PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

For those who said, a couple of years ago, that Flash would disappear and that its time was counted. Well… I forecasted that Flash would stay, and would become the lieder of the market, and it absolutely did:

• Main way to upload and download videos today, FLV format, particularly good for streaming media
• Youtube uses almost 100%, Flash streaming
• Adobe bought Macromedia and Flash, as a developers program has become a tremendous beast of creativity, beyond the wildest of dreams if you were to think about it, five years ago
• The flawless integration of Flash with other 13 mayor programs equally leading the market, offered by Adobe, gives you unprecedented power for creativity in all the areas of multimedia
• Flash has become the leading format for cell phones, and many other hand devices
• Flash is now installed by default in 98% of the computers around the world
• Flash is being used to produce many of the greatest cartoons on TV, and in the NET as well
• Flash is being used for creating complex data-bases thanks to the advanced Action-Script language, which has become quite a robust and universally compliant instrument for professionals
• Finally, more people than ever before, accepts and enjoy games made in Flash

Well… as quite a few of you played sarcasm on me, I think I can play one on you today… he…

My two cents… ups… what did I say… my 50 dollars… yeaaa!

ok, you won
If only this kind of presentation wouldn't applied... (click the 6 links downunder).
(I guess it's flash).

what a pleasure...

well, working for one of the more powerful flash developing companies in NY, I think flash definitely has a great future. It's a strange market really... To understand all the rave about flash, you need to know the history of its users.

Old Flash began catching on, from the director / shockwave boom where interactive games on the web without java became a reality. Remember all those shockwave games that sucked and took forever to download? Well, alot of those people tried to cross over to flash. Especially the design heavy peopl who used photoshop and illustrator alot, and called themselves designers. Alot of these people were extremely good at writing semi-artistic stuff that from today's standards, or from the "hardcore programmer"s perspective of the days, CRAP.

Flash when through its evolutions. Different versions, introduction of actionscript, (as a replacement of lingo) blah blah. All this time, thousands upon thousands of "designer" people were crossing over to flash. Flash was the easy way to code! You don't need to know how to program, you just need to write code all over the place that only you can decode!

Well, then came actionscript 2. This marked the end to the the procedural coders who called themselves flash developers. Actionscript 2 intoduced the concept of class based object oriented programming, and marked a distinct line between the as2 coders who knew what they were doing, and as2 coders who sort of survived by hacking bad code together. But all was good, there was room left for both the good coders and bad coders.

Now, with the introduction of Flash CS3, the world is going to change. CS3 and Flex 2 will not allow for bad coding, and the leftover developers from the early flash days (who essentially can't program in a traditional sense) are going to be phased out whether they like it or not. Sure there will be some time for as2 to die out, but since as3 (flash 9 player) is spreading very fast, it is only a matter of time.

But then you take a step back... as3 is ECMA script 3, and is almost capable enough to be a programming language not too different from c# and java.. Only thing is, why wouldn't as3 incorporate hardware accelerated graphics at this point? MS with their flash counterpart (forgot name) is going to. Who cares if as3 can hook up to Apollo (Macromedia's new offering in testing) apps for local file IO capability... If MS's competitor has hardware accel.. guess what everyone's going to be using to build their games.... And remember that macromedia always has a tough time pleasing both the "psuedocoders" who semi-design and semi-code, and the "hardcore coders" who hav experience with traditional languages. This dilemma is always going to drag their products down, while other companies are free to focus on just the hardcore programmers who know what they are doing. And think of how much experience MS has in terms of offering IDEs and dealing with programmers...

Anyway, not much use for audio pros and hobbyists.. but these are my views on the flash world. I'm right in the middle of it whether I like it or not. Anyone check out USA network's website? Most of their games I built single handedly.. And I learned actionscript 2 because I thought I could convert my knowledge of logic involved in music composition to programming.

there are ways to do as3 and flex 2 with the free flex 2 sdk, but that is not equal to what cs3 can do. flex 2 sdk comes with a command line compiler that can be integrated into ANT, which can be incorporated into any IDE with command line macro capability, or eclipse which is an open source editor that is very powerful. So, although it's confusing, there are ways. Pretty cool actually, I'm trying to find a non-commercial (not buying flex 2 builder or flash cs3) way of working in as3.