A Weekend with ActionScript 3.0

A client asked for a bunch of major changes to a Flash presentation I built a couple years ago—changes that begged to have the whole thing rebuilt using ActionScript 3.0. So I finally got my feet wet with the new version of Flash! Get my feet wet? I nearly drowned!

The project is huge and the deadline tight! The weekend was a constant flow of intense learning, intense problem solving, and little tricks to wake up my brain so I could keep at it. This involved brisk walks, taking showers, and eating hot peppers. I learned a lot and got a lot done. Booyah!

There are a lot of really exciting things you can do with ActionScript3. I've seen demos of sound visualization, 3D, and video but it's really exciting when you build something yourself. The project I'm working on is a Flash presentation that's completely XML-driven. All text in the movie can be changed, images are dynamically loaded, and there are even parameters for fading different songs in and out.

The documentation is great and it certainly made the transition a lot faster. Very happy about that improvement to at least part of the LiveDocs website.

Another big improvement is the text metrics. I was actually getting the correct values for textWidth and textHeight. This is one of the reasons I decided to rebuild in AS3 in the first place.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to playing with the new capabilities some more!