Flash | Retrospective

I was one of those people who thought LiveMotion was an awesome product. I loved AfterEffects and the Flash timeline used to drive me up the wall. But while LiveMotion was great for those of us who liked to use AE, it was anything but pleasant when it came to using ActionScript. And, at the end of the day, it just wasn’t Flash.

With Adobe acquiring Macromedia, and Flash getting more design features and Flex taking over the heavier lifting, I wonder if we might see Flash gain more a more animator-friendly toolset.

Wish-list for Flash 9 or 10 (…already sent to MM when the news first came out about Adobe)

AfterEffects timeline: Allow me to individually keyframe properties like opacity, position, scale, etc, and then expand them further so I can adjust their curves. In my opinion, the AE timeline would make Flash a super animation tool.

Vector Motion Blur: I would love to be to just toggle Motion Blur On and let Flash do the work about applying the appropriate blur values based on vector and velocity. I know this can be done via ActionScript, but the method is quite clumsy and more work than it absolutely needs to be.

Better UI: Maybe now Adobe and MM are one company, we can get a lot of the better UI enhancements that the lawsuit prevented MM from implementing. Plus, there is a lot of tool synergy that can happen now. How about some team work on the next set of keyboard shortcuts?

This last request is not Flash related, but I put in a solid request to Adobe NOT to kill off Fireworks. It is an extremely useful tool that implements both vectors and bitmaps in one tool. I will admit that 6 months ago, I didn’t use Fireworks much. I have no idea why I did things the hard way before then. Fireworks is a very cool tool for quick web work and Flash work. It definitely needs some help to fix quite a few nasty bugs, but please don’t kill it off. At least I have my FireWorks v8 for now.