OK we have a treat for all of the Techies out there. We realise that you might not get excited by Twitter or Monetised Video but we’ve been assured that an article on Flash/Actionscript might get you to take an interest. It’s interesting stuff, especially when you follow some of the links and see what companies are doing with it. Techie or not, we think you’ll be impressed.

Flash/Actionscript is going through its 3^rd major evolution, which is reflected in the way we see it being used:

1.  Early flash versions (with ActionScript 1) were primarily used to plug a gap in HTML/javascript to allow interactive graphics/games to be distributed on websites.  For the most part the output was simplistic because the toolset and language limitations made anything else very time intensive (and therefore costly) to achieve.

It also provided impossible challenges such as accessibility.

2. Later versions of Flash (with Actionscript 2) started to improve things by making more complex animation and rich content delivery possible. This led to YouTube, Flash advertising, and a much larger creative user base.

3. After its acquisition by Adobe in 2006, its focus was changed to cover three key areas:
Creative Studio : the main Flash authoring tool would receive major upgrades to bring it in-line with the rest of Adobe create tool chain – as of the CS4 releases this is starting to become visible with features such as the XFL interchange format to allow complex assets to be transferred between apps like Flash & After Effects, Inverse Kinematics to simulate Bones in animations and rudimentary 3D support

Mobile platforms : Adobe continued to develop the FlashLite and FlashCasting technologies and push for broader adoption

Developer & Enterprise tools : In order to gain a better developer base Adobe needed to provide a robust development platform, improved API’s and an improvement to the painful workflow developers experienced up to now. The upshot of this was Actionscript 3, Flex Builder (plus a freely downloadable SDK) and a number of complementary technologies such as AIR – a runtime that allows a Flash/Flex developer to write apps for the desktop which will work on all major operating systems.

So where we are now?

With the latest generation of the Flash product line we’re finally getting the promised Rich Internet Application (RIA) and Rapid Application Development (RAD) capabilities that developers and creatives have been waiting for. This leads us to the current crop of Flash sites and AIR apps such as:

Actionscript 3 Sites using Papervision 3D or Away 3D libraries

While we realise that screenshots don’t quite do it for flash demos, we took some anyway, just to show you who is using it and how.

AIR Applications:

Some useful info on AIR here http://www.adobe.com/products/air/business/

Twhirl – Twitter client written in Flash/AS3 and publish as an AIR app

Agile Agenda –  a project scheduling tool which makes use of AIR

There’s an online community at http://www.actionscript.org/ which is full of happy helpful people in t-shirts, and where you can find the answers to pretty much any AS related questions. Meanwhile, Adobe have their own developer centre, which has even more info about applications, troubleshooting, debugging, upgrading, integrating…what more do you need?

Well, how about 6 reasons to use AS3? How good is that? Here you go – the full article is referenced at the end so you can read it in its entirety.

Reasons to use ActionScript 3.0

The following are what Lee Brimelow of Adobe considers to be the primary benefits of learning to use ActionScript. They are listed in no particular order.

“1. Your skills will be in high demand

This, in my opinion, is the main reason anyone who currently works or is planning to work as a Flash developer should switch to the new language. All major Flash work is now exclusively being built in ActionScript 3.0. You just don’t see many jobs looking for ActionScript 2.0 skills. So if you plan on working with Flash in your job, learning ActionScript 3.0 is essential.

2. Everything you build will be faster

Developers who have been working with Flash for a while have often been frustrated that our new, super-cool idea just couldn’t run smoothly because of the limitations of Flash Player. ActionScript 3.0 offers up to a 10-fold increase in performance over previous versions of the language. In some cases, the performance has increased even more. This means you can control more objects on the Stage at the same time. If you want your project to look and perform at its best, moving to ActionScript 3.0 is the ultimate way to achieve this goal.

3. There’s an abundance of new APIs

As Flash developers, we love nothing more than getting new toys to integrate into our projects. ActionScript 3.0 includes hundreds of new APIs for working with things like XML, regular expressions, and binary sockets. Even better, the whole language has been reorganized into packages and namespaces that make it much easier to find specific language features. When you use ActionScript 3.0, your Flash toolbox is not only much fuller, it is also better organized.

4. The display list rocks

One of the biggest changes in ActionScript 3.0 is the way Flash handles visual objects in a movie. In previous versions of the language, it was practically a black art to manipulate the display order (depth) of the items in a Flash movie. A large number of hacks and workarounds existed that didn’t make any sense to beginners starting to use the language. For instance, it was common practice to place visual assets at an extremely high depth in order to keep them on top of everything else in a movie. This led to a lot of problems in larger projects and required a lot of manual depth management work. The new display list in ActionScript 3.0 is a straightforward mechanism that handles how visual assets are rendered in your movie. Once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever developed a project without it.

5. The object-oriented structure is better

Developers particularly love the improved object-oriented structure of ActionScript 3.0. It includes things like runtime typing, sealed classes, packages, namespaces, and an overhauled event model. Programming in ActionScript 3.0 is on the same level as writing in other high-level languages like Java and C#. The new features in ActionScript 3.0 also make your code more modular, readable and extendable. Some of these features may not be used much, if at all, by interactive designers-but it is good to know that if you want to get into more advanced programming someday, the language structure is there to support you.

6. It’s more enjoyable to work with ActionScript 3.0

This may sound subjective, but I believe it is absolutely true. Ask anyone who knows ActionScript 3.0 to go back and program a project in ActionScript 2.0 and they will surely cringe at the idea. Previous versions of the language were filled with so many bugs, hacks, and workarounds that working in ActionScript 3.0 seems almost too easy in comparison. ActionScript 3.0 does take a bit of getting used to, but the rewards are well worth the effort.”

Full article

Hopefully this will have given you a good overview of Flash/AS3 and its potential, which appears to be huge. We need more feedback from you – it’s all very well us sitting here and researching, interviewing, scribbling and compiling – this needs to be an interactive site where you can share your successes, tell us what we ought to know (good or bad) and generally showcase the talents of our North East agencies.

Author: Gary Robson, Technical Director at Industrial Strength