Tag Archives: Learn AS3

2 Articles that everyone visiting my site needs to read.

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Collin Moock has published two articles through O’reilly InsideRIA that are fantastic. These articles are for anyone that has wanted to throw his/her hands in the air and say, “To Heck with AS3 and Classes and New Work-Flow and Packages and Display Objects and Event Models and OOP and learning Flash over again, and (well you get the picture)

These two articles will change your paradigm of Flash CS3 and AS3 being to hard. It will really help you in the long term never visit my site for AS3 Error resolution because you won’t be getting them any more. I will miss you but the purpose of my site is to help the Flashers (that includes Flex-ers) of the world develop better Flash. These two articles will most certainly help you do that. They will help you as a Flasher and will change the way you think of Flash and ActionScript 3. The mental barriers will be torn down after reading what the great Moock has to say.

Collin really brings to light the fact that AS3 is the same or even less verbose than AS2 or AS1 in many cases. I must admit that I had this same gripe but after reading this article I stepped back and took a good look at how a little more verbose up front can be a lot less verbose in the long run.

The first article (ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not) addresses and dispels the following concerns:

  1. It’s too complicated
  2. It’s hard to learn
  3. It takes a lot more code to do things
  4. Lastly shares how to believe

The second article (The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0) addresses these specific issues:

  1. The removal of on()/onClipEvent() from Flash CS3 makes creating simple interactivity hard.
  2. Getting rid of loaded .swf files is hard.
  3. Casting DisplayObject.parent makes controlling parent movie clips hard.
  4. The removal of getURL() makes linking hard.
  5. The removal of loadMovie() makes loading .swf files and images hard.
  6. ActionScript 3.0’s additional errors make coding cumbersome.
  7. Referring to library symbols dynamically is unintuitive.
  8. Adding custom functionality to manually created text fields, to all movie clips, or to all buttons is cumbersome.
  9. The removal of duplicateMovieClip() makes cloning a MovieClip instance (really) hard.

READ THESE ARTICLES BY COLLIN MOOCK (I know I used caps but this is important. It will help you dramatically)

ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not?

The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0

Thanks and Happy Flashing