Recently, my business had a need for some Flash development and I had just come off of a rather demanding project that, today, finally went live (yay!). Now, I’d never done any Flash to any degree of seriousness in the past; however, there was a need to be filled and I’m not afraid of a challenge. In a couple of days I was able to write a pre-loader that could be configured to play multiple videos in a time line for set intervals. For those of you out there on the Flash scene, that’s a rather minor accomplishment… but I’m pretty pleased with it, having never done such a thing before.
I’ve never been a big fan of Flash for general purposes. It’s too heavy for my liking. I like the web to be neat, structured and nicely degradable. Now, I never said that I don’t like it. I believe that there is a purpose for it; that purpose just happens to be its nom de plume. Should you want it flashy, so shall you do with Flash. Hey, all-in-all, it’s a neat trick.
Well, it used to be just a “neat trick” back in the archaic days of ActionScript. ActionScript 3 is, actually, quite respectable. After writing my pre-loader, having abstracted my objects to levels that made me happy, I took on a whole new respect for the use of Flash. Sure, ActionScript 3 is practically Javascript with a shiny coat… but I’ve also come to respect well-written Javascript a heck-of-a-lot more than I used to. Key word being: well-written. I guess that’s two words…
After writing a few things in ActionScript 3, I started thinking of the possibilities… Oh, the games I could write… Oh, the fun little effects I could accomplish. I still don’t think it should be used as the multi-purpose happy-web-solution that it’s often hyped to be; but I can definitely think of a number of things that I’d use it for.