Flash stinks (Score 1)

I have used Flash since FutureSplash, but I must say as a Flash/ActionScript (10 years) and Director/Lingo (12 years) programmer that Flash plain sucks. Now Adobe wants to push Flash as an application development platform and I say good luck. The funny thing is I can code anything in Lingo twice as fast as possible than with ActionScript. Adobe seems to forget that they have a product that does this better (application development), despite being almost 3 years since Director's last major update. Flash runs like a dog on slower computers and like crap on OSX, Flash uses tremendous amounts of RAM and leaks like a stuck pig. Macromedia and now Adobe are making a huge mistake not bundling Shockwave with Flash, The Flash player at 1,324 K (Win) is about half the size of the slim Shockwave installer at 2,524 K (Win). Of course the Shockwave installer has the Flash (8) engine bundled with it and many more features, such as Shockwave 3D, support for more media types, and of course the ability to extend Shockwave via a long list of Xtras (specially wrapped libraries) that allow users in the browser or on the desktop to do things that Flash could never do with the current crop of Flash wrappers available. I've developed 2 - 14 player multiplayer 3D projected games in use at a major Florida theme park for one of the largest IT companies in the world, (think blue). They get 1200 players a day on average 365 days a year and to my knowledge over the last 5 years have not had a single problem. I built the game in 3 months and actually reprogrammed the entire game in the last 2 weeks to accomodate for playtesting results. Needless to say this could not be done in Flash. In 2001 I was contacted about the possibility of developing a custom window shaped multi-window IM community for a major brand. I explored using Jabber with Flash and found out that it just didn't work, instead I worked with the guys at Jabber.com to develop the first implementation of Jabber and Director by using the Jabber activex control and dll. I spent 1 hour and had a working proof of concept that blew the client away. I still have a demo online at http://contempt.net/vir-os/viros-demo.EXE if anyone cares to check it out. Despite my rant I do believe that Flash and Director together can lead to great things I just wish Adobe would not push Flash as their desktop application development platform of choice. -b