A nice cup of rabies

I just looked at Adobe's presentation of the new features for Illustrator CS3. And half of them seem to be "make it act more like Flash". It's got Flash's eraser, it's got something just like double-clicking a symbol to edit in place, and ALL THE PALETTES have gotten the HIDEOUS CRAP of Flash's palettes smeared all over them.

Those fucking ugly Macromedia palettes came about because ADOBE SUED MACROMEDIA. And now Macromedia's HALF-ASSED, AGGRAvATING, but not copyright-infringing, reimplementation of the idea is GETTING SMEARED ALL OVER ILLUSTRATOR like RETARDED MONKEYS SMEARING SHIT.

The features boil down to:
- does not crash on Intel Macs (I've heard AICS2 is quite unstable on Intel Macs)
- claims of major speed improvements
- finally, some options to make the point handles bigger
- you can have multiple crop rectangles for different output destinations
- some kind of color harmony explorer I'll probably never touch because I managed to grow a color sense years ago
- better cut and paste between Flash and AI
- Flash's lame-ass faux-bitmap eraser tool*
- Macromeda UI design retards shat all over Illustrator's palettes

I think it's time to take a serious goddamn look at alternative tools. Macromedia's hideous redesign of Flash was a large part of what made me absolutely uninterested in seriously looking for work in the animation world - and now Illustrator's getting all Flash-like. Fuck. This like the Blackwing going extinct times a thousand. This could be the fucking K-T boundary for my favorite art tool. If I have to constantly coax a "context-sensivive Control Panel" into giving me the options I want, Illustrator will be just as frustrating as Flash became.

* Perfect for erasing crude holes in your shitty-looking autotrace images!

Lordy, how I hate symbolizing stuff in Flash.

The current bit I'm working on started with inking some stuff in Toon Boom. Looks nice, came out much prettier than it would've if I'd inked in Flash. TB lets you turn the canvas around like you were using a real animation disc, so you can pull a nice line out very easily. (Painter and OpenCanvas do this too. I think Expression did as well but it's been a while.)

But then I take the elements I made in Toon Boom, and I export them as a SWF, and I bring those into Flash and I start the dreary, boring work of turning everything in the scene into symbols. It's boring and unautomatable. When I'm low on estrogen as I am right now, it's frustratingly hard to shrug and just plow through it. And I need to deliver this thing as a Flash source file, so I really don't have any other option but to use the damn program.

Every time I've had to symbolize stuff myself, it took for. fucking. ever. Or felt like it. The actual animation takes next to no time next to this phase, for me. Despite it's awkwardness, drawing in Flash may well be the best choice, because I can symbolize each drawing (or part of a drawing) as it's finished, instead of having to bring it in, possibly cut it apart, and put it back together again - I'm working on the timing and the drawing and the coloring and everything all at once, and the boring, technical job of symbolizing happens invisibly. This is how I did the animated appearance of Dr. Procyon for the COG. Inking in Flash was painful, but symbolizing was painless.

I'd have finished this piece yesterday if not for the fact that I've been slowly, slowly symbolizing it in fits and starts all night long. More fits than starts.

Once I get it all symbolized it probably won't be more than an hour or so of work to time it. *sigh*

Gnyah. I installed Classic so I could install Flash 5 and have properly separate frame/instance palettes, so I can actually get this stuff done without going completely crazy. Except I just realized something:

Flash MX2004 only has the option to save as MX2004 documents or as MX documents. Flash 5 can't understand these.

I have this horrible, horrible fear that I'm going to end up with three versions of this piece of shit on my machine, because MX can save as MX or 5 source files.

And GODDAMN FUCKING BROKEN INTERFACE MAKES ME WANT TO SMASH THINGS and I don't like using software that puts me in that state of mind.

And this fear is true, because the source files I have from American Greetings are MX2004 documents.

i have one and a half gigs of this piece of shit on my machine, plus the huge amount of crap they splatter into ~/preferences/ and ~/library/application support/ and /library/application support/ to support my desire to avoid using the shitty, hate-inducing interface. This is fucking stupid.

I'm fucked either way. Goddamn it.

"My loathing for this tool is deep and complex and far more intimate than I would like it to be." - me, on the subject of Flash.

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I finished off the first of what will hopefully be a fair number of little things for American Greetings today. This is what I was using Flash for - in particular, a package of animated emoticons for MSN Messenger*. Depending on whether or not they want the source files as well as the rendered gifs, I may be greatly altering their workflow to suit my sanity - changing file structures, changing the complete toolpath. I'm already doing that a little, because they're using Freehand and Fireworks, and the only Macromedia app I'll grudgingly have on my machine is Flash. I really need to figure out how to bend my resume to admit that I worked with that tool, but avoid looking like someone who should be hired to do stuff in it; it really makes my blood pressure rise precipitously.

No Halloween fun because of this, and because of queenofstripes being sick, and other things. Oh well.

*which I will never see in use because it's Windows-only, and because everyone I IM with uses AIM, and because animated emoticons make me scream. But MSN Messenger is all flickertwitchy, and expansion of the flickertwitchiness has been monetized. If I go work on this stuff with my laptop in a cafe, I will be so Internet Two Point Oh that it'll hurt.