May 15th 2009 | David Vogeleer

Flash CS4 - Take 3

It's been some rough months for the developers making Flash CS4 at Adobe. After the initial release, lots of users started complaining about the stability and memory usage of the app. This week, the second patch was released solving dozens of issues.

The first patch was released in November and fixed the most critical issues, such as the White Screen of Death experienced by game developer Jobe Makar. According to Flash IDE product manager Richard Galvan, this second updater has taken more time since Adobe wanted to address as many issues as possible.

For the CS4 release, the entire windowing system in the Flash IDE and much of the internals were changed radically. One feature was that what you saw on stage were to be rendered by the Flash Player at all times. This ensured that what you saw on screen was what you got upon export. While a cool feature, it soon became more of a nightmare for users as memory usage rocketed for many types of projects. Could it be that someone forgot to test how this would work in real life, with huge projects that had long timelines and lots of things happening?

There's also been issues with the windowing system in general. In our initial review of Flash CS4 we just loved how it worked. Once we started working with it on a day to day basis it became obvious that the changes to the tool had been radical. Many things we took for granted were now broken - and the amount of bugs made many go back to using their CS3 version. As Galvan points out, they couldn't fit all fixes into this release, but check the list to see what's been fixed.

Download the Flash CS4 update here