

Does Adobe finally understand developers? - ryanstewart
http://designshack.net/articles/software/adobe-edge-does-adobe-finally-understand-developers/

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citricsquid
Wouldn't the more obvious conclusion be that Adobe believed 10 years ago that
the way to make money was to cater to those that _don't_ want to program and
just want something that "works" and _now_ they've decided that there is a
large enough user base of people that are willing to pay for tools to help
with _real_ programming?

I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years
ago, the web "wasn't ready".

> Adobe has been steadily building steam in this area for years, but they have
> never marketed their efforts so well as they are today.

If Adobe have been building these products for years that would mean they
_haven't_ been "not understanding developers": they just didn't guess 5 years
in advance this is where the web would be. Silly contradiction.

~~~
Wintamute
Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in
ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms
completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE
(FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing
auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not
uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build processes and version
control. I, and many others, were doing "real" programming on the Flash
platform and felt totally understood as a developer by Adobe.

I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like
most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash
developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious
programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and
supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to
bear on its HTML5 developer tools.

I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly
understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious
elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I
feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's
more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites
that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of
ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in
the Flash community.

Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a
melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see
anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was
happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore
Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web
development is impoverished.

~~~
frozenport
You made me nostalgic for my childhood.

It is important to note that for half of the glory days it was Macromedia
Dreamweaver. Until FlashBuilder, we were told with straight faces to use the
Adobe Flash Professional. Remember, FlashDevelop?

I think adobe figured it out maybe 2 years ago.

~~~
Wintamute
Yeah, FlashDevelop was (and still is) ace! I think Adobe were beginning to
figure it when they started to let you do AS3 only projects in FlexBuilder,
whenever that was, maybe a little longer than 2 years ago. FlashBuilder is a
brilliant IDE IMO, there's certainly not equivalent in the JS world yet.

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samarudge
I really don't understand this article style

>Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.

>“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.”

They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is
this a standard way of presenting an article?

~~~
stan_rogers
It's called a _pull quote_ , and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine
articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

~~~
codeka
Usually, though, they're quotes from other people, not the author's own
writing (maybe possibly if you have an editor, like in a magazine, it's not so
bad). Doing it with your own quotes seems kind of pretentious.

And it's usually not placed directly below the actual line of text where it
appears in the article.

~~~
bgilroy26
It's part of magazines, practically any article over 2 or 3 pages will have
them.

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Nilzor
"(...) but for now it’s a little underwhelming for those of us who use the
outstanding Sublime Text 2 every day".

Wait what? I've used Sublime Text 2 for a little while... but I have the
impression that it's a fancy Notepad with a cumbersome configuration system.
Is it more with regards to web page editing? Can someone enlighten me?

~~~
89a
If it's anything like Textmate then the robust snippet, scope and command
system are what makes it special.

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csense
It's been a few years since I've taken a look at Flash; some of the other
comments lead me to suspect some of the things I say here will be out of date.

I've always stayed away from Flash because you had to shell out a gazillion
dollars for the developer tools. I stumbled on the open-source toolchain a few
years ago, but I wasn't able to figure it out. All the tutorials I could find
were written for the official toolchain, and the docs for the open-source
toolchain assumed good knowledge of the official one.
swfmill...flasm...mtasc...so confusing!

Adobe's recent noises of abandoning Flash Player for Linux hasn't helped my
perception of them, either. I develop on Linux if I can. Having to test Flash
in Windows -- and not being able to target Linux -- would be a pain.

So as far as I'm concerned, Flash is a dying legacy platform; HTML 5 and
Coffeescript are the future.

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brianfryer
Great article highlighting some of Adobe's new web-related products.

I especially excited about Edge Animate! My little brother (who majoring in
Animation) asked me, "If Flash is dying on the Internet, what will people use
to create animations?" I didn't quite know how to answer that question a few
months ago -- it seemed to me that Flash the application was more accessible
than writing dozens, and dozens of lines of code to produce sub-par
animations.

Yay for Adobe getting into this space, and for charging a subscription fee
rather than a huge, up-front price (I believe this will substantially lower
the amount of pirated software, too).

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89a
> It seems like Fireworks is the only decent true web design tool that Adobe
> has in the Creative Suite, but it has a sort of cult following, only the
> enlightened few drop Photoshop and pick it up instead.

YES!, Stop neglecting your only good web design product Adobe

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hiphopopotamus
No

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shelf
Too many subheadings, stopped reading

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ZoFreX
We try to aim for more constructive comments on Hacker News - if you didn't
read an article, you probably shouldn't drop a comment, unless there's a
tangible reason you didn't (such as - this doesn't work in my browser, I'm
blind and it's not accessible, I'm deaf and the video has no subtitles - the
pattern here is constructive criticism)

