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I have been dealing with a usability issue in Flash Pro CS4 that has very nearly caused me to throw my keyboard, mouse and every other nearby hard object through the monitor. I am not sure how a company like Adobe could possibly have considered this as being a good user experience, but perhaps my use of the product is outside anything they could have anticipated.

I am speaking of the useless little "publishing..." modal dialog that pops up when publishing a SWF. I am working on a project that consists of hundreds of small movie clips (.FLAs) each of which is fed to Flash Pro via a JSFL script for publishing the corresponding SWFs. Of course, each and every time that little publishing dialog is displayed it steals input focus from any other application. It will even steal focus from a VM running in VirtualBox (a workaround I was hopeful of, to no avail). The result is that my machine spends 10-12 minutes being completely unusable because of the focus issue. Given that I often have to build these assets 8-10 times a day, I am wasting up to two hours every day watching my machine popup dialog box after dialog box. :<

Unfortunately I do not have free reign to restructure the project's assets so that the &%$#@* DIALOG BOX interrupts me less often. So my question is several fold:

  • Is there any way to suppress that dialog box altogether?
  • Is it possible to run Flash Pro in a headless mode so it just publishes without all the UI interjections?
  • Is there a command line SDK of some kind that can build AS2 (yes, AS2) code without the overhead of loading up a heavyweight Adobe tool?

Any other ideas on how to maintain my sanity while having to use this tool to do Flash builds? Thanks.

lje
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1 Answers1

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I'm currently using FlashDevelop to build a rather large AS2 project. If you haven't alreay, look into it - it might save you some time.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/

Ralph Canapa
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  • Thanks for the response. I have FD4.5 installed but was put off by only having HAXE support for AS2. Later I found that there was a legacy plugin for AS2, which I have installed. It seems that FD4 expects the output of a project to be single SWF. My project has many (dozens) of FLA/AS files that each compile into separate SWFs via a JSFL script that just "publishes" each FLA/AS by delegating to AFPro. If I could build these dozens of SWFs completely without involving AFPro that would be awesome, but I do not see how FD4 provides that. I will keep looking into it though. – lje Nov 26 '13 at 18:22