I love AS. While I plan on keeping ASD6 and buying ASP6 outright to support future development, I'm torn by the idea of Smith Micro profiting from a relationship they have done nothing but hurt. It's a very good thing that AS is so good. (Perhaps Smith Micro is fiendishly trying to test our loyalty?)
I have no problem with the pricing scheme. As I'll show in a minute, I do believe (with some reservations) that AS cold become a Toon Boom killer within its price market. But then I find out that I paid retail ( I do so hate to give a middle-man a cut) for not even the final version of ASD6. Luckily Mike's promised a free update to the "official" release (although I'm not sure how less "official" a retail release could be).
::::::::Requests::::::::::::::::::::::
1. Mouse wheel scroll or modifier key click to pan the timeline. Between the time indicator, the keyboard arrows, and the mouse wheel there are three ways to scrub the timeline. But there is only one way to scroll down a long list of animation channels (and now with the sequencer, a very much longer list of layers), by grabbing the scroll widget.
Even just making layer selection in the layers window automatically scroll to that layer in the sequencer would help, since layer selection is always matched in both.
2. And it just baffles me why you'd put all the very fine work in adding that gradient scale/rotate/translate gizmo with out extending that functionality to the shading effect as well. This makes shading and halo seem that much more clunky.
3. Animation channel consolidation should be easier to change, like perhaps right clicking a channel icon. Right now you have to go into the preferences for something I can see a lot of people wanting to toggle often.
::::::::::::Bugs:::::::::::::::::::::::
1. It allows the import of unsupported movie formats, which only the first frame and then disappear. Also, trying to then change the source movie will crash ASD.
2. The save dialog for animation export is not the full system dialog with sidebar shortcuts (like 5.6 has). This makes find where you'd like to save harder for no good reason.
3. There should be a way to remove gradient color slots without having to start all over. Also, the method for adding should be a little more explicit in the UI.
:::::::::::::::Tips::::::::::::::::::::
Six easy steps to frame-by-frame (without a switch layer!)
I did this in minutes, very easily. ASD6 comes very close to approximating other frame-by-frame workflows.
Steps-
1.Set a vector layer's visibility to off both before and after the desired 'frame' duration. (i.e. on twos, fours, etc)
2. Draw first frame.
3. Duplicate layer, so that you don't have to reset the visible duration.
4. Delete all, add, and/or change this new layer as needed for next frame.
5. Once you don't need to see the previous frame, this layer can be slid (on the sequencer) to its position on the timeline.
6. Repeat 3, 4, & 5 as needed
No onionskin required, and you can add a "lightbox" layer to fade the previous frame. Here's what the sequencer and layers windows look like for this:
mediafire 
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