Monday, June 4, 2007

Flash CS3 , pleasure to meet you

Finally I got a go ahead to use Flash CS3 as a day-to-day worktool. And what a pleasure it has been so far. It seems that more then merging Flash into Adobe Suite family, Adobe really listened to the developers and included some great features in the IDE. It's mostly the little things not to detract from the established workflow routine, but it somehow feels enhanced and smooth.
The way that the different control panels can be folded into a sidebar that not only makes the task of saving realestate, but it gives a visually appealing medium-size icon side tray with easy one click reference to that panel. The tool bar itself is interesting. you can click the top of the toolbar to squeeze the tools thinner along the screen, one column instead of two. Then when you're doing something else the tool bar hides, and a click on it's head bar brings it back. Small things like this make it good. Similar thing happens if you have your library open from the sidebar for example, then you click on an empty frame, and the library folds up. This I found to be a bit annoying becuse I wanted to open the library, target a frame by clicking it then dragging the library item onto the stage. Couldn't do it without opening the library again because it just closed. The other criticism that I have is that the contents of a library can take a while to load.
Other than that, it seems really fast. Adobe have done a great job merging Flash into it's product range.
I've only been working with FlashCS3 using AS2 at the moment, which seems like a waste, but I'm looking forward to diving into AS3 already having the tool in front of me.

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