Flash, Worse software ever?

2001-04-14

Have any of you guys used Flash much? Is it the worst software ever or what? Obviously people are getting stuff done in it but for the life of me I'm not sure how they do it. The interface has got to be the worst ever. Trying to select single frames, multiple frames, whole layers etc. Under Flash 5 if you drag a selection rectangle around an object and the rectangle cuts through the object your object is AUTOMATICALLY cut into multiple parts. The parts inside the rect and the parts outside the rect. You CAN'T START OVER!!! You are expect to UNDO if you selection wasn't perfect.

I'm working through the Hillman Curtis book and it's amazing to me that it all has to be done by hand one element at a time. You'd think you could copy and paste keyframes and selectively paste stuff (ie, everyting put the position or all positions relative to the object's current position etc). You'd be able to get stuff done in 1/10 the time. Maybe there's faster ways to do stuff and I just haven't gotten that far but my experience with Dreamweaver was the same. They really need to hire some interface designers.

Has anybody tried the Adobe Live Motion? Is it any better? I know they need some work too. For example in Photoshop you can make "slices" which are rectangles defining parts of an image. For example using slices you can have photoshop automatically cut your image into multiple files. You can set attributes for each slice (like save, don't save, save as GIF, save as JPEG) What you CAN'T DO is select multiple slices and set them ALL AT ONCE to GIF or JPEG for example. What were they thinking? Having to click on 47 different slices and set each one by hand is a joke.

As an interesting side note, I've been helping out in the trial Flash classes at Digital Hollywood and Flash crashes regularly at least on a the Macs in the class. It's pretty frustrating. Worse, I found out Wednesday that just pressing Ctrl Caps−Lock crashes every Mac in the lab. If you just happen to press Ctrl and Caps−Lock (which I happen to press quite often since they are about the same places as shift and control on my Vaio keyboard your Mac crashes and you have to press the Reset button on the case. And you thought Macs were supposed to be user friendly.

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Monosodium Glutamate (or eating crow)