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The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0

  • July 15th, 2008
  • 12:49 pm

Just finished reading the article “The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0″ by Colin Moock. Interesting read, for sure. It echoes the same sentiments that I’ve been hearing from a few others lately…flash development is getting too cumbersome. I’ve heard way more groans along the lines of “it sucks that I have to learn actionscript to do the most basic things in flash anymore” as opposed to “I love AS3!”. I think AS3 is great, but what drew me into Flash in the first place was how much I could get done quickly and easily, and that’s certainly not the case anymore, being too far removed from it’s point-and-click roots (the examples pointed out in the article sum this up perfectly).

Flex came about to get the “hardcore” developers, or at least the people who preferred to go the all-code route, their own separate workspace. However, many of the flash developers I know still have no interest in learning Flex. Hopefully Adobe will refocus on Flash IDE-centered development and rekindle that excitement of the earlier Flash releases.

5 People had this to say...

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  • lee
  • July 15th, 2008
  • 4:59 pm

I love AS3!!!!!!

I’m sure there are flash designer who wish on(rollover) was still around, so they could built their website intro’s even faster….I write my own classes, I don’t use Flex, I just want Flash CS4 to have project/class introspection ability, so I can more easily search through my classes for functions/variables etc.

Good riddance to AS2.

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  • rich
  • July 15th, 2008
  • 5:08 pm

I love AS3 too (I won’t even work with AS2 anymore), but your just reinforcing the point. For you, coding everything works, but there are many flash developers out there who don’t want to code every last detail. I know many people who used to love working in flash but bailed because it got too programming intensive.

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  • RoyK
  • July 16th, 2008
  • 2:09 am

This complaint makes no sense to me. Whose bending the designers’ hand to use CS3? They’re not its target audience anyways. Designers can still use Flash 8.

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  • rich
  • July 16th, 2008
  • 1:13 pm

They’re not its target audience anyways.

I don’t believe that statement is correct, in fact I’d say it’s the opposite. Much of the pre-release hype behind Flash CS3 revolved around the fact that it was more focused on designers rather than developers (look at the CS3 component set…whittled down and way easier to skin).

Funny that both comments so far give off the same vibe of that only serious programmers use flash…which is exactly what Moock’s article is trying to make a point against.

By the way, just as a point of reference, I am a code-only developer, i haven’t done any real timeline work (or design in general) in years. I just sympathize with the people who do want to use flash more but can’t because it’s too overwhelming for them.

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  • lee
  • July 18th, 2008
  • 11:29 am

Yeah, Moock is correct, AS3 is more complicated than the previous actionscript languages, but that could easily be fixed if Adobe put more effort into creating an easier API to work with. It feels to me like they got the basic classes in place, and then didn’t think about extending them to create an easy library to work with.

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