After some years of Flexing I’ve restarted to Flash. I’m creating a flash site for Peter Platel (know from ‘Kleren maken de man‘) and it has been lots of fun and lots of frustration. Luckily I’ve gotten support from Ward De Langhe, one of the best Flash Developers around! (Check the Art he’s creating with Flash! Awesome!).

Four and a half years ago I started working with Flash mainly to created cd-roms (in a Zinc of Director shell — even more frustrating). After a while you get to know that Flash isn’t always logic. Sometimes I would search hours for a bug just to find out that the bug was in Flash and all you could do is work around it. Other things I remember from working with Flash:

  • Debugging is a disaster because there is no debugger. You had to put traces all around to find a bug and those traces would only appear when you were building in Flash. So SOS logger was used to get some logs when you’re site was online for example.
  • Quite often the library in Flash was like a battlefield after a few weeks of development. And once a battlefield is wasn’t easy to find anything back.
  • Putting code on the timeline in Flash was a way of punishing the developer that came after you… We had projects from a previous developer that were like a puzzle with code all around… we called it ‘name of developer’-code… :-)
  • Creating flash content that would adapt to the size of the stage is a hard one. Certainly when you worked with Flex were Layout Containers are part of the sdk going back to Flash is a adventure. With the help of some basic classes created by Ward De Langhe I created a liquid flash site. Some bugs are left in my flash site but they will be resolved in the near future. For a project I’ve worked on (Edumatic) we even created Layout Containers in AS2 (based on the Layout Containers in Java).

So, this in mind, I went on creating this Flash Site. Now I have:

  • Still no debugger but, but I started an ActionScript Project in FlexBuilder parallel to the Flash project. This ActionScript Project uses assets from an Swf file. This ActionScript project has the adventage that it can be debugged. The flash project still can’t be debugged. Another thing I’d like to try is a Flex Project for creating a Flash Site. I wonder if this will work out… (to be continued).
  • My library is kept clean from in the beginning! If you import graphics from Illustrator, you sometimes get hunderds of groups in groups in groups… I always clean them out first.
  • Almost no code is found in the fla file. All code is in classes, except sometimes a stop() for animations (I could also do this in code but in this case I like it more in the fla).
  • The liquid design isn’t easy when you’ve never done it. For example, if you have a Tween that’s dependent of the stage size and during the tween you the stage is resized, you can get in trouble.
  • Thx to some classes provided by Ward, the site is localized. For each language there’s a Xml file containing the text content.

I’ve tried to use Spring.Actionscript in the project but the Ioc framework needs some classes from the Flex Sdk so I could not compile it. Anyway, to keep the size small of the swf it’s maybe better to leave it out.

Another thing I learned is that it’s a lot of work compared to the result. What seems little work for the customer or graphical designer sometimes takes a lot of hours… But I’m happy with the result for now. The site is far from finished so check it out in the next months as new parts will be added.