Another cool thing is the workspace switcher. I never switched workspaces before CS4 because of the overhead: You had to go to ‘Window’ then go back down to ‘Workspaces’, and then you got to choose you workspace… If you already specified any…
Flash CS4 comes with a few standard workspaces and a very handy button, located in the main screen of Flash. Changing workspaces is really only one click away!

Next thing that drew my attention was the 3D capabilities which are now built-in. I have always been intrested in 3D, but I never really got to play with it. So I hoped Flash would allow me some playing around with it.
I must say: The built-in feature is pretty cool. You can actually draw 2D objects and then move them around in a 3D space. The bad thing? The 2D object will stay a 2D object. You can’t change the ‘depth’ of an object. You can only alter the width and the height of the object. That’s a turndown for me. Nonetheless: it’s cool!

But…I’ve been working with Flash CS4 for a while now, and I did have a very annoying problem.
I was working on a typography assignment for school, when Flash crashed. Happily I save all of my progress so nothing was really lost. However when I started Flash again, and opened my FLA in progress, Flash wouldn’t be very responsive anymore. Opening a MovieClip turned out to take almost 20 seconds (including spinning beachballs). Clicking on a frame and previewing the timeline seemed to be even more of a problem.

First thing to do, was to close Flash CS4 and open up Flash CS3, and check out that same FLA file. No problems. Everything went just fine. So I closed CS3, opened up CS4 again, thinking it would be a one-time issue with CS4. But I was wrong. CS4 was dead slow again…
I closed my FLA, and created a new one… And all of a sudden everything went fine again… Like what the f#ck? (And no: when I opened my FLA after that again, it sucked again. Same goes for other FLA files.)

What the heck is going on? I am working in Flash CS3 again for now, but I’ld love to work with CS4 again.

I mean: the panels still disappearing when you click outside of Flash is annoying, but it doesn’t hold you back from building cool stuff. And even though the 3D features in Flash are very basic: It doesn’t keep me from doing my work. But Flash not being able to work fluently with saved FLA files, is a serious issue!

Anyone having similar issues, or knows a way of fixing this? Or is this a very annoying bug, that Adobe needs to take care of, before we (or at least I) can go on working with Flash CS4?