I’ve been simply bombarded by spam recently – I had over 3,000 comments in the last 24 hours – none of them genuine. This blog’s pretty low profile and I haven’t spent much time looking after it but it’s up there to help anyone who’s interested. If you arrive here and find anything interesting please comment good, bad or indifferent, it’ll be such a refreshing change.

Here’s a subject I’ve always meant to spend some time on. While I’m a big fan of Flash there are things about it I hate.

1) CS4 – Web browser based Help system, and fancy making it an online system by default! I really miss the facility to select an action, hit the question mark and get instant usage examples. It helped me a lot. I actually find myself running CS3 when doing something in AS1.0 or AS2.0 just for the old help system.

2) CS4 – Seems to crash a lot!

3) CS4 – Sometimes when I select a frame label or a link in the properties panel – the content vanishes!

4) All Versions – When working with vectors, sometime if I drag a selection around a small part of the vector – the entire vector shape disappears. Usually when tidying up an untidy edge.

5) CS4 – I like the default timeline on the bottom, like After Effects or FCP but why does my context sensitive right click pop-up menu have to scroll?

6) CS4 – In CS3 I could embed a Quicktime video clip directly into the timeline and Flash would convert it. In CS3 I can only do it with a FLV. The problem is that the compression isn’t as good. Guess what I have to do. I do it in CS3 copy the resulting converted video and paste it into my CS4 project. It still works, it’s just that CS4 won’t let me do it directly anymore. What a hassle.

I’m annoyed by my iPhone’s headphones, I presume because I bought a phone, that the headphones included are designed to give the user a hands free device while driving, the problem is I’m in England and I have a right hand drive car. The headphones are clearly marked L and R to ensure I have the right in the right ear and the left in the left ear but the control device hangs beneath the right ear. I suspect that the control is designed to be used by the gear lever hand in the US not the mainstay steering wheel hand? If it’s designed to favour the right handed, then shame on Apple, why not have the control in the middle to cover both left and right and both sides of the Atlantic? It’s picky I know, but these things bug me.