Macromedia must die
Flash is evil.
Evil, nasty, and wrong. And it hates me.
This, mind you, has nothing to do with the fact that it runs at a snail's pace on my home computer, so much so that I've uninstalled it to brighten my browsing experience. No, that has little to do with Flash itself and everything to do with my computer being 8 years old.
The problem is that I am a programmer. I do programming for web sites. Some of which we wish to have complex Flash movies on. And I've been trying bludgeon Flash into line, and it hates me. The designers come to me and ask "Can Flash do x?" Yes, it can. Supposedly. Will it? Give me a few hours and a blunt instrument, and we'll see.
The problem is that it gives no usable feedback to the programmer. None. When there's an error, it just ignores it and moves on. The concept of "Whoa, I can't run that line of code because it's mistyped, and here's why:" is entirely alien to the whole Flash experience. The debugger is laughable. I am frustrated.
But that's not the best part. I've been steaming over that stuff for months now. No, today Flash showed exactly how wonderful it is. I was trying to get it to do something that you'd think would be fairly simple, but no, it hates me -- not the point.
I was working on a file. And got done. And had been saving incrementally as I went. And wanted to save the finished version before I, you know, left for the day. And it didn't. Save, that is.
It came up with some annoying error message every time I tried to save. I tried "save", "save as", "export", what-have-you, it just did not want to. Fine, then. Twenty minutes of work down the drain. Except not. Because somewhere in there -- probably because of me doing something stupid with the "save as" -- it had decided to erase the file from the disk. Luckily, the designer had been making frequent backups, and so we only lost about an hour, hour and a half of my work and another hour of hers. But it could have been a lot worse.
Apparently, this sort of thing isn't all that uncommon. She's lost a day or two's worth of work before.
I ask you, what the hell kind of bug is that? Crappity crap crap.
Evil, nasty, and wrong. And it hates me.
This, mind you, has nothing to do with the fact that it runs at a snail's pace on my home computer, so much so that I've uninstalled it to brighten my browsing experience. No, that has little to do with Flash itself and everything to do with my computer being 8 years old.
The problem is that I am a programmer. I do programming for web sites. Some of which we wish to have complex Flash movies on. And I've been trying bludgeon Flash into line, and it hates me. The designers come to me and ask "Can Flash do x?" Yes, it can. Supposedly. Will it? Give me a few hours and a blunt instrument, and we'll see.
The problem is that it gives no usable feedback to the programmer. None. When there's an error, it just ignores it and moves on. The concept of "Whoa, I can't run that line of code because it's mistyped, and here's why:" is entirely alien to the whole Flash experience. The debugger is laughable. I am frustrated.
But that's not the best part. I've been steaming over that stuff for months now. No, today Flash showed exactly how wonderful it is. I was trying to get it to do something that you'd think would be fairly simple, but no, it hates me -- not the point.
I was working on a file. And got done. And had been saving incrementally as I went. And wanted to save the finished version before I, you know, left for the day. And it didn't. Save, that is.
It came up with some annoying error message every time I tried to save. I tried "save", "save as", "export", what-have-you, it just did not want to. Fine, then. Twenty minutes of work down the drain. Except not. Because somewhere in there -- probably because of me doing something stupid with the "save as" -- it had decided to erase the file from the disk. Luckily, the designer had been making frequent backups, and so we only lost about an hour, hour and a half of my work and another hour of hers. But it could have been a lot worse.
Apparently, this sort of thing isn't all that uncommon. She's lost a day or two's worth of work before.
I ask you, what the hell kind of bug is that? Crappity crap crap.