Saturday, January 12, 2008

Adobe looking to over-productize

I read an article this morning announcing a new Adobe product code-named Bordeaux. Bordeaux is a tool that will allow graphic designers to make great Flash content without knowing Actionscript - it's like Thermo for Flash.

This strikes me as a little weird because I thought Flash WAS the graphic designer tool for making flash content. When did flash become a "developer" tool? And if it is, why does the AS console still feel like an afterthought?

It feels to me like Adobe's taking this whole "flash content for designers" idea a little too far, and needs to bunker down and consolidate. Rather than making two new products and charging us all another $500 a piece to use them, they should focus on consolidating their features into the existing tools. Flash should be the graphic design framework for Flash content, and Flex should be the developer framework.

Without this, Flex is quickly turning into Flash with a layout manager and a different developer environment. That just doesn't seem like a big enough deal to merit an entirely separate product to me. I'd rather see the entire Flex and Flash teams working to make a single great product than trying to play catch-up and maintain divergent streams of the AS3 code base.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

-Sounds like the built-in page turn transitions on my Avid that I gave up for dead long, long ago.