Everyone involved with the IQP has been asking that question lately. It sure seemed like the answer was yes… until today.
Before we get to that, let me recap my Tuesday for you. I wasted about four hours trying to work out how to save and print charts and graphs. The code required to accomplish this is actually remarkably simple. It’s just that, once again, Adobe fails horribly in their internal implementation. When I tried to save an image of a bubble chart, the datatips got cut off. When I tried to print a bubble chart… well, I don’t know what happened there, but suffice it to say the output was very messed up and completely useless. FAIL!
I spoke briefly with Professor Danneels yesterday about this and informed him that saving and printing would be impossible, but that I could probably pull off saving to PDF. He agreed that was better than nothing. I told Matt about this, and he said something along the lines of, “well, it would be pretty bad if Adobe Flex couldn’t produce Adobe PDFs!” He had a good laugh when I told him that functionality actually doesn’t natively exist – you have to use the AlivePDF library that somebody else made to do it. DOUBLE FAIL!
Which brings me to today. I was going about my business online when Matt messaged me and informed me that our Flash Builder trial license had apparently expired. I fired up my Eclipse installation and sure enough, Flash Builder stopped working. Now I don’t have a problem with this; it’s perfectly reasonable that trial licenses should expire since, after all, they are trial licenses. What I do have a problem with is the fact that I was just using the damn thing two days ago and it couldn’t be bothered to tell me that my license was about to expire! TRIPLE FAIL!
Still, I figured this wasn’t really a huge problem. After all, Matt and I are students, which means we can get free licenses for some Adobe stuff, including the final version of FB4, which I discovered was released about two weeks ago. So I hopped over to Adobe’s website and filled out their form. They have issues where web design is concerned, apparently: having a scrolling frame inside a page that already scrolls is terrible design and is really annoying. OVERFAIL!
Anyway, they wanted a scan of my ID to prove I’m a student and said it has to have a “current date” on it. WPI does not put dates on their IDs, but in the interest of getting the license key as quickly as possible so we can keep working, I submitted it anyway. I figured that, if they don’t accept the request, I can just have Professor Danneels write a letter on WPI letterhead stating that we are students and use that as proof instead (since that’s the only other proof they’ll take). After submitting the form, I was shuffled off to another page that helpfully informed me that it could take up to two weeks to process the request! Seriously, Adobe, two fricken’ weeks to look at an ID and decide whether it’s valid or not?!? What exactly are they doing, sending someone to WPI to hold the scanned copy of the ID up to my face to verify that I am who I say I am?!? FAILTACULAR!
*Sigh* So I’ve sent an e-mail to the address Adobe provided in case I didn’t get an e-mail within two weeks asking them to please expedite the request if at all possible, seeing as there are only 3-4 weeks left in the project/term and we really can’t afford to be handicapped like this right now. Further updates as I get them…
EDIT: So about five seconds after I posted this, it occurred to me that the trial became time-locked because we’re in April now. So I set my computer’s clock back to March and Flash Builder started humming right along! FAILTROCITY! I’ve passed this workaround off to Matt, so we are kinda sorta no longer hamstrung. Apparently, two Adobe fails can make a win!
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