Migrating to ActionScript 3.0

Oh, snap! That was my reaction to Dan Carr's article on the Adobe Developer Center about migrating to ActionScript 3.0 in Flash CS3. I've been keeping up with AS3 since the public release of the Flash 9 Beta. Yes, I'm sure the code is better, more compliant, and all that, but - to be brutally honest - there are things in AS2 that are still sinking in for me. I feel like I've just reached a pinnacle with that knowledge and now it's totally changing, again.

Making the transition from AS1 to AS2 took a while, but I think moving on to AS3 is going to be tough. There are some pretty significant changes, some of which I like and others I don't. For example, properties no longer require the underscore character. So I can target the alpha of a movie clip with alpha, not _alpha. That's pretty cool. What's weird though is that you specify the alpha value with a decimal value, not a percentage. So if I want the clip to appear at 50%, I use .5. Same is true for Xscale and Yscale.

Event handlers are differnt, loading external XML files has been changed, movie clip syntax and instance names are different. There's just a whole lot to get used to. Oh, well. Hopefully somebody will write a great book to make the process easy to learn.