What I Learned About Flash and ActionScript 3
I completed my first real Flash project last week. It’s an animation for a musical piece and it’s called Venetianization (long load times, be patient). One of the goals of this project was of course to learn Flash, which however I still don’t know how to use. Instead I learned ActionScript 3. So, there is not a single element on the stage; everything is scripted. And to my own surprise, I quite like ActionScript.
ActionScript 3 is the embedded scripting language of Flash 9 and a complete rewrite of its previous versions. I only had a short look into ActionScript 2 and did some simple stuff with ActionScript 1 at work aeons ago, so I can’t tell you exactly what changed. But I can tell you that ActionScript 3 is really clean and thoughtfully designed. It takes the very flexible nature of ECMAScript (Javascript) but adds lots of instruments to organize and structure your code more strictly. You are not forced to use those, but you’ll help yourself greatly if you do so.
Of course there are also some (many) things that don’t work as good as they are supposed to. Most of them, I believe, are to blame on Flash itself, rather than ActionScript.