BLAZE 16 Feb 2006 12:38 am
Poll: Which Adobe product workflow is the most important to improve?
I recently discovered this new polling widget via Guy Kawasaki’s blog so I thought I would try it out with a little poll about product workflows between Adobe tools.
As you might imagine, one of the big things that we’ll be focusing on for the next release of Flash, code-named “BLAZE”, is product integration with other Adobe tools - most importantly, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and Flex Builder 2. I thought it would be interesting to see which of these workflows you think we should spend the most time improving.
Good luck!
on 16 Feb 2006 at 8:38 am 1.Frank said …
Why isn’t Fireworks in this poll? If it is because Fireworks is already a former Macromedia tool that can interact with Flash (but could always be better), why is Flex Builder in the list then?
Isn’t a little bit weird to put Flex Builder up against Photoshop, Illustrator & After Effects. The last three are design programs, and Flex Builder is totally not that. So shouldnt it be more like workflow from design to animations to development? (e.g. Fireworks to Flash to Flex Builder)
Just my 2 cents, didnt really see where you want to go with “Poll: Which Adobe product workflow is the most important to improve?”, as you end with Blaze.
on 16 Feb 2006 at 9:16 am 2.Graeme said …
That has got to be the ugliest poll app I’ve seen in a while… No nice flash poll apps lying around Mike?
PS to Flash is it for me.
on 16 Feb 2006 at 11:09 pm 3.Lalo said …
Illustrator to Flash. Vectors to Vectors! And what about Premiere Pro to Flash?!
on 17 Feb 2006 at 12:09 am 4.Mike Downey said …
Hi Frank -
I’m not sure if I understand your objection to the poll. Obviously I didn’t include every product - just the four that I’m most interested in getting feedback about. Flex Builder and Flash *are* Adobe products now.
With regard to Fireworks you are right. We already have a good workflow with Fireworks but we need to do a lot of work on the workflow between Flash and these four products.
That said - you should not assume that these are the only four products that we will be focusing on in this release.
Thanks,
MD
on 17 Feb 2006 at 12:10 am 5.Mike Downey said …
Graeme -
I agree, it is pretty ugly. However, it’s REALLY easy to use. If you know of a better-looking polling app that just spits out some HTML that I paste into my blog post as I did with this one let me know.
Maybe I should contact the BlugFlux guys to see if they’d be interested in prettying up their polling app with Flash…
MD
on 17 Feb 2006 at 12:12 am 6.Mike Downey said …
Lalo -
Good question. We do have a few plans to improve the Premiere Pro to Flash workflow but the scope of the work is fairly straight forward. The more complex workflows are present in PS, AI, AE, and FB. The level of integration that we support can go pretty deep with these products so we want to get a feel for which are the most important to users.
Thanks,
MD
on 19 Feb 2006 at 9:58 pm 7.Nero said …
How about tackling the HUGE speed problem with the browser plugin on OS X first? Then we can work on more features that I’ll never use. You guys are making Flash so very complicated, and guys like me who rely on raw speed (I’ll admit bitmap caching was a godsent) are getting screwed just because the standalone player can fly and the brower plugin runs about half as fast as 7’s in OS X.
on 19 Feb 2006 at 11:42 pm 8.Mike Downey said …
Hi Nero -
I must admit that I haven’t heard any complaints that Flash Player 8 is half as fast as Flash Player 7 on OS X. In fact, with the OpenGL optimizations that we did in Flash Player 8 we’ve seen as much as a 30% improvement in graphics rendering on the Mac.
That said, the Player team continuously focuses on performance improvements with every release and continues to make significant progress. The next release of Flash Player, Flash Player 8.5, includes a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2) which, when combined with ActionScript 3.0, can improve script execution performance by as much as 10x.
You can check out the early alpha of Flash Player 8.5 for the Mac at http://labs.adobe.com.
Thanks,
MD
on 20 Feb 2006 at 11:45 am 9.John Dowdell said …
“How about tackling the HUGE speed problem with the browser plugin on OS X first?” Nero, how does your machine do if you shut down the browsers and open in a Projector? This could tell us whether it’s the Player, or the Player/browser interaction, which you’re suffering with there.
(One of the biggest differences was supposed to have been addressed, but the final reports on the Bugzilla entry suggest that it may not be a complete solution.)
on 20 Feb 2006 at 11:46 am 10.John Dowdell said …
whoops, looks like the markup didn’t go through… was supposed to read “One of the biggest differences was supposed to have been addressed in Firefox 1.5″, with this link:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/emmy/archives/2005/11/firefox_15_avai.cfm
on 21 Feb 2006 at 3:28 pm 11.Josh Tynjala said …
People need to realize that there are a LOT of people working on Flash, in several (I assume) different teams. They’re still working on speed improvements and all that in the player, but a completely different team handles working in the IDE and integrating with other programs and formats. Flash is a big project with many different parts.
on 21 Feb 2006 at 11:30 pm 12.Mike Downey said …
This is true, Josh. We have the Flash authoring team (my team), the Flash Player team, the mobile Player team, the Flex framework team, the Flex Server team, the Flex Builder team, the Apollo team, etc, etc. It’s a big project.
on 02 Mar 2006 at 4:57 am 13.Nick said …
NOt only is workflow in it’s widest sense important, but if you take the close integration between Captivate and Flash, where the import of the project brings all components e.g. tweens and such - imagine the possibilities if flash could take in a After Effects project in the same way! This just has got to be done!
on 22 Mar 2006 at 11:08 pm 14.Roman Laney said …
Anyone want Flash workflow to move towards other Adobe apps instead of the other way around? The Flash environment is my first stop in a long line of apps to get my final product. Sure I use Flash inproperly ( tv animation) but man does Flash make it difficult to export artwork to illustrator, and is iffy beyound belief when exporting any thing above the standard 72 dpi. A perfect export to Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects, including all layers, would be amazing! That’s where I would really like to see some improvements.