Flash Builder 4 — Defective By Design?

ApolloX writes "Adobe has released its new version of the Flex Builder, now renamed Flash Builder 4. This version is radically different from previous versions of Flex, introducing the new Spark architecture and theme support. While I am pleased Adobe has finally added support for Eclipse 3.5, I am disappointed with some of the new architecture changes that make doing simple things, such as skinning a button, now quite cumbersome."

Re:Anon Coward too lazy to go find old account on

[Alex Zepeda]

1.) Why? Because Flash can't even bother to provide a decent experience on desktop apps. Desktop Flash doesn't blend in with the native widgets at all. They don't look the same, they don't respond in the same way. The useful internationalization features that native widgets have... non-native Flash widgets lack. They don't respond to mouse input in the same way (often rendering scroll-wheels useless). Now move all of those complaints to a mobile platform where the mobile OS maker has spent some time trying to create a usable interface (and Adobe has not). By using non-native widgets, lazy "application" developers are creating lowest common denominator pseudo-applications. No thanks. Even Java can do better than this.

2.) Nobody cares is a terrible argument. The Flash cookie model bypasses the browser's security architecture. So, yeah, this is bad from a privacy standpoint. However, this is also bad as it creates yet another attack vector (and it's not as if Flash has been without its absurd security problems).

I've managed to find two ways to crash Safari. The first is XCode (which while obnoxious is tolerable because that's quite an edge case), the second is Flash (which is far less tolerable because it happens regularly). Of course, Flash also manages to kill my battery life... and utterly fail at playing even low-res video on my Core2 Duo laptop. My workaround? Downloading all of the flash videos and playing them in VLC, which, of course, means no Hulu for me. From a user experience perspective I care not whether Flash and all of its gunk is open source. I care if it works. Simply put, Flash does not.