Colin Moock published an interesting article about nine problems he sees with ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9. Most of the charges he makes are specific to the Flash CS3 authoring environment, and the general theme is that ActionScript 3.0 and its implementation in Flash CS3 makes the development process more difficult than it should be for users without significant programming backgrounds.
The Nine problems are:
- The removal of on()/onClipEvent() from Flash CS3 makes creating simple interactivity hard.
- Getting rid of loaded .swf files is hard.
- Casting DisplayObject.parent makes controlling parent movie clips hard.
- The removal of getURL() makes linking hard.
- The removal of loadMovie() makes loading .swf files and images hard.
- ActionScript 3.0's additional errors make coding cumbersome.
- Referring to library symbols dynamically is unintuitive.
- Adding custom functionality to manually created text fields, to all movie clips, or to all buttons is cumbersome.
- The removal of duplicateMovieClip() makes cloning a MovieClip instance (really) hard.
Colin does an excellent job of describing each charge in detail, with code examples. He also spends a lot of time discussing not only what Adobe should do in each case, but also what the Flash developer community should do. If you regularly work in the Flash CS3 environment, I highly recommend this article. There's less relevant material for Flex and FlexBuilder users, but a couple of the topics may be of interest: "2. Getting rid of loaded .swf files is hard." and "6. ActionScript 3.0's additional errors make coding cumbersome."
I'd like to encourage you to read his article and send a feedback on what you think are the most important issues he brings up in his article. Colin even links to some of Adobe's feedback mechanisms.
I didn't see in his article the relative weights he attaches to the nine charges, but it would be interesting to see which charges the community would consider the highest priority.
Here's the link again in case you missed it at the top of the post:
The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0
1 comment:
sometimes implementing proper standards force things like this to happen. to make the actionscript complete oop all those roundabout techniques were now removed, even though they were saving tonnes of designers to quickie simple interactivity. anyway.. a few of the items are covered/resolved in flash 10 as far as i know.
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