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/

Snappin: The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0

Colin Moock has posted on O'Riely's InsideRIA charges against ActionScript 3.0. He makes a stand for Flash developers who are having issues with AS3 and feeling that the "ease of use" of previous Flash version is going away. I think alot of the points are good but I also think to make room for more scalability of the structure you have to let some things die.

Check it

Colin also has a video with Jim Cobert that talks about the Flash Player from the FITC Toronto. Some good talks about some of the current bugs in Flash and how they are trying to deal with them. Check that out!

TweenMax AS3

My man Matt Przybylski just lead me to TweenMax. TweenMax is TweenLite's big brother. It has a ton of goodies from regular tweens to filter and bezier tweening. After trying it out seems, it to be one of the best (and smallest 8K!) tweening engines I have tried so far.

I definitely like the ability to stop all tweens and delays. This is always good when user starts or stops an interaction.

Check it!

Thanks Matt!

Pass the Hydro..

Ok Ok. Let's not get to excited. I found HydroTween on the Go blog today. HydroTween is an AS3/Go animation sequencer like Fuse.

We use Fuse alot on AS2 projects. Although Fuse isn't the cleanest it is one of the best sequencer that I have used. I currently use Tweener on my AS3 projects, but I miss having the ability to sequence like fuse. I know you can do a Tweener/Go combo, but it's nice to have a sequencer as a part of the system. I haven't done any tests yet, but this seemed promising enough to be able to post before I try it out. Has anyone used it, and what do they think?

Check it!

Yahoo! Flash Developer Center

I saw a post on Zues Labs about Astra in Yahoo!'s dev center, so I thought I would check it out. There are a ton of Flex and Flash Components in the site that you can use under the BSD license. I must say Yahoo! has got some mad love for us Flash Devs!

Check it!

They also developed some AS3 APIs for their current products. I used the Map API in AS2 before and it was super handy. The AS3 version looks dope! Adobe has got a post about the new Map API and Blaze DS.

FFilmation: AS3 Isometric Engine

Bryan Veloso has create FFilmation, an AS3 Isometric engine that he says he will be realeasing as open source! Read the highlighted features on the page, I especially like "Basic AI API helpers such as “is character A visible from character B’s position ?”". Very ill.

Check it!