Cafe Bucky

Wow, Macromedia + Adobe are merging this Fall. The initial things I’m reading on the Flashcoders list are all over the map. Some think it’s great, some think “better Adobe than Microsoft”, and some think it’s the end of the world.

I haven’t had much time to digest the news. Two patterns that come to mind are:

• This won’t change anything in the short term. Flash 8 will still be Flash 8.
• The Open Source compiler and player projects are going to keep chugging along. The Flash IDE isn’t gong to be the only SWF game in town.

I’m glad I am learning Flash, and it’ll be interesting to see how these two companies create synergy (smooth Photoshop batching to .SWF output comes to mind). Having said that though, I see a lot of renewed interest and possibilities in what is now being called the AJAX approach. I think we’re still taking the baby steps into the RIA (Rich Internet Application) era. It’s going to be interesting to see how “MacrAdobe” or “AdobeMedia” spans the worlds of Print, Video, Simple Online, and RIA. If they decide to make a series of silly moves, the F/OSS community will come up with projects to essentially “route around them”. If they do the right things, we’re better off in that direction. I’m of the mind of “wait and see, and if it turns out to be a bad marriage, the marketplace of ideas will prevail anyways”

Update – 9:40 AM, EST –

Apple buys Adobe!

Nah, just kidding. But for a moment there, it seemed within the realm of possibility, huh? :-)

I’m still somewhat new to the world of Flash and ActionScript, but have long since punted on trying to edit within Flash MX 2004. (I went through a BBEdit phase, and am now mildly happy editing my class files in Emacs). If there’s something else that works well on the Mac (code hinting would be good), I’d love to hear about it.

The next thing to punt on is likely Macromedia’s compiler. It’s s-l-o-w. Makes my PowerBook feel like an old tray-loading iMac – on elephant tranquilizers. I’ve been reading about MTASC (Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler), and it looks to be worth a gander.

What would be cooler is to have an intermediary between a variety of scripting languages, and a .swf file. I notice that there is a little bit of talk about that at GalaxyGoo: Flash8 wishes? Abolish post-colon syntax!. I’d be happy to script PHP or Perl to a .swf target. Even Java would be fun.

But hey, at least ActionScript isn’t Tcl :-) I’m very thankful for that.

I can’t get into the details of what I am working on, but I’ll comment on a few things I’ve across with ActionScript 2.0 … (sort of as a marker of where I am, so I can come back in a few months and see what I’ve picked up)

MovieClips as Classes: this one still throws me off a little. I’m used to thinking in OOP terms with my C++ background. The fact that a MovieClip can be extended as a class, and it acts as a container AND an object on the stage strikes me as “different”. I think of a class definition as a container, which happens to have graphical objects within it.

Poor MM Support for Dialogs: I’ve written my own window manager for my app. I make my dialogs with a MovieClip acting as a container for all of the little widgets inside it (textfields, a header for dragging the dialog around, buttons, etc.) This is all dynamic. I looked at the Macromedia Popup Window class for about 5 minutes, shrugged in a sort of “you’ve got to be kidding!” manner, and dug into it. It was easier to do this stuff in Motif back in the early 90’s.

Patterns: I’m having fun with Patterns. I’ve modified the Singleton Pattern for a class of dialogs so that: a) I can have multiple “edit this item” dialogs simultaneously, but also b) I never have more than one instance of any given item to be edited. Not sure what the resulting pattern would be called (an “Indexed Singleton”?)

Ignoring The Timeline: I’ve been following the track of doing OOP ActionScript, and haven’t been thinking of the extra dimension of the Timeline. It hits me that it’s a handy method to flip between entire states of a largish app (each with it’s own instance of a window manager…) hmm …

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