FlashDevelop 3.0

I've heard a lot of complaints from people about Flash's built-in ActionScript editor. There has been third party development going on for a while. One application that I've tried in the past was SEPY, but the Mac version was buggy and I never tried the PC version. Lee Brimelow swears by it though.

Another editor that's been in the works for a few years now and has finally yielded a full-fledged version is FlashDevelop. FlashDevelop is PC only now and I'm not sure if they're planning to develop a Mac version, but this is a pretty awesome editor. Very quick with a lot of code hinting.

Give it a spin!

ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook

Adobe is still trying to get Flashers to migrate to ActionScript 3.0. It's so late in the game with this, but their efforts have stepped up now with the ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook. 21 PDF pages of code examples and a list of 5 misconceptions about AS3 and a list of 5 benefits of AS3.

So if you're still AS2, then you'll want to check this out.

Beginner's Guide to ActionScript 3.0

At FlashDen.net, there's a new video series by Doug Winnie titled Beginner's Guide to ActionScript 3.0, which are hosted at tv.adobe.com. It's pretty amazing to me that anyone is producing video's of this, since ActionScript 3 has been around for so long now. I guess there's still a lot of ActionScript 2 development going on out there.

Enjoy.

Dynamic Text Fields

I had a recent issue with Dynamic Text Fields. In an interface I designed, I had a set of button symbols - just simple buttons. I didn't want to put any text labels in the buttons themselves, I wanted the text to come from an external XML file. So I set up the XML file and got the text into a Dynamic Text Field that I had in a layer above the buttons.

The problem happened when testing the movie. The buttons normal behavior was blocked by the Dynamic Text Field?!? For example, when hovering over the button, the cursor stopped being a hand cursor over the text field. Any rollover effects stopped when the cursor was over the text field. So I thought it was an issue with the text field itself, like some appearance property or something. I tried all of the settings and it didn't change anything.

After posting questions to a couple of forums, I finally got the answer. With ActionScript, you need to set the text fields mouseEnabled property to false:

textfield1.mouseEnabled = false;

That means that the text field doesn't respond to mouse events at all. Problem solved.

It seems odd to me that Dynamic Text Fields do this at all. I don't think this was a normal behavior in versions prior to CS4.

Simple XML Gallery

I posted a Simple XML Gallery to FlashDen: http://www.flashden.net/item/strongsimplestrong-strongxmlstrong-gallery/34538. Cool app that is very easy to customize. There is adequate documentation for the gallery.

It features preloaders for the images being loaded and hidden next/previous buttons that appear when you hover over the right/left side of the stage.

Nice AS3 Tweening Tutorial

Kirupa has posted a nice tutorial on ActionScript tweening.

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 CS3 Preloader

There's a new article about creating a Flash Preloader in CS3 on the Adobe Developer Center by Jamie Kosoy of Big Spaceship.

Preloading in Flash CS3: Addendum

OK, I don't speak Italian, but Flep does. Not only does he speak Italian, but he speaks AS3. Thanks to his post: Preloader for Beginners, I finally found a really good solution for preloading. The only thing I wish it had was a progress bar. Great stuff Flep.

Preloading in Flash CS3

You'd think that something as important and standard as a preloader would be simple in the latest version of Flash. Not only is preloading pretty much undocumented - probably because there are so many ways to do it - the information both in books and on the internet is fairly sparse. So far, I've found at least four different techniques and none of them to my liking.

What's even more daunting is to find out how it's implemented - with classes. Now I've been using Flash since version 2 and I'm pretty fluent in AS 2.0, but this whole business about classes in CS3, although it's slowly sinking in, is a bit much. Instead of a few lines of code, now I need a whole separate .as file as a document class for my Flash file?!? Try teaching that to first time Flash users!

Anyhow, I thought I'd share what I found, so you could pass it along. First there's this post over at BIT-101 entitled: Preloaders in AS3. For something a little more straightforward, you can try Koen De Weggheleire's solution, which doesn't require a class, but isn't all that flexible either: Preloader in Flash CS3 - Actionscript 3.0 way. Weggheleire follows up with another tutorial on a different technique, this time with a class: More About Preloading in Flash CS3. This approach is promising and easy to tweak. Finally, there's ProgressBar Component of Flash CS3, by Flep. This technique utilizes the Progress Bar Component included in Flash CS3.

Actually, preloading has never been an exact science and everybody has different approaches to the whole thing. I just think Adobe could've implemented it better in this release.

AS3 reference

I'm tackling AS3 now and it's been slow going. Finding good information about it on the Adobe website is frustrating. I did stumble on this today and I thought I'd share it with you. It's an 800 page AS3 reference by Adobe - go figure.

Getting used to AS 3.0

So I downloaded the trial version of Flash CS3 (finally, thanks to Adobe. The new welcome screen allows you to create a couple of different document types, one is Flash Document AS 2.0 and the other is Flash Document AS 3.0. The difference between AS 2 & 3 is huge, so I'm tearing all over the web to look for good resources.

Senocular has an article called Getting Started with ActionScript 3.0 in Adobe Flash CS3. One of the changes, for example, is the fact that you can no longer put scripts on objects, i.e. buttons, movie clips. All of the scripts you write have to be in the timeline only!?!

Event handling is so different now. In AS 2.0 you could easily write an onClipEvent script for a MovieClip or an on (release) event on a button to get things going. No longer. The method is completely different.

There are other big changes too, so check out the article.

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.