Dear Flash. Be more good

A couple of days ago Colin Moock published an article named “The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0″ about the transition of Flash over the last couple of years. Currently working on a commercial Flash project I’m also thinking about Flash, ActionScript and ways of creating Flash applications. So in a way it’s kind of adding my personal view to the things Moock already pointed out.

Being a flash developer almost keeps me away from the Flash IDE. But others have to use the Flash interface and I personally don’t know anyone who likes the Flash IDE. I recently read an appropriate Twitter message:

Dear Flash. Be more good. k tanks

So, the user base of Flash did change as Colin Moock already pointed out in his article. What are the users of Flash right now?

• Graphics designer
• Motion designer
• Animation film artists
• Creators of (interactive) applications/presentations, click dummies, etc.
• Flash developers, of course

All of them but the developers usually do have to use the IDE. At first, content will be created in Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. and later on it all comes together in Flash. Therefore Flash doesn’t need to be a perfect illustration or image editing application. So, what is Flash used for? As listed above it’s used for motion, animation, interactivity. The features that can be used for achieving all this are more numerous than ever before, still counting. Basic ones like lots of different tweening and animation methods. And of course there are advanced features added by external libraries like Google Maps API, Papervision3D or Motor2.

During the last couple of years Adobe took care of developers very much. They brought us the Flex Builder, AS3, libraries etc. which was fine. For me at least :) But people like graphics designers don’t want to teach themselves coding AS3. And in my opinion they don’t even have to. Coding inside the Flash editor is horrible anyway. In 2007 I did some courses at the School of arts and design Kassel teaching students in using Flash and ActionScript for creating interactive applications. My experience was that it was very hard to make them understand how programming works. Most notably they did not want to know every detail of scripting. That was the reason why I decided just to use libraries like TweenLite, etc. to get results very fast and make them playing around. For some students it was still too much code but for many of them this works quite good to explore what is possible using Flash and what’s not.

People want to use the functionality that Flash offers. But it could be very frustrating if you have no idea of coding. This is where a visual coding as known from Apple’s Automator on Mac OS X comes in. The guys over at http://www.sourcebinder.org/ actually did a really great job in creating something like that. I guess a combination of a timeline based interface (not this crappy, super slow one we all know by now), a stage where you can easily modify your content and a visual coding interfaces would be awesome.

To make such a visual coding even more powerful it should be easily extensible for custom code/libraries. This would be great for complex Flash applications if a team of Flash developers and designers will have to work together. Developers would create the framework and functionality that is needed for the project. The task of the Flash designers would be to create screens of the application and bind these views with the code. Sounds like a perfect workflow for me …