Help shape the future of the Flash Platform
Although some people may/will disagree, Adobe does listen to feedback from the community. ;-) Obviously there’s only so much you can add in one release cycle and therefore it could be that your favorite feature didn’t make in a particular release.
There is an easy way to influence which features will be considered for Flash Player, Flash Builder/Flex SDK, Blaze DS and the ActionScript Compiler. Adobe actively requests that developers log bugs and feature requests using JIRA, which is hosted at bugs.adobe.com. The product teams review all the feature enhancements that are logged and pay particular attention to those requests that have community support, by way of the number of votes received. In other words: Make yourself heard! Remember the “Make Some Noise” campaign that Andre Michelle started to get raw audio APIs in Flash Player? The whole Flash community was talking about it… and Flash Player got the audio APIs.
To summarize: Make sure you add your feature/enhancement request to the open bug base and make sure you get lots of support. This is obviously not a guarantee that it will be added to the next release of a product but I can guarantee you that we do take the feedback you give us very seriously and that all feedback is used to shape the future of the Flash Platform.
If you haven’t used bugs.adobe.com before, you can find a quick guide to getting started here.
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I think it’s great Adobe is trying to communicate with the community for the flash platform.
But there’s still much room for improvement before it starts promoting it, most of the bugs that are filed on the bug base receive little or no attention from Adobe in my experience.
Check out this bug as an example:
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1283
A simple comment, saying that you guys are busy with it or it is unsolvable at the moment would do a lot since the user knows someone at Adobe cares about the bug.
I think Adobe is doing a great job already in connecting with the community but it could be better.
On this summer FlexCamp in Sofia, I asked the following question during the Birds of Feather-session:
“How many people are actually working on Flex in Adobe?”
And I asked this in a quite aggressive and offensive tone, I guess. (I had just demonstrated the light weight framework we’ve develop in just 2 weeks as a side project – FLit. It isn’t a production quality framework, but an experiment that indicated clearly to me that the whole Flex framework could be simplified further and made even more light-weight if there’s a focused effort in this direction. So I was a bit cocky comparing my small company with Adobe. In a way I was expecting to proof Adobe fails in their effort to improve Flex significantly in the last year). And… Mihai Pricope was there to answer that question…
Adobe is not a gigantic company – take MS for example – Adobe is smaller by the factor of 50 at least compared to MS. So, of course covering all feedback is simply impossible. Actually, it’s pretty amazing how such a small company (compared to a whale as MS) had and still has such an impact on technology.
Appraisal put aside, the question is whether Adobe really improved Flash/Flex in the direction the community wanted/needed or the improvements are rather cosmetic and coming from the marketing department?
The Flash IDE is part of the Flash Platform as I remember.
http://www.tink.ws/blog/flash-ide-bugbase/
Another year passes and again I call for Adobe to add it to their public bugbase.
On a side note the bugbase is also set up to log Flex SDK bugs which you don’t mention above.
“Obviously there’s only so much you can add in one release cycle and therefore it could be that your favorite feature didn’t make in a particular release.”
Then why doesn’t Adobe just stop adding features for a Flash Player release cycle? There are plenty of bugs to fix and there is plenty of room for performance improvement. As much as I get excited about new features, I would rather see a faster Flash Player with fewer bugs and consistent cross-platform functionality.
For example, I have read that Flash Player 10.0.42.34 adds support for MOUSE_WHEEL events under Mac OS X. I haven’t thus far been able to confirm this in one of my own applications, but that’s the kind of thing that should have been working across platforms all along. If Flash Player can’t deliver a consistent cross-platform experience then what is the point?