I have been dealing with a usability issue in Flash Pro CS4 that has very nearly caused me to throw my keyboard, mouse and every other nearby hard object through the monitor. I am not sure how a company like Adobe could possibly have considered this as being a good user experience, but perhaps my use of the product is outside anything they could have anticipated.
I am speaking of the useless little "publishing..." modal dialog that pops up when publishing a SWF. I am working on a project that consists of hundreds of small movie clips (.FLAs) each of which is fed to Flash Pro via a JSFL script for publishing the corresponding SWFs. Of course, each and every time that little publishing dialog is displayed it steals input focus from any other application. It will even steal focus from a VM running in VirtualBox (a workaround I was hopeful of, to no avail). The result is that my machine spends 10-12 minutes being completely unusable because of the focus issue. Given that I often have to build these assets 8-10 times a day, I am wasting up to two hours every day watching my machine popup dialog box after dialog box. :<
Unfortunately I do not have free reign to restructure the project's assets so that the &%$#@* DIALOG BOX interrupts me less often. So my question is several fold:
- Is there any way to suppress that dialog box altogether?
- Is it possible to run Flash Pro in a headless mode so it just publishes without all the UI interjections?
- Is there a command line SDK of some kind that can build AS2 (yes, AS2) code without the overhead of loading up a heavyweight Adobe tool?
Any other ideas on how to maintain my sanity while having to use this tool to do Flash builds? Thanks.
