g.wygonik's flash experiments

I agree with what you say.
They should update the Flash code editor.

Dreamweaver can, however, edit AS files.

You are so right. Though I am amazed by the new graphical powers, I just can't believe they didn't improve the AS editor. THANKS GOD I switched to Eclipse!!!

[quote]
...like adding back and making the previously removed "Normal Mode" editing even better. *cough*
[/quote]

Yes, Greg, we did add "Normal Mode" back into the editor and made it better. Normal Mode was not used (much) by hand coders. It is not for hand coders. People who are not hand coders do not typically look to third-party text editors like PrimalScript. That's why we spent development time putting "Normal Mode" back in and making it better (now called "Script Assist").

You're comparing Apples to Oranges, my friend. We have a limited amount of time and resources when we build the product so we have to prioritize. We met with customers all over the world who represent every key segment of the Flash user base (solo devs, creative agencies, educators, enterprise shops, etc) and found that, overwhelmingly, everyone had a different idea of what features a good text editor should have and - even more so - were very attached to their existing text editor solutions. Spending the time to add all of the features that advanced hand coders want would have been a poor use of our resources in our opinion. The number of Flash users who are advanced hand coders and would be willing to give up their text editor to go back into Flash was far too small when compared to the greater base of Flash customers.

Regarding DW's new support for Code Collapse... Yes, we would like to have brought this same functionality over to Flash (and we likely will in the future) but we couldn't due to time. With both products now on the same development schedule we must wait for them to finish the work before we can build it into our product. In this case, we didn't have enough time remaining to do so.

By the way, I didn't think PrimalScript had code-collapse. Does it?

Thanks,
MD

Mike Downey | Flash Product Manager | macromedia

Yep, imho MD is right =)
"Normal mode" is not for hardcoders and supposed to make simple scripting easy for early adopters and designers.

Advanced features (afaik) will be realized in Zorn, which is targeting exactly on hardcoding people.

I understand your frustration, but I see Mike Downey's argument. A half-assed code editing solution wouldn't really have helped anyone. I've been using external editors since 6, and haven't looked back. It would have taken a major effort to get the Flash code editor to the level where I would even consider it again.

hey mike

thanks for the feedback. i completely understand the time constraints of getting features in, and that everyone has different needs.

i still think narrowing those needs down to the top two most requested features would have been enough to satisfy a large percentage of current, internal IDE users. as it is there are NO NEW "hand coding" editor features. and frankly that sucks.

i guess my biggest frustration is that since MX2004 was out, and folks have been espousing the virtues of third-party editors, MM hasn't been very straightforward in their idea of what Flash, as a product, is.

with the changes made in MX2004, it was supposed to be THE platform for development of RIA's.

then Flex came out and Flash "isn't used in the enterprise." (tell my 95,000+ daily users we're not an enterprise...)

and "real developers" use third-party editors anyways.

ok. so Flash 8 comes out and there's much better graphic tools, cool effects, and better type handling. awesome.

but with no information on anything new related to building _applications_ in Flash 8, where does that leave developers? does MM not see Flash as being for developers anymore?

Zorn?

i still have to use a third-party tool to do what the IDE should? great. why is there a "team" of people working on this, instead of leaving it to the ASDT folks and working on putting a great editor in the IDE?

Flex's upcoming release that doesn't require a server?

great, another tool that still doesn't fit into our normal workflow or app building format.

i've heard time and time again from MM folks that "we can't be all things to all people," but you've tried so hard so far that it just seems foolish to not make your Flagship product the best it can be at _everything_ it's supposed to do.

granted you have no competition, outside of the growing OSS Flash community, so there's no real reason for you to try.

aargh. i'm just ranting now. it's just so frustrating to see MM going all over the spectrum of the development world, and not seemingly focusing on any of it fully.

i don't know. i'm just "old fashioned" or something.

i kind-of felt the same way once Java got to 1.1 and all the side branches of Java started splitting off and now no one new to Java has any idea what's what or where to begin and get frustrated and gives up.

i am happy that Studio 8 was only a $400 upgrade, because $150 of that is for getting Contribute/FlashPaper, and it seems the remaining $250 split between three other products seems about right based on the amount of new functionality.

g.

"It would have taken a major effort to get the Flash code editor to the level where I would even consider it again."

i've never really left the internal editor (i do use SEPY for certain projects), but it would take _very little_ for the internal code editor to be the best thing since sliced bread for us.

g.

of course, i should note that i still love Flash, still love working with it daily as my main gig, and still support MM and all their peeps.

i just have to vent sometimes, and luckilly in this world of connectivity, i can have nice, interesting dicussions with folks at any time.

i'm of course honored that Mike took time to comment here - he could have just ignored my rant and flipped me the proverbial bird. :D

i just want to make sure "the little guy" is still a voice in their heads and we aren't completely ignored by the "elite coders" who even by MM's own admission make up a _very small percentage_ of Flash _developers_.

peace and love
:-)
g.

[quote]
then Flex came out and Flash "isn't used in the enterprise." (tell my 95,000+ daily users we're not an enterprise...)
[/quote]

Who ever said this? You're way off, my friend. We developed Flex because Flash authoring was never going to fit the traditional application developer market (Java/C++/.NET/etc) so we needed to do something new. Flex is not a replacement for Flash, it's a new solution targetted at a completely different market.

[quote]
but it would take _very little_ for the internal code editor to be the best thing since sliced bread for us.
[/quote]

Dude, you've never worked on a major commercial software development team, have you? :) Don't take that the wrong way - but you'd likely be amazed at how complex even the simplest changes to the tool can be. Consider that one code change can effect other areas of the tool unintentionally, and for every week of dev time there's generally about 3 weeks of QA time.

And, again, going back to the whole question of "how much would we have to do to effect a significant number of users?" In our estimates based on direct communication with over 1200 beta testers and a large number of customers, the answer was "too much to justify the development resources."


I must say that it is the threads like this that make me love my job so much. The Flash community is the most passionate technology community in the world (barely edging out the CF developers :-). I love it when you guys rant and praise every little detail of the product becuase it tells me (and the rest of the team) that you really care.

I just wish you would listen a little more closely every once in a while. We try VERY hard to listen to all of you. ;-)

Cheers,
MD

Mike Downey | Flash Product Manager | macromedia

hey mike

Who ever said this?

well, i'd have to go back to emails and Flashcoders threads, but i'm not going to worry about that ;-) though i could find several chains where this has been said, sometimes by MM peeps, and sometimes, quite rudely. sorry.

Dude, you've never worked on a major commercial software development team, have you?

dude, get this - that's what i do all day long! except that for the Flash front-end side of things, the team consists of - me.

believe me - i manage hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and know very well how every little thing inter-relates.

everyday i'm impressed that i've been able to do this, have it work, and have 95,000+ (and growing daily) inner-city school children all over the United States learning Mathematics thanks to the app i've written COMPLETELY IN FLASH.

however, unlike your world where you get to make the rules, i have to make sure my apps work for even the most smallest of requests because if it doesn't, we don't get that sale. we have to make sure our product meets the needs of every single school district in every single state.

only one county in Georgia wants their students to be able to do something special? well - tah dah - now they can... along with _every one else_. we adjust our cycles to make sure that we are releasing what everyone wants and needs.

however, because of this, we have learned to build things that are easily adaptable, and not so hard-coded that they become nightmares to change one small thing... unlike MM, apparently. ;-p

while i appreciate you listening, and believe me i do, every new cycle of Flash seems to be more and more confusing as to it's focus. sometimes it's hard to fully listen to you guys when it seems that you don't even know where you're going.

g.

it's that time again... let the b*tching begin :P

g, your rant is well-place, however, MD is also right on the money with

"overwhelmingly, everyone had a different idea of what features a good text editor should have and - even more so - were very attached to their existing text editor solutions" ...

... and that brings me to my point/question... the reason "hard core" coders (probably like g here) keep coming back to AS editing solutions in the Flash IDE is because you've tied the development environment to it. Why do I have to Edit AS elsewhere, only to have to open the IDE to compile the FLA associated with it? I'd like to work on that FLA, and forget it even exists (of course, until I really need to make changes to the design stuff in it)... now I understand that certain 3rd party are taking it upon themselves to relieve "hard core" coders of this, but riddle me this... why is it so god damn hard for MM to release a command line compiler? Where I come from, you create the command line/core stuff, then put pretty pictures on them... but I've never "worked on a major commercial software development team" I guess... so please share some insight... why do I need the whole IDE to compile a single swf?

-- eokyere

Mike- i can see how you guys would decide to leave the script editors to the 3rd party companies BUT I see where greg is going with this. The group that seems to be missing is the hybrid developer-the one that might have to write an application that pulls from a webservice and an hour later is building the animations (tweens, masks, etc)swfs that that service will provide. I know that this type of person is not your main focus and MM seperates them out into individuals- just look at how you seperate the positions in "meet your match" -web designer, developer, graphic artist, video whiz. For the people who wear all those hats in one day flash script editor could use some updates. Just because we may be in the minority does not mean our Apples And Oranges are not valid or real-we want an "applanges." AND we can look at the lack of inprovement in the script pane as a shortcoming of the application release-it's a totally valid arguement to US. Even though we don't bring enough revenue to make a blip on MM radar.

i'd like to add that part of where i come from on all this is that i started work on "version 3" of my day job main software app in Summer of 2001. Flash 6 was just out, IIRC, and we were excited to get going with Flash as the main application platform - long before the buzzword "RIA" was thrown around.

JUST THIS SUMMER we released "version 3" (yes - that's a 4-year product cycle). during that time i've seen MX2004 come out, been updated (twice), and have seen the glimpse of the power of Flash 8 with the player public beta.

but i've been "in the trenches" for so long with this project, my day-to-day work is strictly with the IDE.

when i started there were no PrimalScripts or SEPYs in the world. Eclipse didn't even have rudimentary AS support. and there was not even a glimmer in anyone's eye about using NaturalDocs or such with Flash.

Stright-up, in the IDE, coding for a huge app, with hundreds of components and hundreds of thousands of lines of code. a fully skinable, singing, dancing, learning environment - in Flash 6!

now i'm starting working on both 3.1 and 3.2 (which have much shorter release cycles), as well as a 4.0 which is moving to AS2.

and all i wanted is that my normal routine be enhanced by the addition of code collapse.

at this point, moving to and learning a third-party app just so i can have a decent editor is a MAJOR drain on my productivity.

:-)
g.

You know what would be a great comprimise, if we had access to script documents throught the JSAPI. I am not sure how much more or less effort that would be then some of the things discussed here. But at least if we had that MM wouldn't have to spend dev and debuggin time on all the cool panels we could make ourselves. Now that might not give us the ability to have code colapsing but I would be able to build a Snippets Panel and a Class Browser and even a Function List Panel. Those in itself would make me happy and felt like my needs, as one of the last few IDE only developers, had been meet.

julian

if we had access to script documents throught the JSAPI

i think that you have hit on something.

while we CAN access the AS code on any given keyframe, i think writing a custom AS Editor Panel would be a seriously hard undertaking (believe me - i've thought about it before).

i can envision how to do the things i want, but i lose all the things that are there and would have to be rebuilt (eg: code hinting).

just being able to write the NaturalDoc auto generator routine made me think about all the things i'd love to see - like jump to a function's definition - without line-by-line or selection control, that just won't work with JSFL and the built-in editor.

so you need to make a new editor that writes real code to the real keyframe, but embeds comments that it knows how to display stuff with.

sorry for the jumbled thoughts comment. perhaps a route for further study.

g.

I think you misunderstood me. My suggestion is not to write a custom editor with JSFL but being able to have fl.getDocumentDOM() return a .as file instead of only .fla's.

oh - right, right, right... sorry. my bad. :-) g.

I'm with Greg.. the new improvements are great, but what happened to "RIA"?? Class browser and code folding should not have been left out. I have a dozen or so additional improvements to the IDE that would have made my daily grind easier. Ah well, it's not going to stop me from getting F8 and having fun with it.

Agree with 100% on this.

I am really a bit dissapointed with Flash 8.

I still use the IDE for writing script, even if I am in the minority according to MM, I think the IDE is not that bad it just needs to be better and a lot of the features it needs already exist in their other products its a shame they are giving up on it.

Perhaps I should shed a little more light on how we spec the product so you can better understand how we arrive at these decisions.

It starts with an advisory board that we assemble with around 100 high-end Flash users from around the world. We get a lot of ideas from them and spin our own ideas off of them until we have a good hypothesis put together. We then start designing prototypes of a wide variety of features and begin wave one of our feature validation process which takes us to a variety of customers in different parts of the world. We spend a half day with each customer, beginning with an "over-the-shoulder" observation of their workspace/workflow for an hour and ending with a long presentation of our proposed featureset. We record feedback on each of the features and force each customer to prioritize the most important features. Based on each meeting we refine our proposal, tweak our prototypes, drop certain features, and add new ones. This process continues for several weeks and dozens of customer visits until we've arrived at the "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP). By meeting with all types of customers and forcing them to pick which features are most important we're able to maximize the effectiveness of every single hour that we spend on development. By doing this we are able to focus on doing a small number of features and doing them very well.

In the case of Flash 8, users made it clear that code editor enhancements like the ones mentioned in this thread were important - but not as important as the other things that we did.

Do not read this as: "Macromedia will never improve the Actions panel in Flash." This is not the case. As I mentioned earlier, we couldn't get Dreamweaver's code collapse feature into this release because the two products are developed in parellel and DW wasn't finished with the feature in time for us to implement it. It's a complicated feature and it takes time to develop. It's that simple. So - we'll try to get it into the next release.

As for a Class browser, this was actually not a very popular request. Some people asked for it, but it didn't come up very often. We actually had more requests for custom class introspection (you instantiate a custom class and the editor automatically adds code completion for your methods and properties). I believe this is the type of feature that Zorn is considering and we will also condsider it for our next release. Whether it gets in will depend on the same validation process.

Does this help make any more sense out of how we do things? We clearly want to build the best possible product for the most people. Don't take it personally if your favorite feature request doesn't get in the product. We're always listening to your requests and we consider nearly everything that is proposed to us.

All this said, we think this is an outstanding release. As a long time Flash user myself, I've never seen so many customer-driven features added to a single release. We're very excited! :)

Thanks,
MD

Mike Downey | Flash Product Manager

how do you actually use external editors? i`m not talking about writing classes and such 'application' type code, just writing "timeline" scripts.. do you copy/paste all the time from IDE to SEPY(e.g.) and back? or you use #include statement? this might be the dumbest question around in here :)

Not a dumb question at all. I've been struggling with that one for the past few months. What I've been doing at work lately is putting everything except the code to start things up into external class files(EAS2.0 style). Before I figured that out it was all #includes for me and sometimes if I just wan t too use SEPY to code out something real quick I'll use includes still.

>aargh. i'm just ranting now. it's just so frustrating to see MM going all over the spectrum of the development world, and not seemingly focusing on any of it fully.

I actually see it the other way. In the past we were going all over the place, Flash auth is for development, flash auth is for animation, flash auth is for design...

It was becoming one of the most schizophrenic tools on the market (sp?).

The last two releases we spent all of the time trying to make Flash authoring tool into something that it was not originally created as (a full featured development IDE). In the process, we alienated everyone who used it for content creation, animation etc (which makes up the vast majority of Flash users), and after two releases, we were no where near where we wanted to be.

So, with Flash 8, we went and talked to users, and tried to really focus on what Flash is good at.

This doesn't mean you can no longer use it as a development tool. You can do everything today with Flash 8, that you could with 2004. However, Flash 8 is much more solid all around, performs better, and does not have all of those little annoying bugs that had built up over the years.

Does this mean that Flash developers are less important to Macromedia now than in the past? Definitely not. In fact, they are more important than ever before (something that I think will become more clear over the next couple of months).

Make sure to read:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/08/will_zorn_requi.cfm

This will be everything you would expect in an editor based on Eclipse.

And, you will still be able to use Flash 8 to create your content and assets, or to even structure your app (you can use Flash for your assets and app layout structure, and Zorn to edit your ActionScript).

Again, we will have a lot more info on this in the coming months.

Hope that helps shed some light on what is going on. I can understand the frustration right now, but please try to understand we are making these changes so that we can have more focus for each individual tool, and not less.

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com

I understand the arguments on both sides, but one sentence concerns me a little - the following quote from Mike:

"In our estimates based on direct communication with over 1200 beta testers..."

Beta testers are generally going to fall in to the category of "very advanced user" ( probably why they've been chosen to beta test in the first place ).

In other words, they are a select group, which are pretty unlikely to reflect a fair balance of all Flash users.
Their opinions are essential in many regards, but should they be used as the basis for absolutely every decision?

What I'm getting at is that if you asked 1200 Flash developers with impaired hearing what improvements they want in the next version of Flash, enhancments to the Sound object would probably end up being very low priority too.

[Jim] "Beta testers are generally going to fall in to the category of 'very advanced user'"

Hi Jim - This is a false assumption. Our beta program has a very large and diverse group of users who range from entry-level users all the way up to the most advanced.

I'd also like to point out that we by no means base any of our decisions solely on the feedback of our beta testers.

Check out some of the posts on my blog (weblogs.macromedia.com/md) as well as the Flashteam blog (weblogs.macromedia.com/flashteam) to learn a little more about how we make decisions on the Flash team. I guarantee no decision is made likely and all decisions consider a wide variety of factors, including the very important feedback that we get from our diverse beta group.

Thanks,
MD

Mike Downey | Flash Product Manager | mdowney@macromedia.com

Thanks MD. The only exposure to beta testers I've had is through MMUG, flashcoders and from some of the F8 example pages I've seen, but I guess the less advanced users aren't going to be as visible as the top level ones - sorry for the assumption.

Just to add, despite my concern voiced above I have always thought that Macromedia seem to be doing a heck of a good job (getting involved with the community and asking for feedback). Long may it continue! :)