Worse, I noticed a few very alarming developements going on, when using the application for about two days. Let me note here that I’m not a Flash programmer, so I won’t be able to appreciate any improvements on action script etc. I’m merely a wannabe animator needing to create a few banners. And honestly in most cases I’d rather use Anime Studio Pro, neé Moho from Lost Marble, or ToonBoomStudio for creating animation than Flash, but I digress.

Harmless but annoying embarassing

For some reason still many keyboard shortcuts on Flash for OS X just don’t work. This has been the case several years ago, so I think it is nothing but utterly embarassing that Adobe doesn’t get their shit together to fix issues that are so annoying, disruptive to the workflow and obvious even after several years. I lost all hope already at this stage. The menu entry clearly says F6 for creating a new keyframe, alas it won’t. I’ll have to use the contextual menu for that (and yes, my Mouse has a second mouse button, not only that but it has actually 4 buttons).

Another blast from the past hit me when I once quit Flash and after relaunching several of the palettes where moved to the default location, not remembering where I put them. I mean, for FSM’s sake, that was lame several years ago, but now it’s outright sabotage of my workflow.

Tightening the iron grip

But I was nothing but flabbergasted when trying to import data into Flash. Have you ever noticed the number of vector formats flash can or should I better say cannot import? Firstly, it cannot handle SVG, although it was Adobe themselves who came up with this standard, partly to battle Flash. Now that they own Flash and all of Macromedia’s IP, it appears as though Adobe have completely abandoned SVG.

It won’t import PDF files either, nor EPS files, both formats introduced by Adobe as well, but both have the “flaw” that they are at least partially open standards, and files in those format can easily be created by 3rd party vendor applications. Oh, how desperatly Adobe want to keep you from doing just that: creating content with 3rd party applications. They know that most creators will end up with buying one of their Creative Suites including several of Adobe’s applications—and god forbid you’d get to the idea that you actually don’t like Illustrator and rather use one of the many other vector graphic applications on OS X! (Lineform, Create, OmniGraffle, Intaglio, you name it).

So in their “wisdom” to protect us from using “nothing but the best” (at least in their view), they make it really hard having any workflow using standard file formats despite the fact that they created some of those open standards themselves.

It is even impossible to cut and paste any vector data from any other application into Flash. I’ve been trying. Lineform won’t do. Create won’t do. Keynote or Pages won’t do. Graffle won’t do. Funny enough I can cut and paste vector data back and forth between any of those applications and even better most of them even support LinkBack. Not so Adobe.

To put insult to injury I can’t even copy and paste any of the vector data from Photoshop into Flash. No error nothing, just refusal and lots of silence, probably to give you that nice ghosttown ambiente: You are alone.

Party like it’s 1999

Actually Adobe software doesn’t really support anything that makes OS X what it is. Some visual effects have been put into e.g. Photoshop (fading of the palettes etc.), supposedly to match what Apple’s newest operating system, Leopard, is handling without taxing the CPU. But, due to the fact they don’t appear to use OS X technology to implement those effects, it looks a bit clumsy, because those effects make the application quite CPU heavy and sometimes, when the application is a bit busy, you’ll have half transparent Photoshop palette artifacts on-screen, although you have already switched to the Finder.

Illustrator still can’t handle Unicode path names properly: the English version of Illustrator still will trip over its own feet when it tries to open an Illustrator file that has placed images with Japanese file or folder names in their path. Won’t do. Not even after so many years on OS X. I’d have to switch OS X completely over to Japanese in order to help Illustrator finding those files. How broken is this?

It’s too bad that they won’t use frameworks and technologies they haven’t invented themselves (Core Animation, Core Graphics etc.), it could leverage the already incredible functionality of their apps even more. They’re missing out on a whole lot of “wow” they could deliver to their users (at least on the Mac), but I guess being so entrenched in the software market with a big share of Windows users will just not help the fact either.

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