December 20, 2012

The End of the World! Almost.

The End of the World came early for me...at least that's what it felt like. This afternoon I was happily animating away on my PickleWeasel app promo-demo when Adobe Flash started being buggy. This happens with software right? I saved, closed the file and re-opened it a few minutes later.

I saw this:



Flash can not parse this document? Ack. My file was corrupt. A creeping terror swept through me and the blood drained out of my face. I felt like every minor chord in the Universe was ringing dissonance in the depths of my soul. I couldn't even make a fist. Those Mayans!

I'd been working for a week on this animation, so to have the file corrupted was like losing a piece of my heart. Something I'd created was gone.

I turned to Twitter and asked for help. And Twitter delivered! So many fabulous people made suggestions and offered to help. I also reached out to @Adobe hoping they would respond.

This is kinda technical, but The Huz managed to decompile the .swf of rendered "work-in-progress" animation, which was all I had left. It was a partial success; the decompiled file looked nothing like my original timeline. Working in Flash is so...personal. I would have had to do quite a bit of slogging to work with it in that state.

A few minutes later, @Adobe did come through on Twitter. They put me on to @Adobe_Care who pointed me in the right direction. I fixed my Flash file and now I'm happily animating away.



Relief! It's not the End of the World until tomorrow! Thanks Twitter.


5 comments:

  1. Software can be a real pain, sometimes. Wait... I make software. Software companies rock. Good service rocks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey hey, were Adobe. The little car that's made out of clay. http://www.zimbio.com/watch/jmxSnPKhnN9/Adobe/Saturday+Night+Live
    but we can't watch it in Canada. For us there's this: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/86/86dadobe.phtml

    ReplyDelete
  3. I should do versioning on my files, like work for a while and then when I stop for the night or something save it as v2, then when i work on it next time save it as v3 etc etc etc. I'vel ost entire files before :(

    ReplyDelete

Cuz You Rocketh.