ECMA Snappin'

I remember when AS3 first came out they stated that it was based off of ES4 "proposed" standards. Now I thought to myself "proposed", wow risky. If they were going to put all their eggs in one basket using a "proposed" standard would have me stressin'.

Today the Flash and ECMA communities have been a buzz because of a decision made at the latest Oslo meeting to merge the two groups to focus on ECMA 3.1 development. Creating Harmony.

So the big question running through most ActionScript developers is "Where does that leave AS3". Now, I can't possibly see namespaces and packages going away, which is something that ES 3.1 has removed. I will say that it does leave for an interesting future for Adobe. They have been great at adopting standards and opening their technologies to allow future growth. Now with such a change of events will they reformat their language to follow the new standard or keep going with it's already great leap forward.

I tried rounding up all the articles I read about this here. I am nowhere near a ECMA expert but I found it helpful to read over these sites and hear what the experts have to say. Hopefully it will help you understand it a bit more.


http://drawlogic.com/2008/08/14/es4-is-now-es31-es4-is-no-more-merges-with-es3-spec/

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/003400.html

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es3.x-discuss/2008-August/000469.html

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/javascript_stal.html

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ru-roh-adobe-screwed-by-ecmascript.html

http://joshblog.net/2008/08/13/how-will-ecmascript-harmony-affect-actionscript-3/

FDT 3.1 StandAlone

So now that I am moving more to AS3/Flex development I have found myself more and more using Flex Builder to build Flash based applications. I still use FDT 1.5 for AS2 projects because of some odd bugs in FDT 3 that I have seen other developers run into.

With that said I did just get my FDT 3 license and I thought I would start it off with the FDT 3.1 stand alone version. I read that some of the bugs developers ran into are fixed in this version. There are some cool features I thought I would mention in the new FDT stand alone:

Shipped Flex SDK (3.0.477)
- FDT Intro Contribution
- FDT Cheat Sheets
- AIR Debug Launcher as SWF Viewer
- AIR Release Launcher
- SWC Outline view
- QuickTrace..

More on FDT

Caravella Limoncello Drink Recipes

We just launched a Flex and Papervision mini-site for Caravella Limoncello. I am really excited to have launched this project and think it came out great. It was also the first time we got our designers involved with the whole Flex process and they seemed to have loved it.

Check out the site and let me know what you think!

Simple AS3

Josh Tynjala took Colin Moock Charges Against AS3 and turned it into a solution called SimpleAS3. I know alot of flash designers and old school developers will love this approach because it helps them to get into AS3 without worrying to much about all the headaches of learning the new structure.

I gotta say though I am on the fence with this one. Is this framework getting developers into a bad habits? Shouldn't you just learn how to do things the right way instead of just reverting to older practices? I guess it's like the argument with CSS developers snapping that tables are not proper use of HTML for layout. Some developers still use it.

In any regard it's still an interesting solution to the problem and I am sure will get adopted by a lot of people.

Check it.

Paper Brochure creates 3d world on computer.

I have been seeing this alot online. A user takes a real time video and uses visual marks in the real world to create virtual 3d renderings on screen. I can see the cool factor going on, but I am not sure how much this would catch on unless in some sort of controlled environment. I would never take a brochure from a car dealer and take it home and use my webcam to see more. I have a hard time remembering web address from billboard let alone remembering to check out more on something else!

This would be cool in the experiential arena. Thoughts?