colin at moock.org
colin at moock.org
Sat Feb 9 12:22:50 CST 2008
/** * Free ActionScript 3.0 Training, 5 Cities Left */ http://www.adobeas3tour.com/ My "ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up" training tour is already half over. The dates for Europe, India, and Australia have now been set, as follows: * Feb. 20 - Munich * Feb. 27 - Amsterdam * Mar. 3 - London * Apr. 29 - Bangalore * May. 5 - Sydney I'm told there are still quite a few spots available in Munich. You can register for the free training day at www.adobeas3tour.com. My thanks again to Adobe for fully sponsoring the tour, and bringing free training to so many people around the world. The seminar covers all fundamental object-oriented programming concepts, including classes, objects, inheritance, variables, methods, packages, event handling, displaying things on screen, and compiling and running programs. The complete lecture notes are available online here: http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/ Advanced programmers please note: This course does not cover expert-level topics. You are unlikely to encounter new concepts in this course, but are welcome to attend for a refresher on ActionScript programming fundamentals. /** * ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not? */ http://www.insideria.com/2008/01/actionscript-30-is-it-hard-or.html My latest article for O'Reilly examines the difficulty of learning and using ActionScript 3.0, compared with ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 1.0. Executive summary: I argue that ActionScript 3.0 itself is not harder to learn or use than previous versions, but that there are some important issues in the Flash authoring tool that make ActionScript 3.0 less approachable for small-scale programs and inexperienced programmers. Specifically: 1) on()/onClipEvent()-style events are gone 2) parent.gotoAndPlay() requires a cast 3) deactivating display assets that are no longer in use takes more work The first two issues should be relatively easy to fix. The third might not be fixable at all. One other, more minor issue: you can't dynamically change a symbol's class at runtime (as previously possible via Object.registerClass()). Much more info at the link above. There's a good discussion happening in the comments after the article too. Come join the fun! /** * ActionScript 4.0?? */ The working group responsible for designing the next version of ECMAScript has released an overview of proposed features for ECMAScript 4. ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, so ActionScript 4.0 will undoubtedly support most, if not all, of the proposed features. Read the ECMAScript 4 language overview here: http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf In February (Amsterdam) and April (Toronto), I'll be doing a lecture at FITC covering the ECMAScript 4 features that will theoretically be added to ActionScript 4.0. Read my FITC lecture notes here: http://moock.org/lectures/newInECMAScript4/ Get information about FITC here: http://www.fitc.ca/ colin