Poll : What’s in your toolbox: Flash Builder AND/OR Flash-CS5?

– January 10, 2010
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There are no solid dates yet but we can count the number of months until the public release of Flash Builder and the Flex 4 framework on one hand. ( My money is on March 8th at the 360Flex keynote. ) And not long afterward Adobe will be releasing the Creative Suite 5 ( CS5 ).

Now the question is: which will you buy/upgrade to and how soon?

The big-huge news about CS5 is that you will be able to publish not just to the Flash Player but also as an iPhone app. That will also be an option for Flash Builder later on down the road. The date is uncertain but it’s said to be in 2010.

And don’t forget there is Slider the Flex framework for mobile phones. I think the combination of Slider and the Flash Player 10.1 in going to shake the mobile market up big time. I’m very excited because I’ll have at least one mobile app the day that Flash Player 10.1 goes public – RunPeeMobile. And I’ll have 3-4 more mobile apps out this year.

As for myself Flash Builder meets all my needs. As far as I can tell the only thing that Flash-CS5 can do that Flash Builder can’t is timeline animations. And I suck at timeline animations anyway so why bother. If I needed something like that I’d pay someone with talent to do it for me – like I did with the “n” in the RunPee logo.

The only other Creative Suite application that I use is Photoshop. I have Photoshop CS3 and it works fine for me. There are some great features in PS-CS4/CS5 but none that I actually need.

The rest of the Creative Suite is dead to me. Dreamweaver is a fantastic and powerful tool. But my demands for HTML are met quite sufficiently with Eclipse and good old – and I mean OLD – NoteTab Pro 4.95.

So I’ll be downloading Flash Builder the day the bits became available. I’ve been using Flash Builder beta2 now for a few months and it just pains me to open up Flex Builder 3. Even as a beta Flash Builder just kicks ass. It publishes at least twice as fast and refactoring – which can be painful in Flex3, is blazing fast.

The one wild card in my plans is Flash Catalyst. I haven’t heard anything about it being bundled with Flash Builder, or as a separate download, or as part of CS5 or what. My guess is that Catalyst won’t be all that useful for me since I never even use the design view in Flash Builder. But I could be surprised. I could possibly see myself using Catalyst to do rapid prototyping.