Adobe Flash Professional Cs5.5 -thethingy- Review

In the piracy community, "thethingy" releases were considered the "gold standard" for ease of use.

Before Adobe transitioned to the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription model, CS5.5 was a paid, perpetual license product. Flash Professional CS5.5 introduced several features that made it a staple for animators and developers: ADOBE FLASH PROFESSIONAL CS5.5 -thethingy-

The most significant, and ultimately tragic, feature of CS5.5 was the ability to compile ActionScript 3 to native iOS code (via LLVM). This was a technical marvel. A user could draw a bouncing ball on frame 1, write bouncingBall.x += 5; on frame 2, and output a .IPA file for an iPhone 3GS. This was a technical marvel

Analysis: This feature was a ghost. Apple's developer license agreement explicitly forbade cross-compiled apps that relied on intermediary runtimes. Adobe had to strip out the Flash Runtime from the final binary, producing a "static" app. Consequently, any loader.loadBytes() or runtime gotoAndStop() functionality broke silently. CS5.5 thus created a facsimile of native performance—apps looked like Flash but bled like C++. Developers were fleeing. And yet

To understand why professionals clung to ADOBE FLASH PROFESSIONAL CS5.5, you have to look under the hood. The interface was the classic Adobe dark gray layout, but the magic was in the timeline and the code editor.

Let’s decode the keyword. ADOBE FLASH PROFESSIONAL CS5.5 was released in 2011. It was a "dot-five" release—a rarity for Adobe, which usually reserved whole numbers for major overhauls. CS5.5 arrived during a panic. Steve Jobs had just published his infamous "Thoughts on Flash" letter. Apple would not allow Flash on iOS. Developers were fleeing.

And yet, CS5.5 -thethingy- became legendary because of three specific "thingies":