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by egypturnash 5160 days ago
Why am I not surprised this is about bugs in Flash?

It ain't much better on the artist side. The UI revision after the Adobe/Macromedia suit was so bad it was one of the major reasons I left the animation industry. My friends who stayed have AMAZING piles of helper scripts to patch it up and make it halfway usable.
1 comments
talmand 5160 days ago
One of your major reasons for leaving an entire industry is because of a UI revision in ONE of your software tools? Surely you are exaggerating.

What are the amazing piles of helper scripts intended to patch up an UI revision consisting of?

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egypturnash 5160 days ago
No, no, really. Flash was the tool used in ALL the jobs I was getting. And the UI changes from 5 to MX were completely flow-breaking; imagine that a new revision of your favorite text editor made you wait a half a second after every third keystroke, and flushed the typeahead buffer every time that happened.

And you HAVE to update to this new tool because the files saved by it are incompatible with the old versions; if you're gonna interoperate with other folks you have to somehow deal with this maddening new behavior.

I was already coming to feel that I would never have the joy of working on my own stories and creations because I didn't have the burning drive and social skills to claw my way to running a show. All that was left of animation to me was the joy of making things come to life. And this UI change made that a death of a thousand cuts instead.

The helper scripts are a lot of macros to automate common usage patterns, and a few plugins to create new palettes. I can't remember the exact details; this was a whirlwind tour of Cartoon Network's working methods when I was staying at their head Flash director's place for a funeral.

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