Is Reflow still being developed actively?
liberalart Oct 15, 2014 2:34 PMI loved reflow when it debuted. Within a few months I started designing directly in Reflow and built a workflow around it. But lately it's shortcomings have become really tiresome.
I'd hoped within the last year or so that symbols or some sort of CSS styling might be possible to text tags, but it's the basic interaction with the tool that's become the most exhausting.
The main one thing that's truly maddening is that in what seems like the effort to make the page elements stable it requires constantly adjust items lower in the DOM. I mentioned this a year ago when I talked with the Dev team.
For example: If I have a container (A) with 3 blocks stacked vertically in it and I add a 4th, the objects below don't simply shift down maintaining the margins I already set. Instead the lower containers (B, C, D) all take on ridiculous negative margins staying exactly where they were before adding the 4th block to (A), and container (A) simply goes behind the containers (B). Then I have to correct the margin changes in the B & C & D because they adjust their margins with each change up the DOM to stay where they currently are on the page. If I add a new container the lower ones take on huge negative matins to keep from moving, if I remove a block the subsequent blocks change to huge positive margins remain in the same location on the page. In what possible context would you remove a block from a page but want the subsequent blocks to retain a huge gap?
I don't know how this behavior ever came about because it makes you want to pull your hair out every time you make a change to a complex file. Each addition creates a cascade of corrections just to get reset back to what you already entered in the layout settings. I assume this is to help folks who are using Reflow as a drag and draw tool but that's so ridiculously imprecise I can't imagine any but the most amateur users relying on building layouts via drag and draw via mouse. This behavior makes a complex area like a header with logo, navigation, signup block and meta links in it a mine field every time you change something.
FROONT doesn't seem to suffer from this, once you set a value that value remains the same when changing other objects unless you change it. I don't see how a tool could ever be smart enough to interpret what I want to happen to everything else on the page when I add, remove or change elements. Reflow shouldn't be constantly changing my layout tab settings especially since they cascade down the DOM so that the same fields need to be corrected back to what I entered over and over again during a design. If the page breaks because I add or remove an object I'm aware of the context and can fix it if Reflow wasn't automatically adjusting all dependent objects, but instead I have to find all the fields where the application has decided to make adjustments to keep rest of the page layout from looking different after a change.
Like I said, I've been using Reflow for over a year, and I'd like to continue but I really want to know if I'm wasting my time because these issues are also almost that old so it doesn't seem like Adobe is super committed to Reflow but that it was a side experiment that may have run its course.

