back when Microsoft was charging lots of money for Visual Studio, they got hit with open source competitors and even ended up publishing their own free VS Express IDE starting from 2005.
Does anybody know why FlashDevelop or a commercial fork of it has not so far progressed into a full featured IDE with visual designer? Would that have been a very complex thing? Or is there no market interest in a significantly cheaper IDE than the official version from Adobe?
Bump.
My WAG is that Adobe will go out of their way to ruin anyone who tries. But I don’t really know the answer but I’m interested to know too. Also, if I were to develop something like that only for personal use, would that be ok?
There are such things. 3D Flash Animator (which does more than the name suggests, although hasn’t been updated for a while) and KoolMoves, for example.
They’re probably not quite ‘full-featured’, I suppose.
And, spam reported…
What spam? (or is it gone, already?)
The file format for flash used to be unavailable. That meant it was quite hard to create flash files that would work on adobe’s flash player. The current situation is a bit better; there is a publically available spec, though IIRC it’s incomplete. Gnu’s Gnash project is an example of a third party flash player (not a development environment, incomplete, but shows that it’s at least possible to do stuff with flash without using any adobe code).
There’s also a freely available compiler from adobe which is useful if you want to do code-heavy development in something other than the Flash IDE. It’s not hard to hook that into Emacs for example.
I think the main problem right now is that it’s actually not easy to do a visual/animation design program, and when you’re relying on Adobe’s de facto monopoly on the players and the spec, it’s hard to justify making the investment since you’d basically be competing with one of Adobe’s paid product and you can probably expect them to make your work difficult when new versions of the flash system are released.
ok, so this suggestion, which may well have its merits, raises an interesting question - if we were Adobe, how would we do this evil deed? How would we sabotage the functioning of code generating (based on updatable templates) visual designers for Flash or Flex widgets while still allowing Flash apps incorporating those same widget components to run in the freely and widely available Flash Player?
AFAIK flex widgets are actually mostly code extending standard flash. Flex was bought by adobe IIRC. And Adobe has no interest in breaking libraries or automation/code generation by third parties; quite the contrary - that’s why they released the free compiler in the first place.
As far as I can see, Adobe has only two revenue generating products related to flash:
If I were Adobe, I’d give up on trying with 2. The money is in the Flash IDE/Design software.
There’s a bunch of libraries that you get with the paid Flash software that’s not included in the free (flex) compiler which are more useful than the flex alternatives (you can use those with the free compiler, but you have to generate intermediate files using the paid development environment).
Alternatively, you could introduce new stuff - like the shader extensions in flash 10 - in the player and just not support it in a free compiler or the public specs.
ETA: Of course, this is a balancing act; give away too much and people won’t pay for the full environment, on the other hand, make it too hard to do interesting things using your software, and alternatives will be more attractive.
As a programmer I have learned 13 computer languages over the years plus countless ‘technologies’ such as html/xml/css/xsl etc. None of them, not even assembly language, made me want to poke out my own eyes more than Flash.
I think it might just be difficult to get a bunch of developers to spend a lot of time creating a cheap or free IDE for a language that is basically horrific to use and offends our sensibilities 
YMMV.
The language isn’t that bad, once you know what parts to avoid. Especially once you figure out that you can still do everything you can do in Ecma 262 (that’s JavaScript) even though the compiler will yell at you. The main issue is the APIs. They work, but they’re not designed all that well.
Another 3rd party app is Swish. I’ve used it a few times and it’s much less resource intensive than full on Flash.