Against AS3

Colin Moock, author of Essential ActionScript 3.0, makes excellent arguments surrounding the difficulty for typical Flashers to get used to the new adaptations in the mindset of AS3 as compared to AS2. I heartily agree with all of his arguments, especially from the standpoint of teaching Flash. It is more difficult to teach ActionScript now because of the inherent hurdle of teaching programming terms and skills. It was so easy to tell a button to gotoAndPlay something before, and now I have to explain what event listeners are and why we need to construct them, etc.

It's also impossible (well, at least I think it is) to teach ActionScript the old way - by having students chunk together portions of code from the AS library in the ActionScript panel. It's too laborious to put together any code, even with Script Assist. I now have to approach AS3 like I do with HTML - which leaves the students dependent on code examples and pre-written samples that work without error.

The comment that Adobe has abandoned it's former user base is not that far off the mark. I was completely confident in my AS2 abilities and by the time Flash CS3 came around, I was able to put together just about anything. I have to admit, that when it came to AS3, I struggled with it. Some of it looked familiar and the more I did it, the better I understood, but having to deal with a class-based system and not a timeline-based language seemed a pretty far jump to me.

Having gone through Moock's book, I thought I had a good handle on it - but it still feels very foreign to me - probably because I am not a traditional programmer. I don't know C, or C++, or even JAVA. The only language that I was truly comfortable with was AS. It's hard to say that I didn't feel alienated by Adobe when AS3 came out or that I feel behind the ball this time.

What makes things more complicated is Flex. When we had a single authoring tool, it made it easy to see what needed to be done to get something working. Now it seems like I have to make a decision about what tool to use for what situation. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. Add on top of that MXML - yet another language that you need to know for Flex.

All of this makes pure animation and video very attractive to me right now. I enjoy designing and creating things. I shouldn't have to read 500+ page manuals to have to put together an interactive environment.

Flash CS4 Sneak Peek

Flash Magazine has posted some pics and details on the new Flash CS4 interface and features, revealed at a conference in Sydney. The new interface features a larger properties inspector that sits on the right dock and not at the bottom anymore. The rationale? More space for more access to parameters.

Also new is the timeline, which now allows you to control object in the Z-depth. The new IK (inverse Kinematics) option looks fantastic and I can't wait to try it. In general, new 3D features will be awesome to play with in this release.

Adobe has joined forces with Google and Yahoo to make Flash content more searchable. Nothing will need to be done by the developer community in order to 'optimize' Flash files for search, according to Google. Text, links, and other interactive elements will now be indexed by the popular search engines.

Macromedia had made great efforts in this area with the aid of Jakob Nielsen's group, but met with skepticism by the developer community. Since acquiring Macromedia, Adobe has made a continual effort to enhance Flash and this step - probably more so than any other feature request - will bring Flash and Flex to the forefront in the development community again. Without the problem of indexing and searchability, Flash will become more useful, especially to those with a focus on SEO.