Wow, what a whirlwind of a week has it been since my little Dear Adobe letter. So many of you have responded from around the globe, giving me and Adobe feedback on so many aspects of the topic. It's been really great to get this boiling in some of your minds and to see how many people from all backgrounds care about flash intimately and how they envision flash growing. Well, I wanted to try and clarify some things about my letter, so let me just kinda recap somethings since the dust is starting to settle.
Am I upset Adobe has created AS3, MXML and a tighter programming environment? NO! That would be ridiculous. I know that AS3 is the step in the right direction for Actionscript and the player. It is cleaner, faster, stronger... everything that a new iteration in a language should be. It helps give developers the freedom to tighten down their apps and provide a much better product to the end user. The flash 9 player has given older machines new life by running these larger apps faster than ever before. And that means a lot to all of us, since it's broadening the audience of flash sites and apps all together.
What else has AS3 done? Well, besides the player and scope improvements, it has brought on a much larger scripting engine. One that has improved everything, with better event handling, methods, properties and functions. So why was I saying it's so much harder? Imagine you are a designer and you want to jump into flash, action script and flash animation and start building a website or some type of interactive experience. In the AS1 and AS2 days it would be EASY. Throw some buttons on the stage, put a few mouse events with gotoAndPlay's on them and viola! You're starting to build something. Granted the options were smaller than what we could do but hey you were building a FLASH site/animation!
Now move yourself forward in time a little. Flash is using the AS3/4 engine. It's code driven and can build the best apps in the world! But what happened to all the fun of flash? It's gone. Designers can no longer go hey it would be great to build "X". They can't write a site on one frame. They don't have a clue what an object is and hardly know that actionscript is. But they want to build something in flash. Their minds don't and will not ever work in code. Some of you "devigners" are the exception and are the ones TRULY pushing flash to the edge of its boundaries. But if you weren't ever given the opportunity to start building something with flash in its early years you are never going to find out you are a "devigner". You will always remain a "designer", lost trying to understand what you can do with flash and actionscript. This is what I was trying to truly get at in my previous letter to Adobe.
Was I trying to get Adobe to keep AS2 around forever? No! I was just trying to get us all and Adobe to think about what Flash has done to the design/interactive world! And how this tool is used to not only create apps (which I hope is what Flex will be for, not Flash) but to create engaging animation-driven websites. That engage our end users and "had" made it easy for designers to pick it up and start engaging our users in ways most developers never would of never thought of. This is what made flash magical. All I am asking Adobe to do is look at the product and again think about how to leverage Flash and all the technology behind it back to the designer some again. And not to run off into the sunset of the online application world too fast. But to maybe keep progressing the scripting language to give both worlds the ability to create!
I just want to make sure the designer doesn't lose control and the ability to design with Flash. The word design is funny in today's interactive world. It can mean MANY things. But it still has its roots and whether you are designing with code, photoshop or with the Flash animation tool you can still design! That's what made flash so great. It divided the gap and also made the impossible possible for a designer. That is what was really amazing! And it made it all possible on the web! I REALLY can't wait to see where the product goes! But I also don't want to see it run off too far from all of the designers that are engaging our end users with their magical minds! So I just want to say I know Adobe can still keep moving in the developer direction but I think with the right tools and additions to the product it can also keep the designers interested and keep their hands in the product evolving the web.
I haven't sat down and thought directly about what these changes may be. But I will! I know that my opinions about these tools are not everyone's opinion. But that's not why I have been blogging about this. It's to hear the rest of the community's opinions and open the door a bit more for the designers and everyone to speak! Thanks for listening again!
Update: Sorry for the eariler miss hap on the title of this post. I promise that was not on purpose.
Hey Corbin,
Thought you might be interested in a little app, codenamed Bordeaux, that is still in development but targeted at graphic designers who want to develop projects with Flash interactivity but don’t want to learn ActionScript. Intriging.
http://www.beedigital.net/blog/?p=1703
I dont know….I’ve seen arguments that AS3 is actually easier than AS2. for example:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=328#comment-233274
And I agree with a lot of what I have heard. Think about it…. the language is still optionally typed… the timeline is still there…. many of the core methods have not changed (like gotoAndPlay for example)…. your 3 basic symbol types are still there (movieclip, button, and graphic) and work just like they used too…. timeline animation works the same…..
Most of what changed can be transparent if you let it. To create a movieclip, just select something on stage, hit F8, and choose movieclip just like you used to. You don’t have to understand that MovieClip extends Sprite extends DisplayObjectContainer extends InteractiveObject (and so on and so on) to create simple animations and interactivity. You dont have to use the event name constants if you dont want to. You dont have to concern yourself with the differences between int and uint if you dont type your vars….. Heres an example:
stop();
var myVar = 10;
my_btn.addEventListener( “click”, onBtnRelease );
function onBtnRelease( event )
{
trace( myVar );
my_anim.gotoAndPlay( 2 );
}
That is perfectly valid AS3 on timeline. You can’t tell from that if I’m using AS3 or AS2 with an mx Button component. The following code works exactly the same:
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
stop();
var myVar:int = 10;
my_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, onBtnRelease );
function onBtnRelease( event:MouseEvent )
{
my_anim.gotoAndPlay( 2 );
}
One BIG thing I think would be totally easier to learn/understand is the AS3 event framework…..there’s only 1. In AS2, just using the basic instrinsic mx classes that shipped with flash, you had 3: the function-property-pseudo-events (this.onEnterFrame = function()….), the addListener events ( myMovieLoader.addListener( this )…..), and then the EventDispatcher framework ( my_btn.addEventListener( “click”, onClick)…..). We wont even count AsBroadcaster….
I agree, a lot has changed, but a lot has also stayed the same. Sorry for the long ass comment….
@Preston - That looks really intriguing! I’m going to keep my hears to the ground on that.
@John VH - You might be right about alot of it. Being so proficient in AS2 and then having to get worse to get better at AS3 is just a hard bridge to cross. But one I plan to do! We will see over the next few months!
corban: Amen to that.
“Devigner” fits really good, and Flash created us, there was nothing like that before… and way before there was any Flash AS,AS2,AS3 course available to learn fast and easy, you had to try things to see how all worked and then try some more, I know as I’ve been coding/designing in Flash since 1998…wow, that’s 10 years. I have trained a lot of designers into AS2 too, not an easy task but doable.
On the other hand AS3 is simply too complicated for a designer mind to understand.
As I pointed out on reflektions.com website, is it worth it for me to do the jump to AS3 when almost everything in my work field and with my deadlines is done on AS2 all over the world?
(advertising, and sometimes not even a week to develop/adapt/translate stuff)
And with big Portals starting to accept flash 8, AS2 for banners and stuff like that until now?
I just can’t see it happening any time soon.
Same as you, I want to learn AS3, but in my case not to do the regular job I’m paid to do now, AS3 is a great tool, but the wrong tool for my work at least for another year or so.