you do voodoo?

i don't. i work with stuff that doesn't involve trial and error and waving dead chickens at pieces of equipment. i'm a programmer, or a software engineer, or whatever the correct nomenclature is. when i tell a computer to do something, i expect it to either
a) get it done or
b) let me know, in no uncertain terms, that what i wanted did not get done.

to be fair, modern ides (for actual software development) do a lot of the hard work when it comes to error checking, and the compilers do the rest so that by the time your work's doing all the wrong things you know that the screw-up lies with you. as long as you work in an organized manner and your testing is intelligent, the chances of releasing meaningful bugs are minimal.

with web development, not so much. it's like building beautiful, intricate sandcastles with a tiny plastic bucket and spade.

once you've picked a data description standard, such as html, you have to ensure that all the different browsers will be able to handle that standard (doctypes, which don't always behave as required). that's before you've added dynamic stuff using things like javascript, which each browser handles in its own way. jquery is awesome, and its cross-browser stuff is remarkably good, but even that's not enough - there's still a whole list of important functions that behave entirely differently between ie, mozilla and chrome. yes, people still use ie. it's not a browser, people! move on already!

only then, after all of that, do we get to css. the most convoluted and badly engineered piece of crap imaginable which exhibits completely different behaviour across the board and invariably requires rewriting underlying data in order to style things "correctly". and i'm not going to begin to discuss the different debuggers and how dysfunctional they are.

...

so. i now understand two things.

1. using flash / flex, with all the flaws and as undesirable as it may be to be locked in to a specific vendor, means not wasting time on all of these issues and having a development environment / debugger that basically works.

2. writing separate apps for the iphone, android and whatever else is on the market is far cheaper than developing mobile versions of a website that will look acceptable on the various phone browsers.

adobe: i am finally ready to give you money and move on from your trial versions. chain me up!