Colin Moock’s AS3 crash course
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On Monday I attended “Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From The Ground Up Tour“.
First half of the 9 hours marathon to present ActionScript 3 was a true beginners course to Object Oriented Programming. With AS3, Adobe finally manages to provide dissent environment, IDE and run-time. It will appeal to lots of developers (Java developers will be quite exited about it, its very similar syntax), but it will be putting off lots of designers (as many I know who were there are not very happy what they saw), as they don’t get it, and some of them probably never will. Good news for them is that THE time-line is not going away and they can still make some money with the manual-non-scripting approach. The market will decide who is going to stay in the game.
Second half of the presentation was actually much more interesting for me, because Colin Moock show how all things link together using Eclipse Flex IDE and a browser to develop small web application. So, you can develop smooth rich media app outside Flash, but the bad news is, you still have to pay for the IDE and the compiler. Hmmm, I don’t like that. Seems like they missed the whole point of attracting new army of developers to develop new applications for potential rich media content delivery.
Whole examples and tutorials presented are in Moock’s book Essential Actionscript 3.0.
The presentation was great and he is calm and brilliant presenter.
Presentation slides can be found here.
Code examples used in the presentation can be found here.
Flex 3 Builder Pro or Flex Eclipse Plugin (you can get 60 days trail) or Free Flex 2 SDK can be found here.
For me, I’m still for developing in the holy web standards trinity XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I can see great potential in using Flex as addition to this for some solutions.
. Bloody software, it’s always late…
Themocracy