The Adobe's position is clear: reducing the Flex/AIR budget/investment.

I think most developers want to improve professional against amateur features. This is what is now happening: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/air3-2/

You don't want to hear what Adobe is saying you: "Do you want to develop form based apps? Move to Phonegap http://phonegap.com/"

Adobe, please, remove from Builder all those useless stuff: +1.000.000

Get a grip, guys, this is about the rise of HTML 5 not the evil Adobe.

You can continue to cry over spilt milk or just get on with it.

Use Flex where appropriate, HTML 5 where appropriate.

Any Flex developer worth their salt doesn't need design view.

I am a designer/developer - I do use the design view extensively. And yes I am more than worth my salt and more. For me, being able to have immediate visual feedback is absolutely necessary. I don't like coding "blind". I have had the opportunity to work Microsoft Blend - Visual Studio since 2007 - It really is what I hoped flex would be. The best of both worlds. As front-end interface developer designer I could work on the exact same source-code, submitting to SVN on a regular basis together with the software engineers developing the backend and SDK. Blend allowed me controle over the primitive shapes that makes up a component. This allowed extreme customisation and optimisation. The wysiwyg view is an absolute crucial part of the process (e.g. do I want this rectangle to have 5px margins or 4, do the shadow work better with a 10 px falloff or a 8px falloff, do I want pixel snap on or off [whish flash had that] - which does look and work different than the photoshop one so I DO HAVE TO DESIGN in the wysiwyg as well)

Yes sure, I do go through a phase designing in Illustrator and Photoshop, but putting the components together takes time. I do not simply import flat artwork and then wrap them in some appropriate container. I build components up using multiple primitive shapes which gets re-purposed and targeted for various states, subtle animations, color-changes and has to comply to it's parent-component's rescaling capabilities. During that phase I do NOT want to continuously recompile. (although I would sometimes create a separate project just to test a specific component that can only be fully viewed after recompiled).

The excuse of "all good coders don't use the design view anyway" is a cop out. I can understand if Adobe says

1) we did not have the resources to do it decently (like Microsoft Blend)

2) we simply do not put the resources in to hire clever enough developers to create a decent tool

But a statement like it's preferable to work only blindly in code is simply wrong and naive of the state of art of dev. tools. Maybe for a dos-like interface or win-32 forms style interface only using stock-standard layout and components.

The biggest advantage of Microsoft Blend is being able to have split view open - I do this with Flashbuilder as well although it is slower and more buggy than Blend - I would write the markup and see updates realtime, switch over to Visual Studio that has the project open in the background for some serious code-completion capabilities - then miss my wysiwyg view - and switch rigth back to Blend.

Why am I using flash-builder/flex - if it was not for the fact that Microsofts wpf-framework only works fully on Win-OS or a subset of it as a silverlight plugin on fewer platforms than flash - I would have used Microsoft. The reason using flash is because it can be deployed on so many platforms - consistently (not like the html4 and now 5 chaos) - It has powerful interactive and multimedia capabilities.

My HTML works exactly the same way - for certain core complex components I will code and have a wysiwyg open as well for better navigation, more inuitive decision making and less time spend going backwards and forwards between compiling/running in the browser - but with the sad state of wysiwyg of dreamweaver unluckily I have to swithc more often (not because I am a more "CLEVER" developer)

Summary - I will use flash/flex only if there is no alternative because of this decision - Flash was supposed to be a creative environment to create highly interactive and creative applications/content for multiple platforms.

Thanks Adobe , I have used Macromedia director since 1993 - You managed to kill that off and now you are messing with flash - It could have been so much more. You simply lack the vision and we are stuck with the limitations, inconsistency, long-development time of HTML5 and a messy array of tools to try and make it usefull.

Whish Microsoft had the vision to make wpf work on all platforms....

There must be some reason why many of us ignored the design view in FB and much the same in DW. Only recently had DW upped it's game with "live view" making a design preview worthwhile, yet still editing HTML and stylesheets rules.

If you enjoyed design view, then great.

No point in railing against Adobe about it now. We've all grown up with our favourite development/design tools consigned to the bin - it's not just Adobe.

In case you misunderstand this, I'm not defending Adobe, but I do understand it. I was as furious as anyone else when they took a change of direction and massively mishandled communicating their plans for Flex and Flash. Totally inept.

As developers we need to move on and work with what we have not go on about what we won't be getting.

SAPPHIRE STEEL - since I do love the speed and stability of visual studio I will defenitely look into your product. I have looked at it previously - about 2 years ago - but as far as I can remember it did not keep up to date with flex-framework developments - some components were not available soon enough after a new release of flex-framework - and so I stuck it out with flashbuilder for a project I did back then. But I will follow your dev. very closely - because I do dev. on win platform and Visual Studio is a stable fast IDE...

PAULAND - thanks for being so gracious, The main reason I would not have a splitview running in FB while coding is because of the lag, slowness, etc.. of the designview - because of that - yes - it can be a hinderence - but sometimes I will overlook it - Again - Microsofts Blend was done exceptionally well - the way I can just click right into the core basic primitives that makes up a button - No flash, catalyst, illustrator, etc.. bypass - I can just get right to that rectangle that defines the gradient of a button and dynamically link the 3 rgba colors of the gradient to a cascading stylesheet - e.g. buttonHighlightCol, buttDarkCol , etc.. create a stylesheet resource out of it and link the gradient - and then re-use it all over for consistancy - have realtime wysiwyg feedback - {myBackGradient}

beautifull synergy between wysiwyg and coding from the guys that brought us DHTML in the first place - So hoped our beloved flex/FB would copy that (Defraga, and then we do have some if it since ability to create rects etc.. in code - but not to the extend MSoft allows us)

Anyway  - Yes we shoudl "just get on with it" - but as a paying customer that invests years in understanding a platform, sell it to customers, influence the purchase thereoff - even if my loyalty takes effort to shift - I have a strong message for Adobe: A very strong message -

You are dissapointing us and we will take our money and loyalty somewhere else

Yu asked about the Amethyst design view. Amethst does full drag-and-drop design for Flex 3 or Flex 4. You drag-and-drop controls, double-click and code the auto-generated event-handlers (just like C#). Here's a short  example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLXLJhdUbYw Currently we only support drag-and-drop for Flex or AIR. In future we will provide similar features for stadard Flash projects (currently Amethyst suppprts coding and debugging for Flash and ActionScript but Design view is restricted to Flex and AIR). This video gives you a more complete overview of Amethyst: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtlphFmY-HY

It supports states. In fact, the Design View is a Flex application (written in Flex, rendered in Flash then integreted with Visual Studio) which is why it provides such an accurate rendering of Flex designs. You can download a 60 day trial so the best way to put it through its paces is to give it a go.

Amethyst has quite a sophisticated project importer/converter that allows you to migrate Flash Builder or Flash IDE (CS5 etc.) projects into Amethyst. You can even work simultaneously on the same projects with Flash Builder or the Flash IDE (importing/converting does not alter your original code base or Flash Builder/IDE projects). Indeed, a number of our customers have told us that they share projects with other team members using a mix of Amethyst and Adobe IDEs. We have a few videos that demo sharing code with Flash CS5 and the same can be done with Flash Builder.

See:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Tutorials/Amethyst-Tutorials/Converting-a nd-Importing-Flex

and...

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Tutorials/Amethyst-Tutorials/article/amet hyst-tutorials-index

@GordonSmith,

I agree. Looking at the coming 3.2 AIR release is clear where Adobe is putting its steak. Is Adobe planning to release a framework for game developers? With the raising of iOS and Android as game platforms that would be great. Adobe also seems looking at the TV environment as platform to embed AIR. They are planning challenge with MS XBOX and Sony Play Station? This is not a joke, the same game working on mobile devices, desktops (and browsers) and TV! Really great!

On the other hand, I see that Adobe can throw the Design View to trash without problems. Regarding the MXML and Flex framework.... sure they are not relevant to the market but they are still very useful stuff for gaming developers. Many times, game applications require user input data, registration and things which can easily done by using libraries like MXML and packaged with the game. Sure that Adobe will care (from the distance) Flex/MXML works on AIR. Of course, Adobe does not need a big collection of coolest controls, but a minimum subset (likely current) yes.

Pablo.

only thing i used in FB is profiler. if you are not concentrate on flex with FB. please move profiler to Apache.