My Favorite New CS3 Feature (sarcasm)

The installer for CS3 Web Premium is horrible! This is a consistent experience across machines. In an attempt to install the product on a fresh copy of Windows XP, I’ve had to run the installer about 5 times now. I’ve had similar experiences on other machines, generally installing twice, and am now getting rather frustrated.

Installing software shout not take 40 minutes unless you are installing an OS… installing software should not have to be performed 5 times (maybe more!) before an acceptable result is achieved.

What the hell, Adobe???

Flash CS3 ActionScript Editor Improvements

Flash CS3 has some long-awaited improvements in the integrated ActionScript editor. These are things that really used to drive me nuts and it’s great to see that Adobe has sought to make their tool nicer for developers to use. With increased pressure from external editors like SE|PY and FlashDevelop, I had hoped for more- but this is a good start with some very simple fixes.

You can see in the image above that along the left side of the editor there are now two columns. The right column contains line numbers and the thinner, left column is set aside for breakpoints. Clicking a line number will now highlight that line of code (no more CTRL+CLICK to select lines!) and clicking on the other column will set and remove breakpoints. Ever since they changed the click behavior in MX2004(?) I’ve learned to do a CTRL+CLICK but this is a lot more elegant.

One feature not visible in the image: when the “Auto format” button is pressed to tidy up the code, it will no longer remove empty lines. Thanks, Adobe! I often separate certain code blocks with empty lines and if I were to auto-format previous to CS3, it would result in my code getting all crammed together.

Also of note are some additions to the toolbar. these include code collapse and expansion options, block-level commenting and uncommenting, and the ability to set the “Target” FLA to your class files. All nice additions. I was really hoping to see a nice class viewer in this release but I can live without it (obviously). There are a lot of small improvements like this that I’m finding throughout the application and I’m really very pleased overall.

Flash Remoting (AS2) in Flash CS3

I’m surprised that while any sort of remote connection classes you could want are included in the core packages of ActionScript 3.0, if you are working with ActionScript 2.0 within Flash CS3, the classes you need are still not included under a default install. I’ve lamented this fact for years as it has held true each time Macromedia/Adobe releases a new version of the IDE. There may be an excellent reason for this but I do not know what it could be.

Flash CS3 does not include the NetConnection Debugger either. I’ve found that the simplest thing to do is to use the SWC files from Flash 8 alongside the NetConnectionDebugger.swf which is launched separately. It works quite well so I’ve packaged both an FLA with the Remoting SWC components along with the NetConnectionDebugger.swf which can all be used to get around the fact that none this vital stuff is shipped along with the new authoring environment.

Remoting Components

You can also download the unpackaged classes from here.

Flash CS3: New Video Export Features = NICE!

While the new, robust import of Photoshop and Illustrator files in Flash CS3 seem to be getting a lot of attention, often overlooked are the great improvements to the export of video from Flash. Older versions of the Flash IDE allowed export to Quicktime, but nested symbols could render strangely and most importantly, no ActionScript-generated animation would render out at all.

I recently had the opportunity to create a compilation DVD of all my short films over the past decade or so and these did include some lengthy animations. I had a very difficult time transferring the animation to video but finally found a freeware solution which could render a swf into a number of different video formats. It worked out but there were still some oddities even with this process. Really wish I had this new functionality a few months back!

As an example, here is a frame of animation rendered into Quicktime through Flash 8:

There should be rain outside the window but the rain is generated by ActionScript and so does not render.

Here is the same exact frame rendered with Flash CS3:

Awesome!

Adobe CS3 Upgrade Paths?

Various Amazon worlwide stores have posted pricing info and box art for the upcoming Adobe CS3 product suites that will be officially announced tomorrow. Depending on where you look, both upgrade and ‘upsell’ pricing is present alongside the full retail licenses. I hope that the Adobe store will offer a variety of upgrade paths as many of us own both a collection of Adobe software and also Macromedia Studio 8.

Fractured Vision Media is licensed with both Studio 8 and the CS2 Production Studio Bundle- so we pretty well have the CS2 version of the new “CS3 Master Collection” being offered. So will we be able to upgrade from both collections collectively? Or will we be gouged completely even in consideration of my prior investment?

On a related note: it’s upsetting to see the fabulous Audition replaced by SoundBooth. I haven’t given the SoundBooth beta a full testing- but it is lacking many of the features we use to master audio tracks. Really seems like a step backward for audio professionals. :(

Oh, and in regard to my prior rant about splitting product versions: nice to see that there is no mention of “Flash CS3 Standard” anywhere.

EDIT: Nice. With Macromedia Studio and Adobe Production Studio the price is $1,399.00. Since Master Collection will not ship till July, you also have the option to snag a smaller collection now and upgrade from that later for the difference. I think we may just go with Web Premium for now- The audio/video tools in Master Collection can wait 18 months…