I recently got upgraded to CS4 at work and for the most part, the many changes that have taken place in Flash have been pretty cool. I’m having trouble adjusting to the new interface (in particular, having the timeline be at the bottom of the screen vs. the top). Many of the changes have been requested for years - like more AfterEffects integration, 3D, etc. And to be honest, Adobe has delivered some pretty cool new features.

Now for the bad news. As is always the case (or so it seems), every major release comes with its own baggage and behavior that isn’t so welcome. For me (and many others), it’s the new CS4 help system – or lack thereof. It turns out that the folks at Adobe decided that if you’re looking for help, you should be going to their servers — you know…those slow snail-paced things that adobe.com is hosted on — and get your answers there. The help that we’ve all grown accustomed to is now gone, and to quote Bentley Wolfe, an Adobe engineer “The old help format is gone, and not coming back. Sorry.” Nice.

So there you have it. If you’re like me and use the help files constantly as a reference while developing in the Flash IDE, stick to CS3. Otherwise, if you don’t mind waiting for the slow server to load, then finding the right section, then searching for a class or function, then sorting through irrelevant search results until you find something the resembles what you’re looking for, then realizing it’s not it and starting another search, and finally finding something that is already confusing to begin with…well then, be my guest.

More on CS4 later.

[ update ] Well, thanks to David Stiller in this thread, I now at least have access to the local help files when pressing F1 - though it still opens in a browser. Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to Window/Extensions/Connections
2. Click on the context menu (upper right-hand corner)
3. Select “Keep me offline”
4. You’re good to go. Now when you press F1, the browser will open and look for the local files.

I was just downstairs watching tv with my better half and saw a commercial by American Express that quite frankly, left a very nasty taste in my mouth. You have undoubtedly seen it (as I have already seen it like four times in 30 minutes). It goes something like this:

The scene is of some business people having lunch, and when the bill comes, the one guy pulls out his comic-book hero card to pay for lunch. The clients (who are german) comment in their native tongue that the card looks like something right out of kindergarten. They laugh at the guy, and quickly leave the table.

The commercial then proceeds to show the business partner (a woman) pull out her American Express Gold card and in a condescending tone says “I’ll get it,” dropping her card on top of his “childish” card.

I cannot begin to tell you how wrong this is on so many levels. It’s a typical (and despicable) psychological game often found in the world of advertisers. Make you feel ashamed of what you have so they can sell you their product instead.

What’s wrong with a comic-book card? Doesn’t it still represent money? Did I miss something? I don’t think so…but American Express certainly did. I’m sorry, but I am no less powerful as a consumer because I pay with something other than your piece of colored plastic. The point that you are trying to make could have been done so much more tactfully and respectfully — instead, you have managed to insult a great number of potential clients. Congratulations! I hope you fire your ad agency, because I’m very close to firing you.

I cannot begin to tell you how painfully true this is. The other thing I get a lot of is “Oooh! I have this idea for a cool website! Can you do it?.”

The answer is always no.

After doing a great deal of research on Apple Aperture vs. Adobe Lightroom, I finally landed on Apple’s Aperture. Not so much because the feature set was amazing, but because I had already bought Aperture v1 a while back and figured the upgrade would be cheaper.

Now, there are countless reviews of both products that are fantastic for anyone trying to decide, but I can tell you that after using both products, I can say that both of them are freakin’ awesome, and you simply can’t go wrong with either one. It really boils down to a matter of preference (and computing power actually — as Aperture practically demands an Intel Mac Pro).

Anywho, I won’t get into that right now. My focus at the moment is on Aperture’s export to gallery feature (which I use constantly). I simply love the simplicity of exporting an Aperture gallery. It’s an elegant way of presenting your work to the world, and you can even password-protect your galleries so you can publish an entire photo shoot for your client — and your client only. Very cool.

But there is one MAJOR flaw with Aperture’s gallery feature which confuses me to no end. And that’s the fact that there is no way to publish the photo’s caption – only the photo’s file name. Perhaps there is good logic behind this for professional photographers (even though I fail to see it) – but the fact that you can publish captions to the same gallery using iPhoto and not Aperture completely blows my mind.

Of course, the simple solution is to drag my photos over to iPhoto, and publish from there…but that is not the point here. The point is that the feature already exists — and porting it to Aperture would take Apple’s engineers a whopping two minutes (by my very scientific and precise calculations).

So there you have it. Aperture rocks — but no captions? In the immortal words of Gob…COME ON!!!!!

It is largely understood that Windows Vista is — in many ways — a flop. So it’s no surprise that Redmond is trying desperately to *gasp* come up with something interesting to offer. Tonight was a much-anticipated appearance by monkey-boy and the evil emperor at All Things Digital in California where they were to give people a sneak peak at Windows 7 (what? No funky name?). What they delivered? Multi-touch support on Windows 7. *yawn*.

For those of you interested, here’s a live blog of the encounter, complete with a short video of multi-touch in action.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think multi-touch is very cool and I hope to see much more of it. But it’s gonna take a whole heck of a lot more than a bigger iPhone to redeem the flop otherwise known as Vista. And just one question I have: who wants a laptop screen full of fingerprints? *sigh*.