Lots of AS3 developers never actually touched Flash Professional, in fact CS3 was outright broken in AS3 because they expected you to use Flash Builder / Flex. This was the point where Flash stopped being the way you wrote Flash games.
Are there no pro-flash devs? I for one love as3. It made flash so much lighter, more manageable, and far more developer friendly. As of today there are no solutions to match flash's breadth of capabilities, and I would be sad to see it go...
Yeah, FlashDevelop was (and still is) ace! I think Adobe were beginning to figure it when they started to let you do AS3 only projects in FlexBuilder, whenever that was, maybe a little longer than 2 years ago. FlashBuilder is a brilliant IDE IMO, there's certainly not equivalent in the JS world yet.
Well to be fair, I do dislike Flash Pro. And Flash Builder is dreadful, but that's because Eclipse is dreadful and it's just Eclipse. All my AS3 work is done in a standard text editor (I prefer TextMate), and compiled from the command line with mxmlc.
AS3 is a pretty underrated language. It was ridiculously fun to make stuff with it, and if you bought the official Flash Builder IDE (which was Eclipse based), you had decent autocomplete and everything.
The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).
Flash, as something you hire developers for, is an authoring environment. As of CS3, it is not very compatable with Flex.
CS4 actually as adobe tying them together a lot better, but I've yet to put enough time in on CS4 projects to know one way or the other how well they have.
While you may think of flash as "that which runs on a flash player", a vast majority of people developing software in this arena think of it as "that which is written with the component of Adobe Creative Suite 3/4 called Flash Builder"
When I was a teenager I wrote a couple flash games with actionscript. I think the biggest thing about flash, asides from running consistently on all platforms, was how simple it was to build functional stuff on it. Adobe's Flash Professional had a nice monolithic IDE that worked out of the box and included visual design aids.
Yeah I agree... especially with stuff like Starling Flash/AS3 was (and I suppose is) an amazing dev environment with robust capabilities.
I think one of the reasons "flash devs" get a bad rap is because a huge amount of the paid work for an epoch was all about making like preloaders and banners and things that were 95% timeline transitions and animations with just a sprinkling of code.
It's like taking a JS developer from the 90's and putting them in the same league of modern web app developers.
Same language (essentially, ish) but no comparison.
Especially with the last hurrah of flash which tied into native extensions for standalone builds and things - Adobe really dropped the ball with something great :\
Your timing is off, ActionScript 3 was based off the doomed ES4 which had classes etc. Adobe was even a main participent in the standardization process iirc.
I don't think any of the new development platforms have gotten even close to how accessible it was to make games in flash - pre as3 was the perfect combination of ease of art creation and programming
As a former Flash/Air/Flex dev way back in the day I agree, AS3 was a great language that JavaScript still hasn't fully caught up with in some ways but it was only really viable to author ActionScript within Adobe's endorsed editors and their Eclipse fork abomination. Being confined to the Flash runtime also made life difficult as a general purpose programming language. It was a rough development experience and no amount of language superiority would ever fix that.
Adobe Flex really took things to the next level. AS3 is still one of my favorite programming languages, at least until it used mx components (I think that spark thing really messed it up). Everything was event driven, async, first time I learned about Bindings and 100% OO. I think AngularJS still can learn a few things from AS3 (like Binding event, etc). Yeah.. thanks flash, big time!
Hilariously I worked at one of the most well known semweb companies working on a flash client for 3 years :] I'm not talking about using flash design to make stuff, I'm talking about AS3 which runs in the new VM 9+ which is actually a full featured programming language.
I totally agree. I developed a 3D rendering engine using Flash + as3, and I think it's my favourite platform I've ever developed for. AS3 is a great language - Brendan Eich referred to it briefly in his Lex Fiedman interview, apparently it was essentially a potential successor to Javascript that never made it into the browser, which I found interesting. I wish it had become a new standard.
> For all that people complain about Flash, and any problems the Flash Player runtime has, it's really a fun environment to code for. I like AS3, I like the Flash API, and I greatly enjoyed writing Flex back when that was most of my job.
Really? I used to do a lot of AS3 work; it is hands-down the worst development ecosystem I've ever been involved in.
Doesn't sound like they were devs at all. Flash's AS3 (and to a lesser extent AS2) were pretty good languages and after learning them it should be pretty easy to transition to JS. AS3 was, imho, a better ECMAScript implementation than JS was, especially because it was typed. As someone who worked in both AS3 and JS I still miss it a bit but it wasn't that much of a leap to work in other environments.
I used to work with Stage3D when it came out. Its a crippled API with an even worse shaders API.
AS3 spawned way too many OOP practices in the Flash world for my liking, it was the most naive way to code games I've seen until people started doing the same in JS. Angry Birds is so simple a game it could waste 90% of the system's resources and still run smoothly.
The build pipeline for AIR is also terrible, with XML configuration and arcane documentation and plenty of non-documented behaviors. I once had to maintain a Flash extension, ExtensionBuilder is as bad as a toolchain can get.
I learned to program in ActionScript 2 on Macromedia Flash MX back in high-school. In spite of all the (deserved) hate Flash gets, we got to give it credit too.
- It was a response to the stagnant IE-dominated web that allowed people to experiment and create incredibly rich content that is still hard to replicate.
- It's editor was amazing for introductory programming. It was as easy and intuitive to use as any vector-graphics editor, but you could get really complex on your programming too. It was very visual, very graphical, which helped.
- It was great for animation. I really can't think of anything that compares. There's lots of animation software out there but most are targeted to video. There's lots of libraries for animating Canvas/SVG, but they don't have interfaces/editors for non-programmers. Flash was an amazing middle-ground; a great creative AND technical tool IMO.
- ActionScript was nice; it wasn't daunting, it had types to help you, but they didn't clutter the syntax. If I recall correctly, the tooling wasn't too shabby either, with good auto-complete and suggestions as you type.
It's thus no wonder it caught on like wildfire and there was so much content for it. It was a good option for technical projects and creative ones, beginners and experts. I definitely don't want to see Flash making a comeback on web, but I wouldn't mind seeing it in standalone applications (assuming security doesn't become an issue), and I could see its value on education, granted, with the right editors and tools.
reply