get WMV, then do it (or better: barter ruthlessly).

2) Give us dynamic, optimized sound. Currently sound in Flash is just good enough to stay relevant. I don’t think we have the chipmunk bug any longer, but there’s still major problems and we need more more more. A powerful DSP, independent SoundManager, better memory management, more codecs(!!!!), 5.1 / 7.1 sound,  Dolby/THX/AC3, pitch/tempo control, and VST APIs would all be fantastic.

We need Flash audio to be amazing, not passable. If player file size is a deal breaker then at least partner with reputable digital DSP providers to allow us to outsource the signal.

3) Think motion. We dreamed of After Effects and Flash – give us After Effects in Flash. It can be done. Really.

4) Revamp the timeline and timeline-based code. Get rid of the 1996 frame-based grid and use time markers instead (hint: After Effects). Frame-based code can be converted to a special Document function or a new frame class. Then make the marker a button that links directly to that bit of code. Finally, add a tooltip to the marker that displays the name of the function/class so we don’t have to play “code hunter” so much.

5) Fix the floating Actions panel. My current solutions is to place the Actions panel with the timeline and output panels (as tabs) under the stage. The crux is that my actual .as files are somewhere else: up top with my .fla stage. I don’t need my AS code in two different windows! I’d like to be able to place the Actions panel up top with my .fla and .as files. 

6) Allow Vector Smart Objects between Flash and Illustrator/Fireworks, not just Photoshop. While you’re at it, give us Bitmap Smart Objects.

7) Give us a preference to turn on/off the new gradient bar tool in Illustrator. (Ha! Made you look at an Illustrator request! Bwah ha ha ha!)

8) Provide an API for universal remotes. Allow me to control the Flash player using my Logitech remote. You want to play in the media big league, then address the needs and expectations of modern consumer conveniences.

9) Better online documentation and SEO. I Google search for code solutions. Often what I’ll receive are old code examples using the unfriendly old LiveDocs system (or worse, spam/knockoff sites). It would be great to have all of those old URLs forward and/or reformatted for SEO.

10) Refocus on artists/creatives/designers’ needs and perspective. On a whim I tried out Attest, an AIR-based AIR Certification simulator. I figure with 7+ years of professional Flash design & development of dozens of websites and media players it would be a cinch. Nope, I failed! Why? I don’t know anything about LiveCycle, regular expressions, popular MVC frameworks, etc. The assumption: to know Flash is to know computer science, not art. But Flash is taught in more art schools that tech schools. Adobe, please don’t take your base for granted.

 

So some big and some small requests, but most aren’t terribly unrealistic. Most stem from years of media development and most address the big changes that are happening outside Flash. I expect that Web 3.0 will be about integrating services and removing a lot of the walls of the walled gardens, which means we need to look above and beyond Java/Eclipse.

Currently Flash is still the most powerful media platform to build on, but it is now also the prime target of a terribly ruthless competitor. Adobe maintains a major advantage due to a large base of artists and creative professional, something the competitor could never accomplish. But we don’t want to be taken for granted.

Feed your base, Adobe.