Friday, May 24, 2002

Griping About Macromedia
Negativity warning: moderate. First off, don't get me wrong, I love Macromedia products. I always have. I even have old copies of xRes and Director 4 lying around somewhere. Consider this public venting of frustration; frustration that results from the fact that while I love Macromedia, I also love my mac. I don't have a long Macintosh user history (I converted in January), but I'll never go back as long as OS X is around.

Three things aggravate me most:

• Why does Flash run so damn slow on the Apple platform? I've got a brand new tiBook sitting next to a 733mHz Pentium III machine, and the Pentium makes the tiBook look like a wounded dog. Granted, Flash 6 player brought a significant speed bump, but it still lags.
• Will we ever see ColdFusion MX for OS X? It's doubtful. I'm a big ColdFusion fan (take a look at Media Insites), but it makes it hard to develop when you're tied down to a Windows server, especially when you want to take advantage of your tiBook. VirtualPC could do the job, albeit slowly, but developer edition is useless since the virtual machine uses a separate IP. Bah, humbug! I'm starting to turn back to my PHP roots.
• No pressure sensitivity support in Freehand 10? What gives? Apparently, since Freehand was one of the first programs released for OS X, it arrived before the sensitivity support codebase and before Wacom had a chance to develop drivers. Can anyone say "patch"?

Whew! It's good to get that out in the open. I'm sure I'm not the first to rant about these problems. At least Flash MX works as designed.