One of the main functions of this site has always been to preach the good word of Flash to the uninformed (or misinformed) masses — it's why we created The ActionScript Jabberwocky and hosted the once annual ActionScript Poetry Contest. It's also why we created Flash games and spent months turning a long-in-the-tooth open-source text editor into a fairly great little ActionScript editor.

Over the years, we've had our differences with the makers of Flash (both Macromedia and Adobe), but we've never been shy of professing our love for their work in no uncertain terms.

So why so silent on the matter for the past few months?

Well, quite frankly, we're not feeling it any more.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Flash daily — sometimes still for fun, but most often for work, and there are some amazing things being done in the world of Flash, Flex and AIR these days. And thanks to a diverse client base and a plethora of cool projects, I'm quietly taking part in many of them every day.

But am I loving the platform? Quite frankly, no.

Thanks to a growing problem with bugs, inconsistencies with external interfaces and a general lack of faith in the player itself, Flash is starting to feel a lot like the HTML/Javascript fiasco that caused me to seek out Flash's "works anywhere" promise way back in the 1900s. These days, I seem to be debugging the player more than my own code.

Chris at FlexibleFactory, has a post today that sums up my own feelings toward the state of Flash pretty well. In fact, he inspired me to finally break my silence on the matter too. Anybody else want to chime in?

OK, I'm tired of waiting: It's time to buy everyone a good ActionScript editor, and I've decided to foot the bill just to get things done already.

As you may have noticed during the last few months, I've spent a great deal of time customizing, expanding and generally bending the will of the jEdit text editor to make it do things my way (which, coincidentally, is a lot like the FlashDevelop and SEPY ways I learned in the Windows world). For the most part, I enjoy coding with jEdit, and it's almost the perfect cross-platform, multi-language editor. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the Java experience to attain the one feature that I miss most from my days with FlashDevelop: Code completion.

It's a simple feature I thought was silly when I first used it, but man, has it saved me time over the years (preventing typos, providing quick hints of little-used function parameters, etc). Thus, jEdit — along with every other Macintosh and cross-platform AS editor outside of Eclipse — remains a second-class ActionScript editor for me today.

So as of tonight, I've decided to remove my developer's cap and instead take on the role of small-time benefactor: Thus, I will personally award $300 to the developer (or team of developers) who creates the best cross-platform ActionScript coding plug-in for one of two editors by April 15.
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Check out more recent articles to see how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Stacks.

I've been enjoying my first few days with the new OS X 10.5 operating system (aka Leopard), and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the development community is going to be able to do with the hundreds of cool new features and API hooks built into the OS. But that said: Does anybody really think that the "Stacks" feature has been well implemented in Leopard?

I was actually looking forward to using Stacks: Along with Time Machine (which it turns out is currently useless on my existing network storage system), it was one of the things that drew me to buy the latest upgrade as soon as possible. But it turns out that "stacks" are just folders — not smart folders, and not "on the fly" collections of files. Just folders. And really, really, really sh*tty looking ones, at that.

What the hell are these supposed to be? I challenge anyone to identify these folders!

I won't go into details here, as I'm sure anyone looking for more info will find it in abundance elsewhere on the Web (The entire Ars Technica review is a great read, by the way).

In fact, Leopard is indeed a great system, but the two main things that Apple has been using to promote it to the masses — Time Machine and Stacks — have turned out to be sorely disappointing. I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to get Time Machine to work on a networked drive soon enough, so I'm not actually worried about that one. After all, we've already seen "fixes" for other features, such as this fix to disable the miserable 3D Dock.

But Stacks? Stacks just sucks.