So… I hear on CFTalk that Macro­me­dia have a new Devel­op­ers Resource Kit (DRK) in the works. The news comes not from an offi­cial macromedia.com address, but from Cold­Fu­sion Jedi Mas­ter Ray Cam­den which is good enough for me.

Hmm… DRKs are not avail­able to pur­chase. They’re only avail­able to sub­scribers to Devnet, the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice which Macro­me­dia is in the process of killing off — so you can’t sub­scribe to it. Pre­vi­ous DRKs are not avail­able to pur­chase either. So essen­tially, there is con­tent on the DRKs that is known and pub­licly dis­cussed, but the vast major­ity of Macro­me­dia cus­tomers can­not access or pur­chase them. That just doesn’t seem like sen­si­ble busi­ness to me.

Why does this piss me off so much? I would very much like to use the Poll­ster Flash/CF polling app on a client’s site — and I have DRK4, where it first appeared. But I can’t get it to work prop­erly, and the DRK5 ver­sion, which is sup­posed to fix all the bugs in the DRK4 ver­sion, I can no longer pur­chase. I’ve looked around for an equiv­a­lent but noth­ing that works in CF. My Flash skills are not up to the job and any­way, the client’s bud­get does not extend to cus­tom pro­gram­ming the entire job from scratch.

It’s things like this that make me want to scream. So if any­one knows of a Poll­ster clone — or any pretty-looking CF polling app, even if it’s not actu­ally Flash — please let me know. If doesn’t have to be free either, just rea­son­able — if it solves the prob­lem, I’m happy to pay for it.