Comments on: Is Flash Getting Too Complicated?

By: Gideon

Gideon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:25:16 +0000

They need to get with the procedural age and have things searchable too.

I think this is a great example of power and control in a more user friendly environment. (not that it’s flash).

http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/ice/default.aspx

Just my 2 cents on how to make things powerful AND user friendly…

-G

By: Joe Cutting

Joe Cutting — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:58:13 +0000

Hi Ryan,
Have you seen Scratch?
(http://scratch.mit.edu/). Its an object oriented visual programming environment aimed at eight year olds. It works very well but is Java based and the graphic quality is not that great. What is nice is that they have a whole youtube-like community of non-programmers producing and sharing stuff. Would be great if Flash has something similar to get people eased in gently.

Cheers

Joe

By: Brandon Ellis

Brandon Ellis — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:31:55 +0000

Ryan I also wanted to mention that while I think it’s great for the flash designers that they are going to see more visual tools in Flash CS4, folks that throw their hands in the air and say Flash is too hard are never going to be happy with any release. Folks willing to put in time and effort into continual learning of the software will be rewarded. It’s just one of those tools you have to keep up with to stay valuable.

By: Brandon Ellis

Brandon Ellis — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:28:03 +0000

I think Flash is on its way back to being a designer friendly tool. Lee Brimelow spoke at our AUG meeting last week about Flash CS4 and FP 10. There are so many *visual* tools in this version its going to really appease a lot of the negativity that has come from designers over the last two releases.

By: Dwight Zahringer

Dwight Zahringer — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:39:29 +0000

Flash has always been a fun, structured application. However it’s not the easiest to learn or manipulate. It really takes some time to understand all the tools and limitations they have.

Have a web development company many clients want to have certain aspects that they have come to know as “flash”, while simple fade in / out and timed picture changes can be accomplished with CSS and JavaScript eliminating, or an alternative need for Flash development.

Also in the past Flash content , while exciting and animated is not SEO friendly. SEO has been and will be a huge topic of discussion to come. The new Flash does a better job, but little at best to get your content recognized and indexed. That is the problem.

By: raymond

raymond — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:20:17 +0000

I think that they (Adobe) should merge Flex with Flash and create a new development platform were you can easily do animations and application development in one. For example you can draw a line on the screen and then use the UI or FlashScript (a new name for AS3?) program and control the line (or other vectors on the screen).

It’s like having an all in one tool at your finger tips.