Getting Intimate with Flash
I would like to think I am pretty good with the tools that make up the Flash platform. If you wanna talk Flex or AS3 I am your man. But I have come to realize that my flash skills are not up to par. Now what I mean by that is that if you take away my mx.* packages, I am a worthless little crybaby.
So my goal for the year 2008 is to become much more familiar with the tool set available in flash, but outside of my flex tool set. As such I took polygeeks drop shadow example and implemented it in just as3. I plan to do a bunch more of this stuff and playing with the drawing API. I also want to play with HaXe and look at Neko as a server side platform.
So stay tuned for any insights that I may have with regards to using AS3 without flex.
Hey maybe we could just do a little swap–we could trade a few brain cells… because I’m pretty much the opposite. If I need something I just roll my own… every time. Sure, I build little mini frameworks–but even when I SHOULD invest the time to learn a framework (let alone Flex’s) I often think of reasons why I don’t need to. And, frankly, sometimes just doing it by hand for a one-off job is probably better. But, still, I think I’m missing out on a few things but need to get past whatever blocks I have with really embracing Flex.
My guess is that as you get to know the intricacies of Flash, with it’s embedded MovieClips and Timelines, you’ll think to yourself, “How in the frak did anyone ever manage to build all those cool sites with this crap.”
Phillip you and I would make a good coding team. I can do the structure and backend and you can make all those wonderful little pixels dance :)
Polygeek, after redoing your example I dont think thats my issue. The code it took to create, format and place the TextField alone might have warrented that trip to the flash IDE. If only i could use that to lay stuff out without dealing with the time line. Its scares and intimidates me :( And the fact that you can have more than one for diifferent items is just more than I can take. I’ll never find my code hidden in there :)
AS3 Cookbook from O’Reilly is a great place to start if you want to see how some raw ActionScripting is done. I’m sure you will be familiar with a lot of this from your Flex work, but I found this reference far more useful than any of the Flex books I have seen as I started building real Flex apps.
- max
Hey Max,
its kinda funny. I am actually very good with AS3 as a language. And I do have the as3 cookbook.
What I am jumping into is building applications without the use of the mx collections I have come to rely on so heavily.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress.