Loading ...We are pleased and proud to offer this Digital Forward to Learning ActionScript 3.0 from Adobe Flash Product Manager, Richard Galvan.
Looking back at the last eleven years of Flash’s history—starting with the first Flash animation I saw on a website for an internet startup that is long since dead, and spanning to the fantastic site I just saw for a very well known shoe company—it is amazing to me how much Flash has evolved. It is now a powerful platform for delivering Rich Internet Applications and anything else that one can think of.
I sometimes find it hard to describe to a brand new user what Flash is—not because I don’t know what it is, but because I can’t seem to condense all that Flash can do into less than three hours. So, I will use a description that I heard during a meeting with a very talented flash designer. He described Flash as the ultimate digital canvas, which allowed him to display his creativity and imagination in a form for others to see and experience. I thought about that for a minute and I realized that he had just described the mission the Flash team has embraced for the last decade—to create that digital canvas.
Flash had its beginnings in graphics and animation and, although that aspect of it is still very important and strong, it has evolved into so much more. Over the years we added many great enhancements; audio and video playback capabilities, web cam support, and enhanced graphics capabilities, just to name a few. But one feature truly changed Flash and made it the tool it is today—the addition of ActionScript in Flash 5. Although Flash had scripting support as far back as Flash 2 it wasn’t until Flash 5 that the true implementation of ActionScript was added. It can be argued that ActionScript made Flash the dominant technology it is today. It allowed Flash designers and developers to go beyond static graphics and animations and create sophisticated interactive experiences of the likes which had not been seen before.
In 2007, the release of Flash CS3 Professional and Flash Player 9 marked the beginning of a new era in the history of Flash. It was the first release that included the improvements brought about by the combination of Macromedia and Adobe—the new Adobe. A number of new features and workflow improvements were added to Flash CS3 Professional to make it one of the most successful releases of the Flash tool. One of the most important of these new features was the addition of ActionScript 3.0, the latest and most powerful version of ActionScript to date.
ActionScript 3.0 contains a number of dramatic improvements, many of which are covered in this book. However, I will point out that one of the biggest improvements is in its execution speed. ActionScript 3.0 makes it possible to create the type of applications that the Flash community could not previously create due to performance limitations. ActionScript 3.0 support was included in Flash Player 9, which had been available to users several months before Flash CS3 Professional hit the market. During that time many great examples of the performance gains of ActionScript 3.0 were created and made available to the public. There was a tremendous excitement when our users first saw the dramatic difference in performance between ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0, and many were jumping at the chance to start using it. Yet it wasn’t until Flash CS3 Professional became available that a large portion of the Flash community had a tool, which they could use to develop in this new powerful language.
While the improvements are significant, and the result impressive, the reality is that ActionScript 3.0 is a more sophisticated language that differs from ActionScript 2.0 in many ways. At several seminars and conferences (and I attend many, by the way), I have had a number of new and existing Flash users pull me aside and confess to me that ActionScript 3.0 intimidates them. It was not our intention to make ActionScript 3.0 intimidating but, rather, to make it a more powerful, flexible, and easier language to develop sophisticated applications with.
As I mentioned already, I spend a lot of time at conferences, seminars and user events trying to understand what we can do better and how we can improve our users experience with our tool and technologies. While at one these conferences, I had the opportunity to stop by and attend Rich Shupe’s presentation “ActionScript 3.0 for Designers” and I was pleasantly surprised to see how simple he made it to learn ActionScript 3.0. It was obvious from the reactions he was getting from the crowd that he was hitting on every concern they had. I later had a chance to talk to Rich about the perceptions surrounding ActionScript 3.0 and the different ways we could try to address them.
I am excited about the release of this book. I am confident it will help not only beginners, but also existing ActionScript 2.0 users, to take full advantage of the great new capabilities ActionScript 3.0 has to offer. I look forward to seeing what the readers will be able to do with this new knowledge, and I encourage everyone to keep pushing the limits of the technology. That’s the driving factor that keeps us making it better.
Richard Galvan
Product Manager, Flash
