There’s this product called the Aurigma online image editor which is a Flash/Asp.net image editor with filters and a bunch of bells and whistles. A client asked me to modify it for him. Grrr. Try to open up the 16mb fla in MX 2004. It crashes it. Tried it in MX. Almost crashes it, timeline won’t load. I could only view the library which contains 800 or so items. 800!

We got back to the company and they told us “you can load it in Flash MX if you open it with Windows 98 compatibility mode on”. Come on. I can’t even use Flash MX 2004? And the guy told me it was AS2. But no! It’s AS1! I actually loaded it in MX using the above method, and behold, the mess. On frame 2, look at that, 2500 lines of AS1. No #include! It’s inline (can you believe that?). But wait, there’s more! 700 lines in onclipevents in a blank movie clip called Pic Loader on frame 2. Load up the movie explorer. There are about 250 symbols that have actionscript associated with them. Some one liners, some several hundreds of lines of codes. The tooltips are made from movie clips that go on frame 2 on rollover and pop up a tooltip on frame 30. Come on! How the heck am I supposed to work with that?

The license is 1499$, source included. This is crazy! This movie is absolutely unmanageable. The guy from the company warned me that modifying this movie would prove difficult, if not impossible, but I was never mentally prepared for this. The ASP.NET code looks well thought out, but obviously the Flasher that did this mess needs to learn about best practices.