flash sucks

[egypturnash]

No, really, it does. Every time I find a new bit of stupidity and brokenness in the editor I get pissed. Today's nugget of Flash sucking made me curl up and whimper for a while.

Now, most of the people talking about why they hate Flash are talking about end-user usability issues - huge ugly interfaces, broken homebrew widgets, stupid intros, etc. I'm annoyed by those too. But what really makes me hate it is the fucking editor.

Today's whimpering was caused by, first, watching Flash completely fuck up the colors on an imported PNG. No color correction info (not that Flash knows a damn thing about that anyway), looks nice and bright in every single program on my system - but import it to Flash and it comes out all faded.

And then I discovered what happens if you try to tween a bitmap in Flash. Try it yourself: import a bitmap on frame 1, make a new key on frame 3, and then motion tween between 1 and 3. Somehow, Flash thinks that a sensible inbetween between two perfectly identical frames involves the bitmap shrinking to half its size. It works sensibly if you stick the bitmap in a symbol, but holy shit this is so fucking broken. How can it do something this casually wrong?

And it's fucking slow. Look, I'm using a 1.25GHz machine. MX2004 should not be running slower than 4 or 5 did on the first-generation iMacs we had at Spümcø; I'm not sure how fast they were but they can't have been more than 350MHz.

And then there's the horde of brokennesses that happened after 5.

I'm not sure which version introduced it, but the behavior of de-"sync"ed tweens is fucked, fucked, fucked. Used to be you could have a sequence of frames on one layer, with motion tweens, and change how the symbol animated by unchecking a "synch" box in the frame's properties; this would let you hold an object on one frame, and make it start animating halfway through a motion. Now? Well, it changes on the keyframe you unsync at, but the later keyframes? It's anybody's guess what it'll show. So you get to do stupid, ugly workarounds involving extra layers in the timeline, just to work around this. I really hate it when I have to make my source files ugly because the tool is stupid.

And that goddamn fucking shit-head "smart" properties inspector panel. It is stupid. It is wrong. It obscures information that I need to have available, it breaks my flow by throwing extra clicks and pauses in to the mix. It makes me chalk up more distance of hand motion. I used to accept crap like this, but as the years go by I've turned into a usability nazi - anything that gets in the way of a smooth workflow is bad, any time I have to stop and think about the program instead of the project I'm using it for is bad. And I have to keep thinking about Flash's UI instead of the work I'm doing because of this fucking piece of shit marketroid bullet point "smart" properties panel. And it's a thorn in my side because it used to work much better and they threw that away and they're not bringing it back.

When I slither away from this gig of regular little Flash things, I'm going to delete Flash from my computer. In fact, I may back it up and do a complete system reinstall just to make sure all traces of Flash are gone. I might even delete the goddamn Flash plugin so I never have to be subjected to a Flash interface again. Yes, it's overreacting. But my loathing for this fucking program is deep, intimate, and complicated, and I really just want it out of my life. And I keep on somehow ending up using it again for money. Once I'm out of this current job, my rate for anything involving Flash will be a minimum of $300/h, and that includes the time I spend cursing the fucking thing - or, more precisely, I will simply not accept any work that involves Flash. At all. Ever again. It makes me snarl, it makes me throw things, it makes me grit my teeth, it fills me with hate. It didn't used to be this bad, but unlike Photoshop users who stick to an old version, I can't stick with the old, good version, as any work involving Flash requires interoperability with people who are stupid enough to keep giving Macromedia money for their shitty excuses for upgrades.

I want things that turn me into a seething ball of frustration out of my life.

Comments

[siddacious.livejournal.com]

You should really write macromedia. If they are pissing off their customers, they need to know about it. I'm sure you can arrange some sort of a online lynch mob to storm their gates. Seriously now, I want to see vector based tar and feathers.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I managed to find their suggestions box on their nightmare Flash-full site and ever so politely asked them to get rid of the damn unified "properties" panel, the thing I keep beating my head against constantly.

I was surprised when, a few days later, I actually got email from them:

Hi Margaret,

I talked with some folks about the annoying panel design you mentioned, in which selecting an object requires 2 steps: (1) select the frame in the timeline, (2) select the object on stage. We can't revert to the old design (multiple panels). But what if you could select an object by double-clicking the frame? The Properties panel would immediately show the object's properties, instead of the frame properties. Would this help?

Emilio

Emilio Passi | Product Designer | Macromedia Flash

...to which I responded with what was probably a lengthy diatribe on why I thought that would be an ugly band-aid on the core problem of that panel being a horrible, frustrating bottleneck; it's stuff that an artist/animator needs to have quickly and simultaneously accessible sometimes, not in this context-sensitive thing that forces you to constantly define your context for it.

And, well, I've just given up any hope of it ever getting better now. I really need to just work on eliminating this fucking thing from my life. Using it is just a huge source of stress for me.

[repost to fix my broken </blockquote> tag.]

[siddacious.livejournal.com]

I'd be inclined to take it further. Doubtless you are not the only person that hates flash with a passion, and of course there is power in those numbers. Then again I'm not you, and I can also see the merit in letting a pile of shit remain one.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

While I'm bitching, here's something that's been broken in Flash since 4, possibly since the first version of FutureSplash: there's a lot of instances where you do something with the timeline, and you have to hit 'undo' something like three times to undo one action. alt-drag to copy a frame, one thought. But undoing it is 2-3 undo states - the first undo moves the playhead back to where it was before, the second actually undoes it.

The whole thing with moving the playhead back and forth being a change has always pissed me off. Load a file, scrub through the timeline - look! it's changed! And it's not even a piece of state that gets saved!

And the way selecting/deselecting is part of the undo chain? Fucked. Up. Always has been.

Again, these are things that call attention to the UI and make me lose track of what I was doing for a moment, which is frustrating as hell and sends me away to go do anything else.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Classic Flash hate: can't zoom in far enough with annoying frequency

MX+ hate: ignores keyboard shortcuts for tools semi-erratically

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

tool keyboard shortcut hate issues:

* while in direct selection arrow (a, not v) most moving-around meta keys are ignored (space-drag to move canvas, apple-space-drag to zoom in): why? "fuck you, stop working with the points, go use the other arrow tool!" is the message I get.
* drag from toolbar palette well into edit window to select a color. all toolbox shortcuts are ignored. Which is a pain because my usage pattern for filling areas is to have some other tool selected, click in the palette well, ignore the swatch palette and drag into the main edit area to pluck a color, and then try to hit 'k' to switch to the paint bucket. And hit it again, uselessly, a few more times, while swearing.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Oy. That is painful.

I can't remember if you were around when Blake very kindly arranged for a copy of Photoshop 8 to enter my posession. Lamentably, the crack somehow broke the key shortcuts; everything said they were on, they just... didn't work, didn't do stuff. Everything was a maddening ten-second journey to the top of the screen, and an equally frustrating meander through submenus. I nearly screamed in frustration before finally canning the thing and getting a copy of 6. And while I miss a few of the snazzier things that PS8 did, the key shortcuts are life and breath.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember that. Even tried using it myself. It was hateful.

And having the key shortcuts come and go as a result of simple, common actions... geeze. I don't think they actually do any testing around Macromedia. At all. Not judging by the number of hair-pulling little things about Flash.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Your frustration with the "Smart" inspector that never knows what you want to look at, the screwed up tweens on bitmaps and the fact that scrubbing through an animation takes up space in your undo levels are all things I have also cursed. I have often wondered why this program is an industry standard when its interface has such obvious errors that are easy to conceptualize fixes for. I remember my first thoughts when I first began using the program, that when compared with Adobe products it was difficult to imagine an interface that made me feel farther away from my animation project, almost as if I had to submit to some sort of bureaucracy to actually make anything in Flash.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

MX+ hate: general slow-as-fuck response to fast gestural tools. Brush and pencil tools drop large parts of quick strokes, sometimes ignores them entirely, resulting in swearing. I expect my tools to, you know, do basic drawing operations like this?

Line tool does this too.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

It didn't take me long to realize that the drawing tools in Flash were of absolutely inferior quality and begin exploring lots of different ways of importing artwork from other programs. I still can't figure out why vector shapes pasted directly into flash from Illustrator seem to grow or shrink seemingly at random compared to their original size.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I've never tried pasting between Illustrator and Flash. I bet the color changes dramatically, too. I can kinda see some sensible reasons for it to end up a random size, depending on the scale of your source document and the scale you were viewing the Flash file at - but my general reflex is to just put it on the huge pile of Reasons Flash Sucks.

[murrypurryfurry.livejournal.com]

Yeah, actually, color screws up big time. It's a bad idea to paste from illustrator right into flash - usually things come out fairly well, though, if you export a swf from Illustrator and then take that into Flash - but of course you have to remember to keep things simple (as you'd expect to see in flash) and don't plan on editing any shapes once you've got 'em in flash.

When I use flash I never use it’s laughably sub-standard drawing tools, it’s always SWFs from illustrator. I’m kind of crossing my fingers for a version of Flash with Illustrators drawing tools and a cleaned up interface now that Adobe owns ‘em – but of course that would work out TOO well and probably satisfy too many people. Gotta’ keep your program flawed so that people are always eager to buy the upgrade, I guess.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Flash fucks up color importing Freehand files, too - American Greetings seems to be an all-Macromedia shop, so they give me reference bits as .FH11 files. They've sent me reference PDFs of stuff after I remarked that I don't use Freehand (my experience with Flash makes me reluctant to use anything else from Macromedia), and I get the exact same colors no matter what I bring in.

I expect Flash to fuck things up as a rule. But it constantly surprises me with how basic some of the things it fucks up are. It's like if Illustrator's pen tool worked backwards about 30% of the time.

God, I hate Flash.

[jackfurlong.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info...did I ever "dodge a bullet"!

The boss tried talk me into customizing the "video player" vitalstream provides to add the company's "branding" to it, and I talked him out of it.

Looks like doing that would be a world of headaches.

[nyctopterus.livejournal.com]

Me too for everything.

Add on one more - try to export a flash movie with animated library items - they don't move! That's handy!

I hope Adobe get ahold of flash and make into something usable. I like the idea of a vector animation tool for a player everyone has, but Macromedia's implementation is beyond (or perhaps below) words.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Pro tip: never symbolize stuff as a movie clip; do it as a graphic symbol. Symbols are much more controllable in the editor, and export to video properly. I've heard that you can also render stuff with moving movieclips by going through Director, but... eeew.

I only ever use movieclips when there's something programmatic going on; otherwise you should never use movieclips, as they are evil.

[starfallz.livejournal.com]

I absolutely loathe Flash. I like it in idea, but whenever I have tried to animate something with it, it is about as delicate as using a brick to sculpt arble.