Climbing Flash Mountain
I consider myself a decently skilled Flash developer. However, I don’t use the program frequently enough to keep up with the constant pace of change in ActionScript. So it seems that every time I start with a significant Flash project I’m faced with the decision of either sticking with the backward-compatible language choices or forging ahead into uncharted territory and learning new skills. I’ve always been the type that wants to use what’s best—not necessarily what’s easiest—so I again find myself scaling a learning curve.
Adobe’s decision to rewrite AS from the ground up was a good one. A lot of the schizophrenic weirdness of AS2 seems to be gone, and AS3 is now a proper object-oriented language with all the standard features that are expected these days. Maybe now it’ll stabilize for a while…
So here I am once again surrounded by a stack of books. Poking, prodding and testing to see how things work under the new regime. It’s one thing to understand how to use a given feature or two. The trick is to grok (did I just say that?) what the best practices are and use the tools to the best advantage.
So no pretty pictures to share this time, unfortunately. Perhaps I can put together a little Flash gizmo to post here before long though… Until then, I’m clearing the desk to make room for more manuals.
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