Learn Actionscript 2.0

As graphics people, rather than computer people, we are pretty happy with the outcome of this piece. I’m sure for anyone with a true mastery of Flash, Actionscript, or any object-oriented language, this will seem trifling. Still, since I’ve talked here about it, and because it’s done, I wanted to share. Here’s my flip-page book. The flash at the beginning of the site www.breckdesign.com is work that I supervised, but did not do myself. I did “compose” the music for the intro, though, in Apple’s Soundtrack music sequencing program.

Yesterday I had a break-through moment, where much of what I’d been struggling with became clear. It took an immersion in the project and reference texts such that I was thinking about how things work while showering, driving, etc. Not only was I thinking about how my project would work, but how to isolate and test small parts of my work and to test my understanding of Flash/Actionscript commands in the abstract. Amazingly, not much of what I had previously built was wasted.

Now, of course, my boss/clients want new functions in the project not originally conceived, but the part that I set out to do is finally done. The additions will not require of me anything that I have not mastered.

And still, I’m only scratching the surface.

in learning Actionscript is that I am trying to produce work while still only scratching the surface of the language. References are too few and way too frustrating for someone who wants to learn a task at a time.

The frustration of the week is that in English, what I want to do is to play from point a to point b along a timeline, where ‘a’ and ‘b’ might be any arbitrary points along the timeline. I also need to be able to play other isolated segments or combine all segments and play forward and backward as well.

It all sounds simple enough, but direct commands for much of this don’t exist, and animations are nested within other animations, adding to the complexity. A combination of commands are needed for any one of these tasks and I find nothing similar enough to my project for a guideline.

Most references want to take you through the building of projects with no direct correlation to my own project. The idea seems to be that if I build enough of these tutorial projects, I will be able to intuit how to structure and code my own.

I do buy that, but I’m still asking where is the reference that lays out all included commands, classes, and properties? Unix man pages do that very well for it’s myriad tasks. Is it that an object-oriented scripting language is just too complex to create such a manual? I really doubt that’s the case.

I’ve been away from this for a few days, digging deeper into css, and recoding those that dreamweaver fails to code correctly.

last couple of days have been adding interactivity to my Flash. It’s mostly cutting and pasting code, but I kind of know what I’m doing too. What’s more the coding examples only sort of approximate what I want to do, so it has been very satisfying to adapt what I can find to new situations. It’s a very simple application, but discovering how to make it work on my own has been really cool.