A public beta of Flash CS5 was announced at Adobe MAX 2009, but yesterday Adrian Ludwig (Group Manager, Flash Platform Product Marketing at Adobe Systems) announced on the Flash Platform Blog that unfortunately there won't be time for a beta. The plans are changed "in reaction to this strong positive feedback", so no present from Adobe Labs this Xmas.
One line that worries us slightly is Adrian Ludwig's sentence "we think that what is most important is to get the release version completed and in your hands as quickly as possible". We sure hope this isn't an indication that CS5 will be rushed to market as Flash CS4 was. CS4 felt really good initially, but working with it for longer periods of time it became clear that the product was definitely released before it should have been. Flash CS4 wasn't ready for prime-time until Adobe released a second update (10.0.2) to the tool. Users just want solid software that does not crash. That it's released quickly is totally secondary.
Adobe seem to think that it was just the general economic slowdown that slowed the CS4 sales, but it was just as much the bad rep CS4 had in the community. Despite the updates, some of my CS4 software still crashes regularly so let's hope this does not happen as a result of internal scheduling for the entire cs5 package and that the Flash team really should have had more time.
Something that was released on Adobe Labs this week was the updated Flash Player Beta for the 10.1 version (Beta 2). This new version now supports the global error handling that was not present in the first Beta, so if you want to play with the new features over xmas,check it out.
