Tough questions for Adobe
One thing the Flash community doesn’t have a problem with is speaking up when they think Adobe is doing something stupid. In an effort to be as transparent as possible, I’m going to try to get some more detailed answers from within Adobe to some of the tough questions that I hear quite often from the community. To be completely honest, I know about as much as you do on a lot of these so I’m just as curious as you are.
I’m not going to render my opinion on any of these but rather give you the reasoning behind some of the decisions we make. Sometimes the factors that lead to our decisions cannot be made public for one reason or another. But more often than not, we just simply haven’t done a good job communicating why we do certain things. Below are a sample of some of the most asked questions in no particular order.
- Why did you change the FileReference class in Flash Player 10, effectively breaking a lot of existing Flash content? The security reasoning doesn’t really make sense.
- What’s up with the CS4 launch? First you have an announce date that doesn’t even give a release date. Then you release it without putting the trial versions up.
- Why can’t Adobe afford to pay speaker expenses for MAX? If small conferences can do it, why can’t Adobe? Now you are paying expenses for some speakers and not others which is potentially even worse.
- Why do you make changes to things without telling the community? An example would be the changes to the Sound APIs in Flash Player 10.
Now one thing I would ask is that you give us the benefit of the doubt on these until I can get more details. One thing you can be sure of is that Adobe is not filled with evil people who are sitting back twisting their mustaches, thinking of ways to make your life difficult. Remember that we are also users of our products so we want them to just as cool as you do.
While it might be tempting to leave a comment with other questions that you want answers to, I’m going to first try to deal with the ones above. After that we can look at the next set 
.
Lee
Hey Lee,
I’m guessing there were quite a few people complaining at the conference yesterday. Well instead of complaining, I thought I’d say something that Adobe is doing right in flash player 10, which is the unloadAndStop method. It will save a LOT of troubles, plus it should free up memory quite a bit. It was really annoying before.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the Actionscript Conference yesterday. It was good to have a bit of a chat with you.
Where can I find a list of Actionscript changes?
Which one of these is not like the others? Well, #3 is a very old topic. (But one that never fails to amuse.) Seriously, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on the other 3.
It will be great to hear the reason behind the strange release procedures of CS4. Many of us are very excited to get our hand on it.
i got flash 10 working with the new flex sdk 3.0.2, however i have some problems with code completion. One more thing that irritates me is, if Adobe added the GPU support, why couldn’t they make another Bitmap like Class and call it openGLBitmap, where we can render all the 3D stuff. openGL works on all platforms, and from tunic’s blog it looks like flash 10 is already using openGL. why not give us the full power of openGL?
One question you will probably have during your european trips :
Why europeans have to pay for CS4 so much more than US people ?
. via download, there is no extra cost for shipping !
. english people pay for the exact same version !
. in quebec/canada, the french version is sold at the same price than the US version (no extra cost for localisation there)
I don’t think the support alone could explain the 60% extra cost.
An official answer from Adobe is really necessary (think “TRUST”).
Thanks Lee for your wonderful site !
And thanks Adobe engineers for their remarquable work !
Denis
I too would like to know about the Euro pricing. I can see however, that this subject may be a little out of the scope of this article, particularly because Adobe have already made some absolutely feeble attempts already at justification. I am pretty sure that Adobe are wanting to brush this one under the carpet.
Whilst I can agree with Lee regarding the Flash player features (Adobe needs to be trusted at least a bit on this), the financial factor is a far less trustworthy subject because Adobe seems to be behaving akin to a typical greedy corporation and just charging what they think they can get away with. This trend of greed bites you in the end.
I think the latest CS4 products are very good releases, and I really want to upgrade, but I (along with A LOT of my colleagues) are just refusing to do so on principle. My trust in Adobe is really suffering at the moment.
I concur with Dennis on his comment, i don’t get why we europeans have to pay so much more! Don’t quote me on this but i would say its a bit extortionate and very unfair on us and i cant see any reason whatsoever how they can invent an extra 60% cost! Adobe should have the responsibility as a global company to provide a fair and equal price for its services and products. On a more positive not looking forward to finally having decent control over keyframes
.
I agree with #1. I’ve been running flash player 10 for 3 days. And I switched back to 9 today. Becaause of file upload issues in new flash player. They want me to use new fp? No… I’ll wait until all issues are fixed.
Hi Lee
Thanks for doing this. I definitely think that Adobe, in comparison to other companies, is very very transparent and in touch with the community. I heard that 80% of the CS4 changes were user-submitted too.
One thing i would really love to know is why Adobe is so scared to leave developers (particularly in AIR) to their own devices… They have ominous-looking warning messages on the installer, you cannot run external files from an AIR app, etc. Surely the onus is on the developer and publisher to moderate maliciousness??
I think Adobe either needs to clarify this with a really good explanation OTHER than legal-begal rubbish, or finally let us do what we will do. Malicious or not.
Prices are really weird from USA and Europe :
upgrade (english – win – download)
USA : $199
France : 240,79€
upgrade (english – win – ship the box)
USA : $199
France : 238€
It’s more expensive to download it, than to ship !!
It doesn’t make any sense
For information 1 euro = $1,3473
Thanks Lee for all these informations
One other point (more technically related) that I would like to see answered is why adobe has replaced the project panel in CS4 without providing an API for the new one yet.
Any extensions that use this panel (the Gaia framework for instance) will now not work properly as they rely upon the project panel extensively. Furthermore, I am assuming that its a bit difficult to build a new extension version without an API.
Hopefully, Adobe intend to provide a new API reasonably soon?
Here’s a link to an article that Steven Sacks (the author of the fantastic Gaia framework) wrote in his blog:
http://www.stevensacks.net/2008/09/26/jsfl-in-flash-cs4-project-panel-alternative/
This is sort of inline with Q #2.
Why accept preorders on 9/23 (I preordered The Master Suite on 9/25), then announce it is shipping on 10/15, then when you call to ask about the status of your order you get an answer like “they are shipping on a first come first serve basis, yours is still a week out”. So I guess my question is why take preorders at all if you can’t fill them on ship date???
A really good example of a company filling preorders successfully was the release of Halo 3, the largest video game releash in history so they say and all preorders went out the day of the release. Why can’t Adobe hit that mark? Adobe is a big company and should be able to estimate how many they need from the amount of preorders they received. So then they can have the product ready to ship to those who took the time to get their preorders in.
The same thing happened with the CS3 launch, but I cut Adobe a little slack because of the acquisition of Macromedia, but this time it is just unprofessional. They hype the new product to death, but wont ship it when they announce it. I heard all the excuses before. “We didn’t anticipate the large number of orders so we ran out of our first run of the software.” B.S. to that. If that is really the case then someone needs to get fired, and Adobe doesn’t have it together as much as a company their size should. When you launch something you better have the inventory ready to go when people start ordering.
Your problem is that you think that all the europeans earn as much as people in Switzerland or Norway. The thing is that in western Europe, salaries are 5 times lower. For example in Poland average salary is something around 3000 pln (= 844,7 euro). The prize of master collection is 3,3386.79 euro. How the hell am I supposed to afford that stuff?
I agree with Denis.
I live in Germany and the pricing model is just ridicolous. I’ve read a post at a blog (which is hard to be found again) recently, mentoning that EU buyers will have to pay from 63% to 80% more than US citicens and (if this isn’t enough) they aren’t allowed to purchase a version from a shop located in the states too.
Is this true. If yes, explain it to me please…
On the other hand. They did an excellent Job with (at least Flash CS4 for what i’ve seen so far). Just the Editor is (as always) unusable. (exept gotoAndPlay() scripting)…
I full agree with Denis: when CS3 came out some time ago, lot of people asked why price so different from US to Europe. No answers, and now with CS4 same thing (with the price of upgrade from CS3 web premium to CS4 Master Collection in Europe, in US we buy full new CS4 master collection!).
Also the additional 16-20 € for download are strange: it’s the first time I see a software house sell download version more than boxed one.
Like Denis, I’d also like to know why I’ve to pay about 800-1000 € more for the same software only because I live in Europe
I have an even tougher question – Doesn’t Adobe test there stuff at all? I bought the CS4 Master Collection download version. Downloaded it, and it doesn’t install… After spending literally about 10 hours on the phone with Adobe and about 20 hours total installing and removing CS4 because it crashes on the English Language pack, I was told that my download packages were corrupt… I had already downloaded 4 times (about 8.5GB folks even on FIOS that takes a while) and then the tech support guy (Samson – the only helpful tech support person I had) determined after reviewing my error log, that it was Adobe’s fault, not mine…
Most other tech support folks tried to tell me I don’t know what I am doing. I was extremely p’d because I have been a loyal non pirating, Flash addict since it was called Future Splash… And I have more PC than 99% of the people working at the tech support area of Adobe.
Anyway, they could not fix my issue, they couldn’t even refresh my download files… WHAT? SERIOUSLY? Yeah – they could not even fix their own download servers. Um, and I’m giving them how much money?
They are sending me discs but come on if I wanted to wait 2 weeks, I would not have preordered on the 23rd when this was announced.
I have to say my trust is severely shaken right now… So maybe you could find out why the download that I paid $1200 for cannot be refreshed to correct the problem. That’s a question that I really believe needs to be answered. Not just for me – ANYONE who purchased the package for download is probably going through a similar problem.
There has been some issues with the CS4 release, but I’m still eager to try it… I wonder if there will be some information around about this changes in the APIs…
Thanks for everything Lee… As always you are our link to Adobe…
4b. Another example would be abandoning the .flp file type, removing the Project Panel and its associated JSFL API with no warning, no grace period, and no deprecation.
I’m a little mystified that the Flash IDE “help” is now only online. I used it quite frequently to look up class definitions, methods and properties. There is also no PDF version for the class reference section of the online help (it says you can look it up in the IDE).
I’m not always connected to the internet and don’t always have ,y reference books with me. A PDF version (at least) would be nice….
I’m just curious on the reasoning behind changing the “z” key to the new bone tool and setting an “m” for zooming… Haven’t tried any other cs4 products then flash but i very much doubt they will use “m” for zoom and “z” for something else no?
I just assume Adobe, like many businesses, is usually stretching itself too far, and therefor unable to perfectly cover every detail. I know the company I work for is!
I just purchased Flash CS4 for the mac and I opened up a file I have been working on in CS3 and everything is VERY slow. The file takes 70 seconds to load. Then when I try and double click to edit my main movieclip it takes about 20 seconds to load the edit. In CS3 the same file takes 2 seconds to load and less than a second after I double click the movieclip to edit. Everything is like this — about 10-20 times as long to do anything. I have a MacBook Pro (OSX 1.5.5, 3GB ram, 2.33 GHz). Maybe this is why there are no trial versions… because it’s not ready to launch (at least for the Mac).
Why is the Flash Player not being open sourced?
Arguments like ‘that way there will be too many implementations out there’ are not valid in my opinion, Sun used to say exactly the same about the Java runtime and then they decided to make it open source under a GPL license. I’d be interested in the answer, because I’m 99% sure in a few years time it will become open source and that’s when it will be interesting to refer back to the arguments you give today and realize it should’ve been open source all along.
When the Flash Player would be open source all of those ‘tough questions’ raised here could’ve been easily and satisfactory answered, instead of the secrecy there is around the Flash Player today.
Lee, are you familiar with this site? http://www.dearadobe.com/
Those are all the questions that need to be answered by Adobe.
Hey Lee,
Thank you for being a crusader for collective flash community. I’m glad to see members at Adobe are moving towards transparency, when things are typically very closed.
“Who needs 3D support in flash, nobody really wants that” lol.
Why does Adobe see fit to completely rip UK customers off, in total we pay almost £500 ($286)* more than the US does. We pay £1500 ($2,613) and you pay (£1,032) $1799. Now I can put up with the fact there may be shipping costs, but there is no way it would cost £500 to ship a single copy of CS4. And then another thing is that Adobe wonders why there is such a high piracy rate. There are loyal customers seriously considering a trip to The Pirate Bay!!! Adobes products are great why should they be spoilt by price?
*Based on adobe cs4 Design Premium
PS: Sorry if this looks like some angry rant its not I just have strong feelings on this subject.
oops sorry I didn’t look at the post above, god now I look like prat >_<
Caching in Flash! now there’s a mystery. We need a robust way of Flash interogating servers to find out whether we have the latest versions of files, using the local cache where appropriate and getting the new assets when not. Instead we have to use cache busting techniques and PHP workarounds. C’mon Adobe!
hi Lee,
My big problem with Flash CS4 is the font list and the text tool is to heavy and slow. When i choose it the application freezes for a some time and when i open the font menu the program closes I hope that you can till your fucks in adobe to resolve those problem cause this application is wonderful like your work and your helpful site
Thanks again Lee.
Nabeel
Wow, very brave post. I for one am very happy to see someone from Adobe speaking this honest and clear.
The question about the huge pricing between countries is a very nice one too. It’s been previously discussed but I haven’t heard an official explanation yet.
Cheers!
Juan
[...] Tough questions for Adobe Cool Stuff Flash Player, web « HydroSequence, stop, [...]
Heard back already from the Flash Player and MAX teams and they are going to write something up. Please be patient though as it may take a little time to compile. Thanks
.
Stick with flash 9!
@JC No way! Flash 10 is amazing, and while there may be an issue or two, overall it is an amazing release.
Lee please tell the nice people of adobe to increase the SPEED, even after as3 the speed is still bad, before thinking about adding another feature please focus on the speed first ( who needs IK?? ). Silverlight is FASTER then flash. Please heed this warning or face extinction
Agree on the remapping of the Z key. Seriously annoyed me at Flashcamp.
this is silly, but our flash detection js was seeing the flash player 10 plugin description as 0 and therefore displaying the upgrade flash page. it was an easy fix but something to be aware of.
I agree with all of the above regarding European costings. I know that Adobe are getting very tired of the question – when it was raised at the Town Hall Meeting at FOTB, the audience laughed and the team on stage rolled their eyes because it was inevitable. But the answer given was quite frankly, unsatisfying. The general consensus of the crowd is that there was no good reason for doubling the US prices other than for “support lines”, which pretty much everybody concurred that they rarely have used, if ever.
In these days of electronic downloads, none of us can understand Adobe’s position on this. As a small business owner I am responsible for organising license fees on software and now with economic downturn, I believe that it is Adobe’s responsibility to give us a satisfying response to this. I’m not just moaning for the sake of moaning, if Adobe can give me a response that makes sense then I will be the first to put my hands in the air and say “fair enough”. But currently they are pricing small businesses in Europe out of the market and I’m absolutely certain that a lot of people (myself NOT included) will have to resort to illegal downloads to keep themselves alive and up to date.
I deal with the companies all around the world and other than basic tax changes, my prices are exactly the same no matter where you are. Similarly I buy a variety of software, books and services from all over the world using the internet and other than the occasional hike in shipping costs, they cost exactly the same wherever I buy them. So what I’m saying is that I can understand a small cost increase due to taxes and shipping – but doubling the price is quite frankly disgusting.
Finally, I would like to ask, why do Adobe make it so difficult for small businesses to become Adobe Partners? Surely the majority of web design and multimedia companies around the world are in fact small businesses. For 2 years now I have been a “Microsoft Partner” which allows me to use all of their software, with a number of licenses and quarterly updates. In exchange I pay £200 a year and take an exam in their software to prove that I am worthy to promote them in the workplace. Yet the majority of the software that I use is from Adobe and I would love to promote Adobe software and stand up proudly and state that I’m an Adobe Partner, but Adobe’s partnership schemes centre on a company’s revenue and don’t seem to care that users of their software (especially Flash) are promoting them on a daily basis.
So I suppose my question is, how are Adobe going to help me promote them?
Apologies for the lengthy moan Lee, I just needed to get all of that off my chest! Thanks again for running a great blog and my favourite tutorial site.
As a Gaia user, I would like to see .flp and an API for the project panel back.
So much for tackling the first four set of questions that Lee outlined in his post…
I guess you can’t please everybody. Though when common sense goes out the window on the pricing front users get pretty stroppy. I’m in a bit of a different situation as I lived (up until 6 months ago) in Australia where the pricing was higher than the US but no where near as disparate as the European prices. Well now I’m living in London, so I’m now being subjected to the same pricing oddities as the rest of the region. Though I guess I could just purchase and download from the Australian store (assuming that’s not contravening any laws or licences!!?)
I normally wait a few months before upgrading to the next release of the Studio software so the initial issues will hopefully get sorted out in that time.
@Edward – thanks for posting the link to http://www.dearadobe.com/index.php Lot’s of good stuff in there
Flash 10 is overall an amazing “pre-release”. I can’t agree that a final release should have so much issues and it’s not one or two. Or at least the ones known and experienced by many are 2. The product haven’t even been tested enough to know the rest of the problems.
Sound API’s latency moved from 46 ms to 830 ms with Flash Player 10. That’s not an issue. That’s a disaster.
Old files created with previous versions take forever to load.
Fonts menu crashes the IDE. I’ve heard that from several users (including myself).
Every product on the planet uses “z” for the zoom tool, including Adobe’s baby products Photoshop and Illustrator. Now we have to adapt to another shortcut.
Project panel disappeared! Eh…! Hello…??? People do use stuff like a project panel. Especially developers.
And don’t let me start with AS3.
All that and we didn’t have the chance to test the product enough. We’re still going back and forth to Flash 9 to finish what we previously started.
So Flash 10 might be an amazing pre-release but it’s not even close to be a release.
We really appreciate the effort you’re making in keeping the community close to the manufacturer, yet we really would like Adobe to actually listen to what the community says cause this is how Flash and other products might evolve to an actual reliable release.
I’m not denying all the effort the Adobe Team has put to make Flash what it is today. But I think that WishLists are the ones that are actually initializing those improvements and changes. We’re not asking Adobe to give us part of its earnings
yet we’re asking it to be transparent and fair; Adobe CS4 Design Premium US: $1799, France: 2630 Euros ($3464), UK: 1467 GBP ($2492)
Thanks Lee.
albeit the above be true, i tend to want the new releases, but always wait up to 6months until I am satisfied the development community in general have had a chance to put it through its riggors. After my purchase this year, I personally think CS3 Master Suite has been one of the best releases to date, and if not, was a snapshot of things to come.
Pricing – hmm, always a hard one, why? well, basically, I re-coup the cost of my Adobe purchase generally in one to two projects. Paying 63% more…sucks dogs balls for sure…and that does need to be addressed.
otherwise, theres my 4,500 AUD worth on the matter.
For those of you who want Z to be the zoom tool again you can modify all of the keyboard shortcuts in Flash CS4.
The keys…
Thanks Lee, still curious about the reasoning behind it, i’m sure it’s very logical :]
ehi Lee you made it
Kudos to you !!
see you in SF
ciao
marco
Heck I would love to try Flash CS4 but I can’t seem to order it from Adobe. My transactions are being denied even with my bank approving $3k. Try talking about this to customer service in INDIA, I am better off banging my head against the wall. Forget about the issues with Flash, Adobe can’t even process my order. Great service!
Ed
Want back Panel APIs to use with Gaia!
Why are people saying that the project panel has gone? It is still there as soon as you open cs4 for the first time.
I am really miffed about the filereference stuff though, it looks like loads of work I have done in the past few months needs recoding to get rid of the annoying security popups.
[...] the weekend, Lee Brimelow created a brave post hoping to address some common critical questions he’s asked about some of Adobe’s [...]
Well – not sure if this is going to resolve my issue with my software that would not install, but apparently someone at Adobe realized that they screwed up and posted a prerelease version of CS4 on their download servers. I am currently downloading the “release version”.
Guess we’ll see what happens.
@Jim Glad to hear. Mistakes like that happen and thanks for being patient.
Ok – after about 5 hours of unistalling, cleaning, downloading and reinstalling CS4 is working great! Whew – I knew it wasn’t me!
In case anyone else has this issue here is the email with the resolution. Lee, you may want to add this to your site in a more visible area.
From: Adobe Customer Service
Sent: Fri Oct 17 18:37
To:
Priority: Normal
Subject: Alert: Incorrect Version of CS4 Master Collection (Win only) on Adobe Online Store
Dear Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection customer,
We have discovered an issue that affects a recent purchase you made from
the Adobe Online Store. Unfortunately, we inadvertently posted a nearly
final version of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection for Windows,
rather than the final version, for purchase and download. We wanted to
alert you to the problem and let you know how to fix it. We appreciate
your recent purchase of CS4 Master Collection and apologize deeply for
the inconvenience this issue may cause you.
BACKGROUND
If you purchased and downloaded CS4 Master Collection for Windows from
the Adobe Online Store between 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday,
October 14 and 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Thursday, October 16, you
received an older version of the software and not the final version. No
other versions of CS4 Master Collection—whether available in
shrink-wrapped retail boxes or on volume licensing media sets—were
affected. We have now removed the incorrect version from the Adobe Store
and replaced it with the correct final version of CS4 Master Collection
for Windows.
HOW TO CORRECT THE ISSUE
Nearly final versions of software are not intended for production
workflows. We strongly recommend that you replace the build you
previously downloaded as soon as possible. Here are the steps to to
take:
If you have downloaded the software without installing it, please delete the files from your system. You will then be able to download the corrected version to replace it.
If you have already installed Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, you
must uninstall the software. Otherwise, when you download and install
the final version, you will see an error message and the installation
will stop.
To uninstall the software, do the following:
On Windows XP, open the Windows Control Panel and double-click Add or
Remove Programs. Select the product that you want to uninstall, click
Change/Remove, and then follow the onscreen instructions.
On Windows Vista, open the Windows Control Panel and double-click
Programs and Features. Select the product that you want to uninstall,
click Uninstall/Change, and then follow the onscreen instructions.
Then download the updated version of CS4 Master Collection: Go to the
Adobe Store in your region, click Your Purchases, click Your Downloads, log in with your Adobe ID and password, and then initiate a new download.
If you prefer not to download the software again, we would be happy to
send you a complimentary DVD set for CS4 Master Collection for Windows. Please contact Adobe Customer Service to place your request:
In North America, call Adobe Customer Service at 800-833-6687.
In other regions, locate the Adobe Customer Service number for your
region at http://www.adobe.com/support/contact.
We regret any inconvenience or confusion this issue may cause you. We
appreciate your purchase of CS4 Master Collection for Windows and want
you to have a productive and satisfying experience using the software.
Please accept our sincerest apology.
Sincerely,
The Adobe Online Store Team
All this talk about the pricing model of Adobe’s products, well to all: look at the prcing model of some other HOT items on the market from an other big company, Apple Inc. For this example we’ll use the new MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB hdd etc.
Which is currently priced in the U.S.A at: $2,499.00 (APL Online Store)
Now we look at it in the Dutch Apple Online Store:
Here we see that the price is a smashing: € 2.249,00 (Dutch, The Netherlands)
At the current exchenge rate (xe.com, 2003908.10.23 09:56:35 UTC)
$1,00 (Dolar) is €0.778387 (Euro cents)
And
€1,00 (Euro) is $1.28471 (Dollar)
So let´s put it in view±
US MacBook price in euros would be: €1,9451.89
but
put the Dutch price in Dollars, and it´s $2,889.31
so a quick sum learns me that Apple is making
2889,31 – 2499 (current US price) = 390,31 MORE
(not to mention all other Apple products at different price points)
So i’ll leave it to you to figure out which company is better.
Kind Regards, Dave
@DaveFlash – Taking your example and moving it back to the realm of Adobe (and just for arguments sake) let’s look at the cost of the upgrade Web Premium CS4 Suite (the one I’d be getting) in AUS, GBP and USD.
AUS – $983 (which I believe has gone up a few dollars in the last week or so)
GPB – £534
USD – $599
Now the conversions, which I’ll do to pounds sterling.
AUS ($983) = £397
USD ($599) = £386
So that’s a saving of £143 on average (woot for the Aussie version too!). Which is a 26% price differential over the UK version of the suite. Comparing that to the price difference on your conversions, the Euro version of the Macbook Pro is about 14% more expensive.
In answer to your question (and I did suggest this would be argumentative) – Apple is better.
[...] > The Flash Blog » Tough questions for Adobe [...]
I’d like to agree with comment #20: I would really, really like to have the Help panel back. It’s so nice to do a quick syntax lookup without opening a page in a browser.
Again, here’s my post, corrected this time. (to Lee: you may remove my previous post and this sentence
)
All this talk about the pricing model of Adobe’s products, well to all: look at the pricing model of some other HOT items on the market from another big company, Apple Inc. For this example we’ll use the new MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD etc.
Which is currently priced in the U.S.A at: $2,499.00 (Apple Online Store (Netherlands))
Now we look at it in the Dutch Apple Online Store:
Here we see that the price is a smashing: € 2.249,00 (Apple Online Store (U.S.))
(Note: Rates my vary from date-to-date, hour-to-hour)
At the current exchange rate (Live rates at 2008.10.24 15:29:35 UTC, xe.com)
$1.00 (Dolar) is €0.785427 (Euro cents)
And
€1.00 (Euro) is $1.27319 (Dollar)
So let’s put it in view:
US MacBook price in euros would be: $1,962.78
but
put the Dutch price in Dollars, and it’s $2,863.41
so a quick sum learns us that Apple is making
2,863.41 – 2,499 (current US price) = 364.41 MORE
(not to mention all other Apple products at different price points)
So I’ll leave it to you to figure out which company is better at marketing/selling products in different regions.
Yours Sincerely again, Dave Wouters.
(live mid-market rates retrieved from xe.com, at Friday, October 24th at 15:29:35 UTC, rates may vary date-to-date, hour-to-hour.)
Again, here’s my post, corrected this time. (to Lee: you may remove my previous post, and the the one in moderation (not this one and this sentence, and by the way, commenting area is way too small)
All this talk about the pricing model of Adobe’s products, well to all: look at the pricing model of some other HOT items on the market from another big company, Apple Inc. For this example we’ll use the new MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD etc.
Which is currently priced in the U.S.A at: $2,499.00 (Apple Online Store (U.S.))
Now we look at it in the Dutch Apple Online Store:
Here we see that the price is a smashing: € 2.249,00 (Apple Online Store (Netherlands))
(Note: Rates my vary from date-to-date, hour-to-hour)
At the current exchange rate (Live rates at 2008.10.24 15:29:35 UTC, xe.com)
$1.00 (Dolar) is €0.785427 (Euro cents)
And
€1.00 (Euro) is $1.27319 (Dollar)
So let’s put it in view:
US MacBook price in euros would be: $1,962.78
but
put the Dutch price in Dollars, and it’s $2,863.41
so a quick sum learns us that Apple is making
2,863.41 – 2,499 (current US price) = 364.41 MORE
(not to mention all other Apple products at different price points)
So I’ll leave it to you to figure out which company is better at marketing/selling products in different regions.
Yours Sincerely again, Dave Wouters.
(live mid-market rates retrieved from xe.com, at Friday, October 24th at 15:29:35 UTC, rates may vary date-to-date, hour-to-hour.)
The removal of the Project Panel and its JSFL API for publishing Flash files without opening them has caused a HUGE performance decrease in the Flash IDE. Look at these numbers.
———————–
CS4 – JSFL script opening, publishing and closing each file
252.10
253.10 fin checking
001.00 total time
254.00 publish
309.20 end
015.20 total time
total time 16.2 min
per file 11.395 sec
CS3 – Using Project Panel to publish all files without opening
313.00
313.27 add files
000.27 total time
315.00 publish
319.07 end
004.07 total time
total time 4.34 min
per file 3.186 sec
———————–
16.2 minutes vs 4.34 minutes! That’s what has been wrought by removing the Project Panel for reasons that are still unexplained.
All I’m asking for is the C command that Flash used to publish a Flash file without opening it. Please?
@Alex, as a loyal costumer, a can’t even properly download my copy of CS4 Master Coll (from adobe.com/…/MastC…STAMCS4_LS1.dmg), it keeps stopping at (either) 2, 2.5 or 4 Gig. so I’m now actually switched to downloading a shared image (torrent), and install that one, until Adobe sends me a complimentary disc-set (so I’ll be able to (at some point) reinstall it.
@Clint, a haven’t yet been able to install cs4, but if what you say is true for my installation as well, then I’ll definitely switch back to cs3, until it’s fixed.
@Jason, Apple may be better in your opinion, but a find it strange that Apple promotes it’s (so called) SUPERIOR computers, but can’t even fix, the kernel hangs (STOP FAULTS) of its OS – black overlay appears, a message in the center stating you’ll have to restart (in my case iMac) by pressing and holding the power button for a couple of seconds- I would actually call those hangs, Mac’s equivalent to Windows’ BSOD.
And last but not leastt: Adobe, please fix these ridiculous mistakes, errors, and blunders once and for all! What’s even stranger is, that there haven’t been any (public) betas of Flash CS4 and Photoshop among others.
(PS, Lee: My previous post (about price difference) is now up here tree times, please remove the 2 oldest, and leave the last one from oct. 24 8.50am intact.)
Many thanks, and good luck Lee, Adobe Flash Team and Adobe.
Hey Lee I myself am an Adobe supporter and have been let down by the performance of Adobe Flash CS4 Pro. I am experiencing really bad lag times when trying to work with files that I created in CS3 and when creating a complex web application in CS4 also it gets really bad sometimes minutes of lag to go into a MovieClip and when editing something as simple as text it takes about a minute to add new text typed the slowdowns prevent me and my company to be productive in anyway using this application it is happening in both the PC and the MAC environments and at least one time I myself force the application so much that it crashed my Windows Vista system giving me the famous blue screen, everything was fine after a simple reboot but needless to say I was not expecting an outcome like that.
Many other users are experiencing similar problems and several Boards on the internet are talking about it for example users at Flash KIT community and the Kirupa community. Including a Multi award winning flash animator that is now saying he might skip the CS4 experience all together.
Don’t get me wrong it is an incredible application and the workspace is in my opinion awesome, the animation module is great and the new features unlike many other users have said are extremely useful but it is Broken man you can have all the best tools in the world and if you can’t use them then what’s the point?
Why would Adobe’s Flash team release such an unstable version of the software?
Will these problems be resolved in a timely manner?
Will we be able to thrust adobe to produce complete work environment capable applications to us in the feature before we make an investment in the name we have trusted but has let us down so badly this time?
Sorry for the harsh words and thank you for providing a helping hand and for being the voice of a hurting community.
As for now we have reverted to using the CS3 environment till Adobe provides us with a more stable application.
Thanks Jonathan Cruz.
@Jonathan thanks so much for your feedback. I haven’t experienced any issues yet with CS4 but that might be because I have tons of RAM. I’ll pass on your complaints to the Flash team.
@DaveFlash – All I was doing was answering your question. I’ve used PC’s all my life. I did think about getting a Mac recently but decided to stick with Windows (for a few of the reasons you mentioned).
Anyways, obviously this post ain’t about PC’s vs Macs
It’s interesting (worrying) to read Jonathon’s comments about how CS4 is performing though.
always felt flash as a sluggish app when compared to others, really don’t have a clue what is beneath to make it this way, as a vector interactive motion tool expected this to be a kind light. toggling between projects, opening actions pannel, working with text, even copy past, was simple features that lacked speed cs3. well, i’ve been using mac lattlely, intel based, with ram between 3 and 4 (laptop and desk) not a mighty machine, but well, should be enough for working with web stuff.
when cs4 was announced I almost didn’t knew about the new features, but first though that cross my mind was, we are going to do stuff faaaast!
just want to express my sadness that workflow is more broken than ever, and big hug to adobe team that should be feeling really bad about community disappointment.
…
Reading all the comments above remind me of the feeling to Vista’s release which was “I’ll rather wait for all the guinea pigs to try it out first and wait for Service Pack 1 at least” whereas Starcraft and Leopard’s was more along the lines of “I can’t wait to get it, checkout all the new stuff and enjoy using it!”.
I think Adobe can take a few pointers from Apple and Blizzard. I like Blizzard more for their pricing and quality. Apple has a bigger task but I think they’re finding a good balance in terms of their quality and production, pricing in terms of hardware… not so sure. Apple software (software made by Apple, not for Apple), yes.
Time: Should not be an issue if you want quality. We don’t mind waiting for a quality product.
Quality: Yes please but may take more time. Don’t really mind waiting.
Cost: Yes, it may cost you more but in the end, it WILL make you more if you don’t charge hectic prices and get more of the market.
Which is more? (just an example)
1000 ppl x $20000 (decrease in market due to price and availability of pirate software)
or
1 000 000 x $100 (increase in market and loyalty as it is affordable and of high standards)
I guesstimate the real world stats to be something more like:
1 100 000 x $200(US) + 2 200 000 x $300(Rest of world)
or
7 600 000 x $100 (Everyone)
I’m probably off by a lot as there are more upcoming business owners, entrepreneurs, developers, artists and students than that, probably take my guesstimate and multiply it by 10-20, anyways, you get my point. Don’t forget about China! ; )
Lee & Dev team, keep up the good work. (3 thumbs up, I don’t have a 3rd but if I did ; )
Just want to say something here. While I agree that there are some issues, Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10 are amazing releases with more new features than any previous release. Please make sure you actually try them out for yourself and make up your own mind.
personally i think that people that are complaining is because they bought something regarding all the amazing new features… but all i read here was about disappointment about performance issues… so i do not agree totally on your comment Lee (just in the part you say it have more than the last release) as i don’t believe in more as a quality… in fact i like it “less is more”
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
Charles Mingus said
although he was a musician i’m sure he would have hard time using the flash cs4.
I’m so disappointed about Adobes behaviour the last months! First, this Upgrade costs me 772€ (Web Premium), thats 1000$! For some minor new features and native Flash Player 10 support (speaking of the only changes making me even thing about upgrading).
Then the treatment of some community members as for example hobnox who had to suffer severe headaches because they relied on Adobes noise, before Adobe decided to change the api without telling anyone.
Yay, no update, let’s make a new release!
here here,
please help sort this out:
http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php?topic=1007.0
Lee,
Have you heard back from the Flash Player, or MAX teams about the questions yet? I’m curious as to their answers, especially since they said they were going to write something up back in October.
Thanks!