Flashpaper
Adobe have despatched Flashpaper to the same grave of irrelevant products as FreeHand and ImageReady. Considering Flashpaper was made by Macromedia before their assimilation, it was kind of on the cards due to it's competition with PDF.
From the article the CEO a doomed startup whines:
What about all the websites that have been storing all their documents with Flashpaper? It will be a major job having to transfer all those documents to a new solution
Perhaps if instead of willingly submitting to vendor lock in they stored their documents in a recognised, open standard that's widely implemented by multiple vendors they would not have this problem.
Popularity: 69% [?]
FlashCommand
I found this excellent command line tool to compile Flash movies the other day.
It works like this:
-
flashcommand -p -s /path/to/fla
The -p switch means 'publish' and '-s' specifies the path to the source .fla file. It works by opening Flash CS3 in the background and instructing it to compile the movie, consequently it will respect the publish settings you've defined in the .fla so the generated .swf file will end up in the right directory.
Combining this with Flash CS3's ability to import an external AS3 file to use with each movie means bar the initial .fla file creation you'll never have to use Adobe's painfully bad authoring environment ever again.
Popularity: 66% [?]