So about 5 years ago I worked at this company doing flex stuff… yeah, about a year after I left I talked to some people from there and they no longer develop anything with flash.
Why? Because adobe pushed an update that broke my old companies working product on preexisting installations.
More recently, the same exact thing happened to my current company because of the AIR 2.0 update. It (for some god awful reason) actually made changes to the way the XML was being parsed… awesome. So all of our clients were suddenly left with a product that failed to validate user accounts via our web service and wouldn’t let people get past the first screen. wth! This is working, preexisting code that was run through a quality-assurance process and already been installed on client machines. It shouldn’t just suddenly break, and it makes it worse that adobe pro-actively prompts all users to download that upgrade!
More personally, I went out on a limb to convince a client I work with to switch from CS4 into a flex environment. These new components are so much better I say…
Spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to convert, changed everything over after, ported out of CS4… and guess what. The new SDK version of the DataGrid (Flex 4) is non-functioning for our purposes! The old one works, and the new one blows hard. I am not supposed to look at old and busted versions of an SDK with envy. I’m not supposed to want to move backwards, but case in point this “upgraded” data grid no longer supports duplicate items! Way to break something that was working, yet again. And yeah duplicates are extremely integral to this particular product and going to be annoying to hack a work-around.
It’s no wonder steve jobs hates adobe, I really can’t fault him for it.
I’d have half a mind to side with him if I didn’t hate apple.
But ■■■■ Adobe. build some unit tests or something.
Seriously, because **** flows downhill and I’m just a lowly developer over here.
I do not feel very secure depending on their business process to not screw me over yet again in the future.
Anyone else have horror stories they want to share from working with flash?
