Learning Flash
I decided to try to learn Flash. I’ve been using Director for most of my intermedia work since 1999, though I also do some stuff just in JavaScript.
The last couple of versions of Director (11 and 11.5) have been terrible. Jig Sound doesn’t work in Director 11.5. They’ve screwed up the audio somehow. The development of Director itself is now being done in India. I expect they’re being set up to fail. Adobe has no idea what to do with Director. It should be sold to a company that would develop it properly. But Adobe wouldn’t want the competition with Flash. A pity. Flash has pretty much caught up with and, in most ways, eclipsed Director. So I’m going to give Flash a go.
Christine Wilks helped me with suggesting some books. I have ‘Essential ActionScript 3.0′ by Colin Moock and will soon have ‘ActionScript 3.0 Bible’. I also bought ‘Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4′. And then there’s the online ‘ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference’ and the ‘ActionScript 3.0 Developer’s Guide’ and ‘Developing Adobe® AIR 1.5 Applications with HTML and Ajax’… and on and on.
A bit intimidating but I’m on about page 300 of ‘Essential ActionScript 3.0′. No where near yet doing anything creative with it, but I’ve done some testing out of making small programs in the Flash IDE and small AIR apps in DreamWeaver and am using an ActionScript editor called FlashDevelop. Which is much faster than the code editor in Flash.
Basically, at the moment, I’m just wading through the first part of ‘Essential ActionScript 3.0′. OOP, Namespaces, Interfaces, Garbage collection, and other thrilling topics.
But just wait. Before a year has passed, I hope to have something good for you done with ActionScript.
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4 Responses to “Learning Flash”.
Sounds like fun, Jim. Have you checked the news recently concerning Flash? From the Adobe website:
“Adobe flash will soon be coming to Android, Blackberry and the WebOS. Previously this was scheduled for the beginning of this year but Shantanu Narayen said that their partners are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets only in the second part of the year. He did not give any explanations for the change of the schedule or provide any certain dates.
Commenting on the Apple’s exclusion of flash support in its iPhone operating system Shantanu Narayen said: “Lack of support for flash on any device means that the consumers using these devices are not getting flash in all its glory. We have a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with us to bring Flash to their devices, whether they be smartphones as well as handsets, and so companies like Google or RIM or Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year”.
And as for the Apples decision Adobe CEO says that this is not a technology decision but a business decision and that it hurts customers. As for the effect that this move may have on Apple Shantanu Narayen said that competitive response in the market is going to happen in the second part of this year when you will see phones running Android operating system or the Palm operating system support the web in all its glory.”
It’s easy to get bogged down in reading about ActionScript 3.0 or any contemporary OOP language. All those tedious permissions of OOP and namespaces… I went for the basics and will get the details if and when I need them.
The juicier stuff, to me, is in the ActionScript Developer’s Guide. There are juicy chapters on sound, video, text, and graphics.
As for Flash not being available for the iPhone, well, that’s too bad, I guess. What was the basic reason for that decision, I wonder?
There’s quite a debate going on about the future of Flash. A lot of people seem to think that its ubiquity will be seriously threatened by HTML5 – and certainly Apple banning Flash development for the iPhone and iPad doesn’t help. It makes me feel rather insecure because my current creative practice revolves so much around Flash.
Although many people believe there will always be a place for Flash, it’s made me more determined to learn HTML5 and Javascript. Processing too. Also, I’m thinking, if I can learn the underlying principles of programming, I should be able to move from one language to another with relative ease…?
I’ve been following the Flash/Apple/iPhone discussion a bit. HTML 5 has an audio API, but it is miniscule. About all you can do is embed video-like sound controls in HTML pages and start and stop those sounds. No notion of channels or mixing or seeking or synchronization or getting microphone input or access to byteArray data or sound synthesis or any of that. Really really bare bones concerning audio. So HTML has a long way to go, at least concerning audio–and probably a good many other things–before it’s even in the same league as Flash concerning those particular types of media and operations on media.
But, eventually, HTML will probably develop API’s that challenge Flash in all the fundamentals. As HTML becomes feasible to render various types of things, there will be a move to use HTML for those things rather than Flash. For instance, http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/scribd-html5/?qfds is an article about how SCRIBD is moving from Flash-based documents to HTML 5 documents. Which, I suppose, makes sense for the sort of thing SCRIBD offers, ie, documents that are basically quite printy.
I would say Flash is going to be around for quite a while. I expect it will be 20 years before HTML gets to the point where it seriously challenges Flash on all the fundamentals, including audio, concerning the sort of work we do. Mind you, what I think is fundamental is advanced, for many people.
And as HTML becomes viable for more complex and granular operations with and on media, tools will emerge for non-programmers and programmers and various levels thereof that make dev using HTML less completely programmerly. Much as has happened with Flash, where non-programmers can do quite a bit, and there are small steps one can make in coding.
So I would say don’t worry about it too much, Christine, just do the sort of work you want to do with all the wonderful creativity in you and the tools and stuff will follow.
Yes, once you learn one programming language, learning another is much easier. Programming languages do not differ as much as natural languages differ from one another.
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