So I got my Adobe Flash MX 2004 certification certificates…months after I took the test and passed. I believe this may have been caused by the Adobe-Macromedia merger, as when I took the test, Flash was definitely property of Macromedia and Macromedia was its own company. I still don’t know what to think about the merger. Some of it will be good. But I worry about so much power over my creative tools being wielded by one vendor…especially seeing how spotty Illustrator has been after version 9. And Acrobat has been prostituted to the business world leaving a bad taste in this designer’s mouth. I really like the PDF file format – it really does make my life easier in many ways. But when the newest features in Acrobat are developed primarily for “enterprise” document solutions…yeah, it kind of rubs me wrong. I thought Adobe applications were made primarily for us creative types. It just makes me feel a bit left out. It’s like an old friend deciding to hang out with a different crowd and slowly starting to ignore you. Anyway, the reason for this post is that I also received a certificate saying I’m an Adobe Certified Instructor in Flash MX 2004: Rich Media Design. Okay. I only took one test too. I guess getting Flash designer certified also certifies me to teach Flash. Of course it is kind of a moot point as Flash 8 is out and I’m only certified for Flash MX 2004. The upgrade to Flash 8 is worth it from my experience at mediaRAIN. Not that I have personally made the upgrade yet. I’m waiting for Adobe apps to become Universal. I have a nice MacBook Pro just waiting for them to appear. Any day now. Like right now. Now? Pretty please, Adobe?
For further and better written commentary on Adobe, Macromedia, the merger, and Adobe’s drift away from its core principals because Marketing is in Control, please see John Gruber’s daringfireball.net.