Whinge

I use Macromedia's Flash quite a lot, mostly for creating animated poems. I even teach a course on Animated Poetry in Flash. This means I have to keep up with the latest versions, so at present, I have Flash MX 2004 installed. This has lots of fine features, and lots of bugs.

So I was initially pleased when Macromedia announced they had a bug fix release. Less pleased when I went to their site and discovered I could download it. All 66.66 MB of it. I don't have a broadband Internet connection, so downloading it via my modem would take about 6 hours, assuming the connection were reliable for that length of time and there were no problems.

I bought the product on CD, so I ought to be offered bug fixes on CD.

I contacted Macromedia about this, but they didn't have anything useful to say:

...Furthermore, for you to be able to acquire the Flash MX 2004 7.2 updater, may we suggest that you refer with your Internet Service Provided. You may request from them, if possible, to have your download bandwidth increased for only a particular period during off-peak hours for you to be able to download the said updater. They may be able to provide you with further assistance on this matter...

That bit of boilerplate just means they've had lots of complaints from broadband users about the amount of time it takes to download the update. As I said, I don't have broadband, so the stuff about increasing my download bandwidth is totally irrelevant.

I suspect this is one of those gestures, intended to please, but done at half-cock and on the cheap, that ends up having the opposite effect. It's certainly disgruntled me!

Oh yes, and that new Blogger NavBar looks really crap, doesn't it.