Critical Errors with Flash CS4

Posted on | January 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

I will admit, that this is probably the only application from the whole Creative Suite 4 that is giving me issues. It’s like they rushed this product out in order to make the cut when the whole suite shipped. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new extras that they added into it, like the Motion Editor.

However, the new additions don’t make up for the fact that almost every time I click on a text item, try to open an older Flash CS3 file, or try to go from a text item to a movie clip or button item that I am thoroughly disgusted with how Flash CS4 behaves.

More often than not, when I double click on a text item that is on the actual board to edit it and is inside a graphic container, I get a Flash has encountered an error and will shut down. BAH HUMBUG! Text makes up a large percentage of what I want to do within Flash, so having it that when you edit text it crashes is a huge NO NO!

The second item of irritation is that I have older CS3 files that occasionally need updating and editing. I have one that is over 123MB in size because it houses tons of different scenes. When I try to open it, it doesn’t even give me an error, Flash just sits there and hangs up the entire system. I’ve tried saving it out as an even older file type, from a different workstation that still has Flash CS3 (thanks to the help of a friend) and I encounter the same issue.

The last really big peeve with Flash CS4 is the flash panels used for the properties of graphics, text, buttons, and movies. If I create a text box and actually have the ability to edit it without crashing, the text properties panel is “FLAKY”! (click images below for larger view)

Then of course, once you’ve selected a text object, the properties panel WILL NOT change back if you select another item type. It continues to display the above whacked out Text Properties panel with missing icons and so forth.

I truly hope that Adobe gets their Flash application development team cracking on fixing these issues.  I don’t know if it’s just for people with Windows/Vista or what, but this is just plain scream worthy aggravation.

P.S. Just installed CS4 on the Windows 7 beta platform and Flash CS4 seems to behave flawlessly. So we have a CS4 installed on Windows XP 32-bit that is flaky, and now on Win7 64-bit that behaves as it should. Hmmm, of course I had CS3 installed previously on my XP platform… Maybe I should go back and uninstall it, and try again.

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