Adobe Flash 9 public alpha is out!!!

[AGRO]

For real, Flash Professional 9 is out in public alpha !
Meaning we can begin to familiarize with Actionscript 3 within the new IDE.


http://www.adobe.com/go/labs_flash9as3preview_downloads

[AGRO]

Here is a screen snag.

[Corey]

Wow. That has to be the least anticipated update in Flash history. Other than yourself and 2-3 others I haven't even heard about anyone purchasing version 8 yet. Although I'm sure all the studios have.

In a broader sense they are just greedy at $699, that code paid for itself *long ago*. Obviously the geniuses in Adobe marketing have decided that individual developers don't matter anymore, i.e. who spends 2-3% of their annual income on a tool they use once a month?

[AGRO]

Wow. That has to be the least anticipated update in Flash history. Other than yourself and 2-3 others I haven't even heard about anyone purchasing version 8 yet. Although I'm sure all the studios have.

In a broader sense they are just greedy at $699, that code paid for itself *long ago*... Obviously the geniuses in Adobe marketing have decided that individual developers don't matter anymore, i.e. who spends 2-3% of their annual income on a tool they use once a month?


I think adobe had to up the price to help pay for the $3.4 Billion they paid for Macromedia.

A better link... http://www.metah.ch/blog/?p=175

[Corey]

Probably, but they're in for a wake up call. Most individual developers will simply not lay out 2-3% of their annual income for something they only use occasionally, and less than 1% of developers use Flash daily. Especially when they can already get a sealed copy of Flash 8 for $399 or less:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Macromedia-Flash-Pro-8-Win-Mac-Sealed-Retail-Edition_W0QQitemZ230001791875QQihZ013QQcategoryZ41 877QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Studios will stop updating now that each successive version provides less relevance to their client's needs, i.e. it doesn't matter what Adobe's vision of the web is, todays clients are simply not looking to establish large Flash based infrastructures. Period. And with very good reason. Pure Flash sites suck for doing business. It costs ten times more time/money to get 50% less done and results in an immediate reduction of usability and traffic.

Here's what I get whenever I am asked for Flash content in my job. "How quickly can we do this?" not "How complex can we make this?" I think that's pretty common. And we have Flash demos for 100% of our products, so we're hardly fence-sitters. Adobe seems to be ignoring that completely.

"Web services" is the catch phrase they've been using to ensnare people over the last version or two but that's a joke. AFAIK there are zero Flash based web services in existence today which are superior to their non-Flash equivalents. Whatever the task is - searching, retrieving, formatting, presenting - it's all much easier to build/maintain with PHP/HTML and the PHP/HTML services will generally offer superior performance and flexibility. I would never recommend building a web service in Flash let alone attempt the complex fantasies they seem to be selling. Adobe says:

Earlier versions of ActionScript offered the power and flexibility required for creating truly engaging online experiences. ActionScript 3.0 now further advances the language, providing superb performance and ease of development to facilitate highly complex applications
My question to you is this. What percentage of Flash users today are using it to build and maintain "highly complex applications"? And, of those people, how many of them required these new actions to facilitate the process? My opinion is that describes maybe 0.2% of the existing Flash user base. If that. I mean where are all these highly complex Flash applications? I've not seen any. When I look around the web I don't see the managers of large web services even considering Flash because they know what incredibly poor value Flash offers in that role.

Flash has a crystal clear role. Just like a hammer. Just because a hammer is able to hold stacks of paper still doesn't make it a paperweight. They have been trying for some time to crowbar Flash into roles which are intrinsically badly suited for Flash. I believe that's why almost no one upgraded to 8.0.

95+% of the Flash work real world developers do on a daily basis consist of intros and presentations for clients who want them done as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible. If you put an ad in the Yellow Pages today that says "Flash Development" you *might* get one phone call per year from someone asking general questions about web services, let alone highly complex ones. And the odds that any of those calls will result in you actually being handed a cheque are very slim. I've known a ton of Flash developers over the years but never one who builds highly complex web services. I'd like to see/try one of these highly complex web based Flash services to see what Adobe is even talking about.

My position on 9.0 is that it should have been 8.5. They've lost the rhythm in their upgrade sales now and once you do that, it's doomsday. Compound that here because this is the second ho-hum upgrade in a row. My primary directive as a marketer is to make sure *at all costs* that no one ever questions our value, let alone decide that it might be OK to skip "every other" upgrade or whatever. That's the kiss of death. If you want to maintain an upward curve on your upgrade sales from version to version you *absolutely must* make each upgrade so incredibly compelling that no one questions it. Period. You have to dwarf their concerns in a big way. Adobe probably has too many Harvard grads thinking these things out because it's a very simple, very obvious equation which they have missed completely. Now they have two mediocre upgrades in a row and an increase in unit price. Astounding strategy.

[yosik]

Corey,
Albeit agreeing to what you wrote, I would differ on the upgrade relevancy of ver 8.
Mostly the video support and the visual effects (alpha, shadows, filters etc..) are, in my opinion a substantial progress in the toolbox that Flash offers.

Yossi

[Corey]

I'm not disputing that. But I've not seen any Flash which uses the video alpha feature yet (let alone en masse) so in practical terms I think it's something shiny which people are just not using. I think people get attracted by the potential but that's as far as it goes in practice.

For example, let's take the instance of video alpha. Do you know how tricky it is to integrate video with alpha in such a way that it interacts seamlessly with your timeline and other objects in any meaningful way? Very. No client outside of the Fortune 500 or the Disney/Pixar type category is going to pay a web developer to create a piece like that, it's just too time consuming. So we're talking maybe a half dozen pieces of that magnitude coming out of the global community over a year or so, and those are all basically Flash Forward type content, i.e. Flash for the sake of Flash, not business components purchased by a company from a developer.

All I'm saying is that there are two sides to the story. The side which involves we 95% of developers who use Flash almost exclusively to do intros and presentations, and the other side which lives in la-la land and basically makes their living off evangelizing new Flash features. If you examine who is using these newest features in their day job I see primarily Adobe staff and their extended family of journalist, speakers, and authors, i.e. the Colin Moocks of this world. That's all fine and dandy, some of those guys are my heroes but we have to keep two feet on the ground when relating that experience back to our own daily lives where gas is a few bucks per gallon and wages are not increasing.

Or to put it another way the upgrade price is around 1% of an average Flash developer's annual take home pay but it doesn't offer a whole lot new in terms of the things clients demand. So I don't see what's so compelling. I haven't seen anyone buying 8.0 and I think that's why. It's empty calories when you weigh the cost against the practical advantages, i.e. video alpha is of zero advantage to you if none of your clients aren't willing to pay you for the extra hours it takes to integrate in any meaningful way. And they aren't.

In the big picture I'd put my Flash product tours up against any on the net in terms of effectiveness and I authores a couple of those using ancient versions of Flash. Antique software rules! :)

[yosik]

No arguments here, Corey (I still have an old Amiga 4000 which does today amazing stuff with a 1986 technology that Wintel2006 has not gotten to yet...).
From a creative stand point (mine), it is nice to know that a feature is there when you need it. This Alpha channel stuff, for example. ONly a month ago, I had to make a presentation where this feature was THE right one to use.
I wouldn't pay the money for ver 8 based on that feature only and I am VERY picky when it comes to upgrade software (going more in jumps than continously), but in that particular case, I had Flash MX and my decision was to skip mx2004 when it came out (mainly for the reasons you stated) but to adopt ver 8.
Different strokes....
Yossi

[Corey]

From a creative stand point (mine), it is nice to know that a feature is there when you need it.
Well that's really the nail on the head right there. That's the sell. Here in North America our culture is very much geared for that mode of thought too (especially when the employer is paying) so Adobe should manage.