I recently moved to IntellJ for all of my Flex development. This is because I like the very powerful refactorings available with this ide, and the way that it can use POM’s to manage projects. I do still like Flash Builder though and think it was an improvement over Flex Builder.
So it was with great interest that I read this post by Jesse Warden Adobe, Please Bring Flash Builder Up To Par, and noted that Andrew Shorten had responded that Adobe were listening.
In Andrew’s response he mentioned that people should post ideas in http://ideas.adobe.com/. This seemed like a good idea and many people have spent time posting ideas and voting on them over the last 6 months. However there is no evidence that Adobe ever looks at the site. Every single idea is still listed as a ‘New Submission’ even after 6 months, and none of the top ideas have had any comments added by anybody from Adobe.
With respect to bugs, it has to be said that Adobe are not the best communicators either. For example the following user submitted bug (2 years ago it seems) https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-15844 has now been closed. However even after being asked it is still totally unclear as to when this fix will be made available to the public.
So Andrew, it’s all very well saying you are listening, but, please, can you be seen to be listening.
Hi Conrad,
Your thoughts are 100% relevant to mine ones. Since two of my ideas in Flash Builder and Flex SDK categories reach more than 200 points and are among the top ideas by popularity more than 3 month there are no any single reaction from Adobe (excluding votes from some of Adobe employees).
Putting all my observations about Adobe for the last 2-3 years together it is very obvious that Adobe is just declaring openness and collaboration with community but in real life only listen for enterprise customers and themselves
I think they are loosing the lovely community which existed from the Macromedia times. A lot of great persons just switched to other technologies for a couple of last years. Some of them are now iOS guys, some Silverlight etc.
Flash platform still has a great potential but this potential is nothing without strong community.
Hi Conrad,
Thanks for your feedback – whilst we have been reviewing all the ideas coming in, I agree that not providing an update on their status on ideas.adobe.com is poor on our part.
I’ve now updated all the ideas submitted for Flash Builder and provided comments where appropriate. Some of those ideas have directly lead to prioritized features whereas others will remain on the list for consideration in future releases.
Thanks again for bringing this issue to my attention.
Cheers,
Andrew Shorten,
Senior Product Manager, Flash Builder
Ditto – I’ve recently been looking at IntelliJ as it’s got the built in Flex Mojos support. IntelliJ X looks even better and there is always new stuff on the blog specific to Actionscript and Flex development – http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/tag/actionscript/. As far as I know you can also use all these same features on the Linux edition whereas Adobe last updated Flex Builder for Linux towards the end of November last year : (
That’s really cool Andrew. burrito is looking rather exciting. The videos of new features is excellent. Seems like you are really making a difference.
Love the fact you can mix and match IntelliJ and Fash builder projects. Not so easy with Flash and Flex builder or FlashBuilder and FDT.
And also the IntelliJ team are super responsive on bugs and feature requests.