Top 5 Favorite Things about Flash CS5
I have been using the Adobe CS5 for development since it was officially released and I have grown very comfortable in it right away. I plan to write more detailed impressions later with more info on some of the new things, but for now my top 5 favorite things about Flash CS5
1) Performance: I love OSX. I disagree with most things Apple these days, but at this point I am not interested in migrating dev back to windows. Developing with Flash on OSX has been painful over the last few years. CS4 was a pretty nice upgrade, but CS5 has been amazing. Everything just works now. Window management hasn’t seemed to be a problem and performance of the IDE has been great.
2) Font Embedding: In the past, font embedding with flash was a fairly tedious process. Things didn’t work like you’d expect they should. Having to re-embed the same set of fonts in different textfields, etc. In Flash CS5 Font embedding is handled great. There is now just one panel for managing all embedded fonts
3) Code Completion On The Timeline: This has been a request in flash for years and years. It took them awhile to finally get it, but it’s a real nice to have. I hardly ever put code on a timeline, but sometimes an animation needs to dispatch an event or you want to call a function from the timeline after the creative team does their thing. Having code completion for this stuff is great because of the auto importing.
4) Selectable Static Text: Happy to finally be able to select static text in the swf.
5) iPhone compiling: Yah, Yah, I know apple won’t let me submit anything to the store, but sometimes I don’t need things in the store. Sometimes I write small apps that I just use on my phone or a small utility for a friend. Being able to write small things in flash and run them on my phone is a real nice to have. Even prototyping in flash can be fun.
While I do love working with CS5, there a few things left to be desired. I really wish PSD importing was more solid, and I have found a few small bugs in the IDE. Overall though, it’s a great user experience and a significant upgrade!
