Guys, after just short time (luckily) that I had to work with flash, during which time flash show what its capable of (not a positive thing), my thoughts on it.
Flash is extremely poor quality software. Incidents working with flash involved
1. thumb doesn't show up on slider when I click button once, but shows up when I click this same button twice. (code: thumb.visible=true), that all there was to it!!!
2. movie clips moved out of scene are showing on scene anyway
3. Simply copying the aforementioned slider and placing it on first frame on main scene brakes totally unrelated code somewhere else. But pasting the same slider on second frame doesn't brake that code anymore! Needless to say that slider has no code whatsoever so it couldn't possibly reference anything in my scene anyway!
What else? Yesterday I was happily working till lunch. Saved my work, went, had a lunch, came back, try to open my file, nope, not so fast flash tells me that this is incorrect format of a file!!! I couldn't believe what I'm seeing. I've never during my 15 years of working as a programmer came across software which couldn't open file saved by itself. Apparently, this is very common problem with flash:
Luckily I've had save this file the day before so I've lost only half a day's work.
Another phenomena, during debugging flash goes through lines of code and at last line throws error that child mustn't be null, which is really bizarre because on previous lines I've had that child object and flash didn't complain at all:
child = new Item();//goes through this line
child.setUp("myChild");//goes through this line
addChild(child);//throws ERROR that child mustn't be null.
Another incident, two buttons identical class, all is different is text on them, one says play, the other one says settings. First button do not respond to mouse events, specifically to mouse_over event, second button behaves correctly. Situation got resolved that I've added another, dummy button and moved it out of stage. Now both original buttons behave correctly!!! How is this possible???
Another incident from before yestarday. Same slider. First frame, two copies of it. First one (top one) after publishing looks as it looks in editor, second looks completely different! parts are scaled up, far away from each other, total mess!!!WHY??? I simply put one slider from library and copied it once. Same frame, same slider, no code involved whatsoever and despite this flash messes things up.
Another incident with slider. The same slider copied from one frame to other. One works perfectly on one frame (that is you can drag the thumb and the thumb follows your mouse), paste EXACT!!! copy of this slider on different frame and the slider becomes unresponsive!!! Un effing bellievable!!!!
Oh, and one more thing, can this software and swfs produced by it be any slower and use more processor power?
There were also plenty of others smaller annoyances how flash behaves, or why doesn't behave correctly. I'm so glad that will not have to work with this software anymore. It is so bad. And it is Flash CC. Unbelievable.
So I suppose, my question is, why is flash so poor quality software, despite the fact that is on the market for so many years?