(thanks for the heads-up email on this entry, Lili! <3 )

If the folks at Macromedia want any clarification on my notes, they can reach me at peganthyrus at rdwarf dot com.

My first thought here is "YES! It's about @#$% TIME!". Part of my deep and intimate annoyance with Flash comes from the fact that it was awkward, at best, to animate in, and it's only gotten more so with recent releases. I'm really glad to hear that Macromedia is finally interested in some input from the growing number of pro animators who use Flash.

5, aside from its initial crashiness, was mostly a step forward in usability over 4 (though a lot of people tend to prefer 4's color selector in my experience), but 6/MX? I only keep it around to convert FLA files to something 5 can use. You'll see why later. I haven't touched 7/MX2004 yet.

Things I Wish For Every Time I Touch Flash:

- the ability to choose what the default type for a new symbol is; Flash has oscillated between defaulting to 'movie clip' and 'whatever you choose last'. My method of working with video in mind (and probably that of every studio that has ex-Spümcø people involved) is to never use movie clips. Ever. It would be nice to just have a switch in the prefs to make it always default to "graphic", so that I don't accidentally have a movie clip lurking somewhere. I wasn't aware of the Flash->FLA->Director->Quicktime fix!

This is a much simpler fix than 'make the video export routines understand movie clips', although I must confess I have visions of using programmatic movie clip effects now - Tinkerbell sparkle-trail generators, simple particle effects, whatever our more coderly-oriented team members can come up with or adapt... at present, movie clips are only for work that will never leave the web, in my book.

- bend symbols? (I know this is heavy lifting in terms of calculation, and may not be something that can be achieved in realtime for a few more generations of processor power.) Something I've wanted for my entire time with Flash. I want my rubber-hose animation! I want to twist and bend and warp stuff without fighting the shape tweens!

(I almost never shape tween. When I do I'm always left with a lingering suspicion that I would've done better in terms of time and blood pressure to do it by hand.)

- I will agree that ease-in/ease-out on motions are a pain. I am to the point where I almost never use a tween in the final animation; I might use one as a start, but I'll drop in some keyframes, move them around, and pretty much control the curve manually.

Maybe some way to have time-weighting handles on motion curves?

Maybe something inspired by the little timing charts you'll see scrawled in the corner of hand-animation keys?

This is as much a user interface problem as a feature-set one.

- Here's a weird one: "On Twos" for tweens. I favor a more hand-tweaked look to my work, and will just move symbols around by hand on every 2nd frame (at 24fps) for an effective 12fps. It's a common practice going back to the early days of animation. But when I do want to throw a tween against this, I either have to go in and hand-tweak everything onto ones (every frame a keyframe), or convert the tween to keyframes and throw away every other one, otherwise it Looks Weird. I'd like to just have a switch I could throw for this and keep it a tween. (Or a slider to tweak: maybe I might want a tween to run on fours, or tens...)

- Get rid of that 'contextual information panel', or make it an option and bring back the old, separate object info/frame info/etc palettes. When doing dialogue synch, my pattern with 5 was to click on a frame, f6 for a keyframe, then go over to the symbol properties palette and put the right number into the 'frame' slot. With 6, I hit f6 and the 'helpful contextual input panel' displays info on the current frame; I then have to go click on the object I want to keyframe, and then in the symbol properties palette. It doesn't sound like much, but I find this extra conceptual step and extra mouse mileage really adds up. It's the major reason I stick to 5 when I do freelance. (That, and 6 runs horribly on my Mac, but I admit that I need more RAM in it.)

- Sound issues: Synch is always a problem. Anything over about three minutes or so seems to drift for me, no matter what, with discrepancy between what the editor thinks will be played at a particular frame and what you get when playing as a FLA or exporting to video. This is mostly a problem in web production; I have a file that demonstrates this reliably, if I can get clearance from Cartoon Network and Spümcø to share it. And other attacks on it that display the same problem in different ways.

Most TV production I've been involved with is done with the scenes as separate FLAs, or with several related scenes. Usually no more than a minute or two. Each gets exported as video, then assembled in a video editor. Usually with the final audio mix happening here. Assembling into one massive Flash file is fraught with symbol conflicts, instabilities with large files, and synch-drift issues.

- Definite agreement on the 'let's slice sound with a new keyframe' idea mentioned in the main entry. If I have a 20-frame sound in the timeline and make a new keyframe on the frame 10 of it, this new keyframe should have the sound starting right on the 10th frame - I should be able to play it back without any change in the audio from before I made that keyframe.

- Also, how about the volume envelope being available on the timeline? It's impossible to do any kind of quick and dirty volume tweaks with the current method.

- Non-circular line caps. Sometimes you just need that straight, flat edge. This is not a big issue. Just a little throwaway.

- A way to mark a timeline as 'drop frames to keep up'. We live and breathe by our timing, and not being able to rely on our tools to deliver rock-steady timing is a constant source of stress. Current practice (which I can claim to be one of the simultaneous discoverers of - I know the folks at Renegade figured it out for 'Elmo' around the same time I worked it out for 'WPH') is to have a layer in the timeline that contains nothing but a many-times-looped sample of silence, set to 'stream', which forces Flash to drop frames in playback; otherwise timing is highly dependant on how complex a frame is to draw, and varies widely with the power of the machine you're editing and playing on... and the video you output has completely wrong timing. It'd be nice to be able to just say we care more about the motion and precise timing than the individual drawings. Bonus points to be able to mark a particular drawing as Important if the rendering is going slow - show THIS one instead of the ones nearby, if things're too slow to show them all - and for the ability to choose a default 'try to play all frames/try to show precise timing' for all new files/scenes.

other timing-tweak suggestions: new timing-over-features view-modes in the editor? turn off transparency? ignore Actionscript (um, I think that may already be a menu choice - must check)? etc. There's a suggestion in the back of my mind, but it's not coming to words.

May I suggest sending some observers to willing animation studios with a video tape recorder and just... watching? Encourage us to curse. I'm sure there are things that drive us crazy that I can't think of offhand. Things we've learnt to unconsciously work around that we just don't think about any more, when some simple interface fix could save us a lot of work.

Or even start up a small production company in-house. This is why I was very interested in investigating Creature House's "Living Cels" as a possible replacement for Flash; they did some animation, and the feature set of the tool was being developed as a direct dialogue between animators and programmers. Unfortunately Microsoft ate them up.

Maybe doing a little light TV contract work, maybe doing some personal films as a way of testing/critiquing the program's evolution that I don't have the sense you've had before. (I'm moving to San Francisco and don't have anything long-term lined up yet, if this idea intruigues Macromedia. I wouldn't say no to a year or two as a high-end in-house Flash abuser, especially if I got some personal work out of it!)

Gee, that was longer than I expected it to be. o.O;

beyond the suggestions already listed, here's....

 

ADDITIONS AND CHANGES I'D LIKE TO SEE IN THE NEXT FLASH VERSION

 

Pen tool doesn't work while 'editing in place' - often times when an animator is diving deep into layers and nested symbols in a scene, the pen tool doesn't work.  From what I’ve heard it's because the image has been altered or flipped, and the remedy is to right-click (PC) and 'edit' as opposed to 'edit in place,' but that process takes the artist out of the scene and off track.

 

Infinite zoom - if a graphic has been scaled on the timeline to a much smaller scale than it's original rendering, the zoom tool often doesn't allow the artist to go further in.

 

Locking graphics - this would help greatly in the case of character models.  Our crews often run into the problem of multiple versions of models that have been altered in the process of animation.  Not sure exactly how this would work - whether it would be password protect or a simple 'click' to lock and unlock. The later might make more sense.

 

More elaborate masking capability - masks currently have to be a single symbol, and it would be nice if masks could be made of multiple symbols.

 

jpg rippling - JPGs tend to ripple and distort when moved on the stage

 

More brush options - more photoshop-esqe brushes, like texture brushes and sponges, and the ability to import bmp designs that are turned into brush shapes

 

Control over tweens - tween on the 2's would be a big help in taking out the overly-smooth feel of certain tweens.

 

Contrast - ability to manipulate contrast (and brightness on the same palette) on graphics and other symbols

 

Global color - the ability to build global color lists for various characters would greatly speed up any global color changes.

 

Flash MX & 2004 importing issues - both of these versions (PC) seem to have difficulty importing illustrator (.ai) files, and often drop points in the process.  We often use Flash 5 instead for this task.

 

Transparency of layered symbols - when a graphic consists of many layered symbols, and the opacity is lowered, the layering of the symbol is revealed.  For instance, if a character is a complicated 'puppet' model of a ghost, and we wanted the ghost to be opaque, we would have to do this in post, outside of flash, or the structure of the model would be revealed.

 

 

 

PIE-IN-THE-SKY REQUESTS

 

3D extrude and rotate tools - not unlike the Kai power tool package for illustrator

 

Brush tricks - the illustrator brush tool tricks that have developed over the last few years are exceptionally cool.  Helps with animating a single image in a very dynamic way.  Can take a static flag design and warp it to create a waving flag.

 

FX - a stronger blur tool (rack focus & whatnot), ripple glass, glows, a stronger drop-shadow tool,

 

Parenting/IK - seen this option in other vector animation offerings, and not sure if it's worth the trouble, but would be something fun to play with

 

Play in reverse - playing frames in reverse can currently be achieved with the 'reverse frames' button, but it would be very useful if a multiple-frame graphic could be flagged to play in reverse from a certain frame.  This would help with cycles and other re-use options.

 

 

AARON SIMPSON

Warner Bros. Animation

Producer - Animatics

 

 

Hi Lili,

Great opportunity here so I couldn't help but put my bit in.

I would love Flash to have a rotatable work space to make it a bit more "wrist friendly".

BTW, Happy Birthday Eddie!

Cheers,

Mic

Great feedback, folks. We have a VERY tight schedule for the next release, but we'll cetainly try to do as much of this as possible.

Also, to clarify, the next release (8ball) won't be *just* for pro TV animators, rather the key focus will be on animators and multimedia designers. I don't want to mislead you into thinking that we are creating a special version of Flash just for pro TV animation. Believe me, I wish the TV animation market were big enough to target a full release towards.

We have been visiting with and talking to pro animators and designers from all around the world while building a spec for 8ball and we think we've defined a great product that should make all of you very happy. Please keep the feedback coming as we're still early in feature development.

Thanks,
MD

--------------------------------
Mike Downey
Technical Product Manager, Flash
mdowney@macromedia.com

There's not much more I can add that already hasn't been said, so here I go:

-Bring back the Flash 5 interface where you can have the instance panel open at the same time as the motion tween panel.

-Bring back the old undo, need I say more about that

-Do not have the right-click create motion tween default on sync and snap.

-Often on 'Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends' the files get really slow when we have characters with instance buried in instance buried in instance and so on.  I understand it's not the program itself but the complexity of the character's setup.  But it would be nice if Flash had a little more power to support the complex setups.

-When there is a ease set on the motion tween it would be a lot cooler if when a keyframe is set between the tween that the keyframe doesn't set the ease back to zero.

-Make the shape tweens a little more intelligent much more like the Blend tool in Adobe Illustrator.

I don't really care for the 3-d or camera junk, or tweens animating on archs, I don't want to let the computer do everything for me.  However it would be nice if flash did also have the same kind of capabilities that adobe illustrator offers ie. the brush libraries.  And some better sound editing capabilities would be nice.  Please don't get overwhelmed and change the program entirely because I, and I'm sure many others, can get around the current version of Flash (with the help of other programs) without too much trouble.

Thanks for your time,
Eric Pringle
Cartoon Network
"Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends" -Flash Director

NTSC safe color palatte

I'm glad I'm not the only one who misses the separate instance/frame/etc palettes, Pringle - I actually miss it enough that I convert things to Flash 5 when I do freelance.

And to think I used to laugh at Photoshop people who stuck with a three-years-back version! The only thing you lose is layer folders and running native under OSX (if you're on Macs), and since I still have the many-symbols-on-one-layer, few tweens, habits left from "Booty Call", that's not a big deal when it makes the rest of the work feel 10x faster.

(This is Paul, by the way. Hi. Haven't seen you since Nebulous - glad to see you're doing well!)

Simple things really: Separate outline colours for symbols and groups. It's so annoying when you realise you've just tweened a group and you have to go back and reset your keyframes.

When you come out of a symbol and then hit undo I'd prefer if it would bring you back to edit in place rather than switching to edit mode.

Just by selecting things new points are added. No thanks.

The envelope tool needs oodles of work done to it. Things are constantly disappearing when I'm trying to work with it, unless I distribute to layers.

Distribute to layers - it could be an Adobe illustrator thing, but I've frequently imported graphics that bring up 1000's of empty layers when I click distribute to layers. It's very time consuming to get rid of them all.

Sometimes flash crashes when all you've done is hit undo after inserting a keyframe. That should not happen.

I'll ask around and get some more.

C McIntyre

Guys, no matter what, you've GOT to fix the audio sync problem.

AND

You have to fix that frame limitation! I don't even understand why Flash HAS a frame limitation! But it prevents me from having a 30fps FLA over 8 minutes, and that's jacked up. FIX THIS. I'm not a TV animator like them but I like to produce stuff for the web that's LONG, and I am getting sick of having to rig together multiple SWFs. This problem has existed since Flash has existed and it's got to stop.

These are the suggestions, in no particular order, from Boulder Media in Dublin – Producers of Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends:

When a symbol is skewed and all you want to do is rotate a symbol that’s inside it, it shouldn’t start skewing itself. It’s such a waste of time to rotate, skew back to the original shape, rotate again etc.

Change the naming of ease in’s and ease out’s to the correct animation terms. E.g. ease in = slo out

The ability to flatten layers as in Photoshop would be great

It’s been said before, but it’s very important that when a symbol is flipped, you should still be able to paint inside it.

When double clicking into a symbol, you should enter on the same keyframe as in Flash 5

When importing a swf into a new fla it would be good to keep the original symbol names

Change the masking technique so that you cover up what you don’t want to be seen; and, if possible, have both options – covering what you see, and covering what you don’t see.

The ability to alter the properties of multiple layers all at once, i.e. turning several layers in to guides.

A “create shape tween” option in the right click menu would be super, and the ability to assign a shortcut key to both.

The ability to change properties on motion tweens and shape tweens at the same time, instead of separately.

You should be able to use keyboard shortcuts no matter what window you’re in. For example: if I’ve typed in the transform box and pressed enter, I’d want my keyboard shortcuts reactivated, rather than clicking back onto the stage before I can change tool.

When a symbol’s alpha is lowered, the symbol’s separate parts become transparent separately. It would be better if it was possible to turn down the alpha as if it were a solid shape.

Instead of turning off a mask and then turning the layer that was masked into a guide layer, it would be great if we could turn the masked layer into a guide layer directly

Easings should be more sensitive. The graph suggested earlier is a good idea.

An option for changing all layer outlines to one colour. Also, the yellow, grey, black, light blue etc. outlines are usually difficult to see. They can be dropped. We’d prefer the option of putting them in ourselves if needed, but generally they’re a nuisance when they turn up as default.

Labels for custom colours would be good.

The option to save a palette to import it later.

The old undo option was better, as in flash 5. and the inclusion of a history panel for symbols.

That’s all we have for the moment. If we come up with any more we will post them too. Hopefully you’ll be able to take at least some of our suggestions on board.

 

C. McIntyre

I have a few ideas. I am heavilly on the design side of Flash, so nothing I have to say involves animation...

It seems that you guys need to make a decision... are you gonna try and have the kind of strong design tools that are available in Adobe Illustrator ( robust bezier tools, brush assignment to lines, etc.) ... or are you gonna make importing Adobe Illustrator files seemless... where colors and shapes are IDENTICAL when brought into Flash. I have no preference... but having neither is frustrating.

I would also like to see more ability to manipulate colors. Not tinting whole symbols, but altering the artwork's actual colors similar to how old bitmap programs would work... where you could replace a certain color, and every occurance of a color, with another color. And giving us the option of doing it throughout an entire .fla too would be cool... where we could create different time of day palletes for characters and even locations. I often have to take things into Photoshop as Raster art, play with the saturation and hue there... then re-import it into Flash and color pick the new colors... too many steps!

I hate that the "lock" is default... every file I've ever opened I've had to unclick that little button... waste of time...

Similar to what I was saying about Illustrator, Flash needs more robust vector tools. Complicated objects dissapear on me constantly when broken apart, or converted to lines... I have work arounds... but for my limited understanding, it's just because there are a lot of points very close together which define the shape, and when they are asked to solve themselves for optimization... they freak out and break. Illustrator does not do this. You can have a storm of points all on top of each other and Illustrator can figure out the shape and not freak. This would be a welcome fix.

Along with this, it would be great if the line tool had different ends. The current rounded tip is functional, but I am constantly converting it to a fill and then having to sharpen and taper the ends... if there were other options on how the line tool ended, that could be really great and save me from spending a ton of time "nubbin-killing"

Optimization for the Mac would be nice. There is no processor excuse for why Flash runs faster on PC than Macs...

Alright, I'm sure there is more, but if you even did half of all these great suggestions... you make a wizzened Flash artist very happy.

Roman Laney
Walt Disney TV Animation

Here are some additional suggestions that the Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law crew came up with that aren't mentioned above (well, we're also re-listing ones that are important to us):

New:

• The ability to select lines of a certain weight across an entire shot and globally change that weight.

• Setting in and out points in the timeline for rendering (i.e., not having to render the entire file if you only want a small portion of it)

•The ability to define multiple layers at once (Setting 2 or more layers simultaneously to guide, mask, etc. We frequently use the 'guide' setting as a workaround to indicate layers that shouldn't render, like reference images and movies).

• Fix the issue that when you try to scale a symbol up (via the tranfrom dialog box) past the visible work area, it messes up the proportion.

• When editing in place, being put at the same frame displayed on the timeline, instead of defaulting you to frame 1. Ex: Frame 498 is displayed on the timeline, double-click into the symbol and be on frame 498 inside the symbol.

• Two possible fixes with the keyboard zoom (Ctrl + or -). When in a symbol zooming out is fine, but when zooming in it will only zoom to the designated center point of the symbol. Even more annoying is when you're in a group, once again the zoom out works fine, but the zoom in will pop you to the upper left hand corner of the frame. If it is possible to fix it so that the Ctrl + works the same way in the symbols and groups as out in the scene, that would be great.

• The ability to swipe paint bucket through multiple shapes to color them all at once, but not changing an already existing painted shape (This is similar to the 'Paint Unpainted' tool in USAnimation/Toonboom Studio).

•The ability to find and replace colors in a group (currently the find and replace ignores colors within groups).

• In the properties inspector for a symbol, ability to see more than just 2 digits where you type in the 'First:' frame number

• Ability to use the same shape hints over all keyframes… not having to set a new bunch with every key frame


And while we're asking....

• Better sensitivity with the brush tool, more like Photoshop. Even possibly having varied opacity with a brush.

• Animatable line weight over time.

• Filters for lines like noise, etc.

• A more robust render engine that could handle a large render (up to a five thousand frame) without stalling out


Already mentioned but things we'd really appreciate:

• Rotating work surface. The Toon Boom platform rotates in small (10 degree?) increments, which captures the essence of turning the old animation disc very well.

• The addition of a camera.

• More complex motion path controls, including eases in and out on the same path.

• Better sound editing capability, especially being able to cut the audio layer and not lose the edit point.

• Ability to have various, not-circular ends of ink lines, especially tapered ones.

• Similar performance from Macs to PCs.

There are a lot of good general notes posted above, and it's interesting to see how many issues are common to every post. Even if we saw half of these additions/fixes implemented, it would make our lives easier (but here's hoping for all).

Rich Ferguson-Hull
Cartoon Network/Turner Studios

This is exciting news! Flash is already a great tool, but there are a few things that would make it much more powerful and user-friendly. The following are my personal suggestions- mostly related to animation. We use MX 2004 on the Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Show- Ill ask around and see if we can come up with additional suggestions for a later post.

First off, PLEASE undo the undo function of MX 2004 and return it to the powerful, intuitive tool it once was in previous versions. I dont know anyone in our studio who is happy with the redesign. Its pretty much useless and disorienting past a couple of moves. The old undo worked perfectly and was VERY powerful, with individual undos within each layer of nested animation. I used to be able to test multiple parameters on different nested layers concurrently, knowing I could undo things independently in each layer at any time. This was great for experimental FX animation....

A Maya-style graph editor would be fantastic, with the ability to edit individual parameters. This would make organic or eccentric movements much easier to create and edit. The graph editor would also cover another suggestion... which is to have greater flexibility and control in eases. That includes everything from making scaling independent of movement on tweens, to the ability to do more extreme easing without having to employ a time consuming "cheat" method.

More control over sound clips right on the timeline.

A variety of bug fixes, like the inability to paint in flipped symbols, or the sluggish response (and sometime program crashes) when undoing keyframes in complex, nested animations.

Better usage of screen real estate. For example, the Properties toolbar in MX 2004 has plenty of empty space when docked in most locations, but it frequently cuts longer names short, even though theres plenty of empty area within the box. Unfortunately it can also display only 2 digits of a frame assignment, which creates all sorts of problems (you have to scroll through with the arrow keys to see whats hidden- and there is no way to tell if your frame assignment is 11, 111, 1111, or 11111, for example.

Animators at our studio almost never use the shape tween tool because it rarely follows the most obvious tween path, and often creates bizarre solutions to seemingly simple shape tweens. Animators on TV productions timelines rarely have time to use elaborate, time consuming shape hints.

A pie-in-the-sky suggestion would be to include a deformation tool similar to Photoshop's Liquify. I can think of plenty of uses.....

My dual G5 is very fast a just about everything EXCEPT Flash. Why is the Mac version so much slower than the PC version?

A few of these suggestions have been mentioned earlier, but I hope similar postings from multiple users will increase the chances of some of these improvements being implemented.

Im looking forward to this next release of Flash. Its a good sign that Macromedia is willing to listen to suggestions from artists using their programs.

T Szabo
Animator,
Renegade Animation

Wow! You guys are great! Thanks for taking so much time to articulate your feedback. This has all been circulated around the Flash team for review.

Now comes the fun part. We have to prioritize these things and try to fit them into our ever-shrinking development schedule. In fact, as you continue to post feedback, please post the version of Flash you currently use, platform, and please prioritize your feature requests (if possible) in order to help us out.

Thanks again. This is great.

Cheers,
MD

--------------------------------
Mike Downey
Technical Product Manager, Flash
mdowney@macromedia.com

First, PLEASE consider the previously suggested CAMERA.

Then, just a pie in the sky thing.. it'd be nice to get some motion blur or general blur/focus options. That's one thing that Adobe After Effects has over Flash, from my perspective.

And if you can fix the Stream audio sync or frame limitation, that would sell the product for me, I think.

well "tight dealine" aside I would much rather have you guys take your time to do things right, rather than released another rushed and unpolished version.

1. Non Linear Editing of SWF files.
The ability to import SWF "clips" and edit, composit, retime, transition, in much the same way video clips can be edited in After efects. And be able to export finished product in native swf vector format, from there.

2. Particle System Support. The ability to attach symbols to aparticles system and create effecs like snow, leaves in the winds, smoke, etc...give the canon a series of propperties, like gravity, time to live, wind, direction, velocity, spread, etc...

3. Dynamic and programatic effect export for video.
What good is being able to generate beautifull effects using action script if they can actually be used in production work.

4. Wall, Obstruction, and Friction system.... Much like the motion guide layers, you could set up a layer where objects you draw act as obstructions. Say I animate a ball from one side of the stage to the other. I can place an obstruction layer and draw a rectangle in the way of the two keys. This would cause the ball to have to go around the box in order to reach the second key.

5. Timecoding/Timestamping...I dont really think I need to explain this too much, but it involves hours:minutes:seconds:frames

6. Fix the freaking terminology. The colums are the frames, the rows are the layers, and the intercection of the two are NOT frames, they are "CELLS". Inserting a key frame is not "inserting anything, but rather "duplicating" the previous "cell". "Insert Frame" does not insert anything, but rather it "extends the exposure" of the previous "cell".

oh yeah...

7. Fix the frellin' terminology.
The colums in thetime line are the "frames". The rows are the "layers". The interception btween a row and a colum is called a "cell".... "Insert Keyframe" is inacurate because you are NOT inserting a frame. You are merely duplicating the contents of the pervious "cell". "Insert Frame" is also misnamed, because again, you are not inserting a frame, but rather "extending the exposure" of the previous cell.

Hey everyone...the feedback is great.  Unfortunately terms like "Fix the freaking terminology" do no-one any good.

Macromedia are going out of their way to improve their products, by way of this dialogue.  Please let's keep it professional.  -Eddie

I'm very excited to hear that Macromedia has finally realized the need to focus on Flash as an animation tool. I've been sticking with Flash 4 (!) because the various benefits of later versions have always been balanced out by drawbacks. Most of the comments cover anything I can think of right now... Anything that improves the drawing and line control capabilities top my wish list... This might lead to the first new version I will actually look forward to!

xeth feinberg
mishmashmedia.com

all these suggestions are spot-on! Let me add:
being able to crop/enlarge the canvas stage from it's center point as opposed to just the right and bottom sides. Then we won't have to use edit multiple frames to adjust the animation to reflect the new stage size.

speed up the Mac version....pleeeeez!!!

enlarge the Search & replace dialog so the path to the script is visible

It'd be pretty awesome if movie clips actually worked in video/picsequence export's... Also, if the importing of png's actually worked... ie. not fill the background, that'd be pretty awesome. It'd be pretty cool if the distort tool actually worked on graphics/movie clips.