part designer. part developer. all creative
I’ve been playing around a little with the online Flash building tool, Wonderfl. If you haven’t seen it already, I urge you to create an account and have a go. You can browse the weird things that people have created, fork other users’ code, or write you own from scratch and see the results compiled online in realtime. It’s a great way to learn graphics coding in AS3 I reckon.
Playing around with Maxmind’s GeoIP city database, I made this globe that ‘should’ look up your IP address and point to where you are on Earth – well, the nearest city at least:
I finally got around to making a simple audio visualiser, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. If you have a microphone, simply click ‘allow’ below and put some music on. You may need to play with your micrphone gain though, just right-clic, go to ‘settings’ then click the micrphone tab and drag the ‘record volume’ slider up/down.
Much as it pains me, I still develop in AS2 when it’s absolutely necessary. But I was never a big fan of AS2, its quirks, the weird work-arounds and its ‘almost but not quite’ OOP nature. We should all be using AS3 now, but many of the roles I get asked about are primarily AS2 – with AS3 exposure an advantage, they say. No shit sherlock!
For those still clinging to AS2 like a comfort blanket, daunted by new-fangled syntax and the loss of some of AS2′s most trusted old arcane method… fear not, help is at hand in the form of the AS2 to AS3 migration guide:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/langref/migration.html
In many ways, AS3 is actually simpler than AS2, because it retains less of the AS1 legacy that plagues AS2′s structure and behaviour. So, in saying that (in my opinion) we should all be developing in AS3 now and drop AS2 like a bad habit, it’s not because I’m some kind of code fascist (far from it). I find that the development and maintenance of projects built in AS3 just seem to go smoother – but the enforced use of the proprietary, often clumsy frameworks I encounter in some of my contract placements is another story altogether. 
I quickly cobbled together this little demo using the new native 3D transforms in Flash 10. Alongside the regular transform.matrix property, DisplayObjects now have a transform.matrix3D property, which controls its appearance in 3-D space. It’s pretty easy to play with in Flash CS4, without any coding knowledge – I can’t wait to see a version of GTA built using this
As you can see, I’ve started a blog. I’ve also officially made the leap to ActionScript 3.0. So far I’ve come across some interesting points of note to anyone migrating from ActionScript 2.0 – but I’m a long way off being any kind of AS3 guru yet
I’ll be posting stuff I learn about AS3 that you should know as I go… so stay tuned.
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