Comments on: What, you didn’t read the 30 blogs before this?

By: flabbygums

flabbygums — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 23:29:35 +0000

“The whole UI acts like it should.” .. I almost agree. #1 peeve for me is that you cannot grab the properties panel from anywhere on the panel - you must grab it in the top left corner. Seeing as this is the thing I move the most..it’s annoying. If NOT having this ability speeds up the IDE in general, then I understand why they did it. It’s funny how many times this usability has changed from version to version.

Secondly, the tabs within the inspectors eg. info/transform/align cannot be rearranged without breaking them off first.. that’s also very annoying. I’m just too used to having my order of info/transform/align since Flash 3 so I want it to stay that way.

By: Derek Vadneau

Derek Vadneau — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 07:06:02 +0000

It doesn’t close the Actions Panel automatically, afaik. But in my setup, I just get the AS panel out of the way, and you don’t notice the other greyed out panels.

Like I said in the post, in my 2 monitor setup that was REALLY annoying. My new setup doesn’t take advantage of the 2 monitors, but because the panels aren’t broken anymore I don’t really need 2 monitors for Flash.

What MM should have done, perhaps, is have the Actions panel mirror the content in the “stage editor”. That would at least give you the choice of where you want to edit your AS. They would just need to grey out, or disable in some way, the areas of the AS panel that don’t make sense to be there.

By: André Goliath

André Goliath — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 06:53:15 +0000

I´m working pretty often with external AS2 Classes (in the Flash IDE). What anoyed me with MX04 was the fact that if you have an Actions Panel open, and then select an AS2 Class File Tab, the Action Panel remained open and you had to close it manually to see your AS2 source. When switching back to your fla you had to reopen the Panel. That was really a pain. I have not tried Flash 8 yet, but if they have corrected that then this feature alone is worth upgrading for me

By: whiteroka

whiteroka — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 23:47:12 +0000

I too prefer to work on my AS files from inside Flash. The number one feature i LOVE about the Flash editor is the “Code Beautifier”, or format code, or whatever you call it. I haven’t played with other editors too much, afraid to let go of the branch i suppose, anyone know if other editors have a format code feature? Unfortunately, using it has always made nested long-format comments indent with every execute, sometimes sending them completely off-screen. Which in turn meant, for AS2, discouraging JavaDoc style documentation. Before now, I have had to use tons of // to hold my code form. Which reminds me, it would ALSO be great for the code formatter to have a preference on whether or not to collapse lines that are totally blank….

By: jhey

jhey — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:50:09 +0000

they did not fix the “TOOLS” panel. boo!

By: Derek Vadneau

Derek Vadneau — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:56:32 +0000

It can be a hassle, which is why developers have been asking for so much from the Flash IDE. I really think a lot of these people wouldn’t have switched to another tool if the IDE was even starting to focus on improvements in the editor. However, Macromedia IS responding to requests, not by trying to tack on a few features, but by building a developer app from “the ground up” (Zorn).

I do work with external AS files a lot, and AS2 more and more.

Before Flash 8 I was using EditPlus for my AS editing. Why?
1. Source control. This isn’t done well with FLAs.
2. Editing text files is typically faster than launching Flash to do the same. Yes Flash must be launched in order to publish an SWF but then there’s MTASC.
3. Coding features. While EditPlus doesn’t have code-folding like SEPY it’s customization is pretty powerful. It’s also little things like producing a function list from the open file, advanced window control (sorting, tiling, etc.), find matching brace, bookmarking sections of code, adding/removing multiple lines of comment signs, cliptext, text filtering, good find and replace … you get the idea.

So, Flash 8 still doesn’t have any of these features (except for slightly better find and replace), but that integration really does count for something. Plus the codehinting and help.

Because I need to work in Flash as part of my job I REALLY appreciate the difference in this release. This is why I’m going to take a much better crack at doing my AS work in Flash 8.

By: Valters Boze

Valters Boze — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:11:31 +0000

wow, never used actions panel on top, always had glitches when its on bottom! perfect! one thing i never understood is why people dont like IDE AS editor? i dont use much AS class files, so maybe i never needed an external editor, but it seems a hassle to me to switch between IDE and external editor :/