> Imagine that his company was about to go bust and had no money to > spend on anything other than salaries and marketing, and the > management team weren't actually being paid but they had a killer > product (i.e. any organic startup). How important would an IDE > upgrade be in that case? If it is that important would the developers > agree to paying for it themselves? We don't know whether the OP's > company is in this situation or not, but it is a perspective that is > worth considering before asking management for money.
Excellent point. I'm in exactly that situation myself (boostrapped startup) and I absolutely know that I can't justify spending company money on an upgrade to FB3. The situation was exactly the same when CS3 came out. In the end, I looked at my personal budget and basically paid out of my own pocket (for CS3). I wanted the upgraded functionality and workflow enough that it was worth it to me, but there was no reason that the company would need anything more than CS2 (which we had). Of course, I could have argued that'd "work faster" or "create better art" but I can't really prove that... hard to say that you're getting the most out of your tools when you know there are folks out there doing way more with less! Anyway, this is one reason I'm looking for folks who have experience with Textmate and Flex SDK... the Textmate editor such a pleasure that I'd be happy to do quite a bit of work in it, even though I wouldn't have nice tools like the refactoring or improved design views or auto-imports... I see as my own Flex Builder 2.5... ;-) BTW, Adobe, if you could just go ahead and purchase/license the Textmate editor and embed it in Flex Builder (integrated with the tools you have for FB3), I'd happily pony up anyone's money I could find/borrow/steal to get FB3. Textmate truly is one of the best programmer's editors I've ever used (and I've used dozens over the last 20 years!). Troy.
