Flash 8

It's that time of year again, time to list what Macromedia have cocked up with this years Flash release. So, my trial has lasted less than a day with Flash 8 before having to revert to MX04 (which I hate). Last year's full on showstopper bug in the release version was the fact that pinning your scripts meant you would lose a whole days work when Flash failed to save the changes. Unfortunately it took me a whole day to find that out. This year, the idiotic bug that has been introduced and is bringing an end to my trial of Flash 8, is that it can't publish to an absolute path across a network.

Try it yourself, (this is in Windows btw).

  1. Start a new movie
  2. Open the publish settings
  3. Click the little folder to choose a publish destination
  4. Select a destination on another machine
  5. Click publish

You get this message...

Error creating Flash movie. Destination directory does not exist. Change your publish settings.

What a great new feature, make the software useless to people on a network.

I imagine if I could actually work around this bug I would find an endless list of showstoppers again but thankfully this one ended the trial run early.

One nice new feature I did spot before giving up though was that when you click on the stage, Flash doesn't consider your document to be changed anymore. 8 versions we've waited for that. I'm not going to hold my breath for the network publish to be solved.