Flash is dumb?

My design/development education has taken me in some directions that I didn’t count on. For instance, that Flash phase? Never went anywhere. Seems to work for some people, but I lost interest like immediately. Do I regret that? Not really. Flash is useful in some instances (see kuler for an excellent example) but mostly its just a bunch of crap (see Flash scroll bars, user interfaces, and slideshows). Besides, most of the time the same things can be achieved with JavaScript.

I’m not a total hater. I appreciate that Flash opened up web design to designers who would not otherwise have embraced the web due to technical limitations. Like it or not, the common JavaScript versions of Flash-esque visual effects came after Flash had been doing it for a long time. And good visual design helps usability and makes the web a nicer place to hang out in.

The cool kids are NOT doing it

The final nail in the Flash coffin?  None of the designers I look up to use it.  Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Van, Andy Clarke, Cameron Moll – these guys make incredible things and none of them use Flash.  And that pretty much does it for me.

I decided not to use MTASC as my compiler after all, since it can’t do Actionscript 3. I’m going with Haxe instead.

Installation:

1. Go to http://haxe.org/download and download the OSX Universal Installer.
2. Unpack the installer and double click on it
3. Open up .bash_login from you home directory in your text editor and add the line: export HAXE_LIBRARY_PATH=”/usr/lib/haxe/std:./”
4. Follow the instructions for “Getting Started with haXe/Flash” in the Documentation section of the haXe website to test your installation

Now you can go to http://www.loziosecchi.it/lab/textmate_bundle/ and download and install the Haxe TextMate bundle:

1. Go to Marco Secchi’s website and download the haXe bundle for Textmate.
2. Unpack it
3. In Finder, locate the Textmate icon in the Applications folder and right click on it. Choose “show package contents” from the menu that appears.
4. Navigate to Contents -> Shared Support ->Bundles within the TextMate package
5. Open a new Finder window and locate the bundle you unpacked
6. Drag and drop the haXe2.tmbundle file into the Bundles folder and restart TextMate

I decided that if MTASC is only good for Actionscript 2 I should probably try Haxe, which is a compiler that does Actionscript 3 as well as a lot of other stuff. It looks like my development platform is not going to resemble the book I was referencing at all. I’ll try to post a complete installation guide from soup to nuts once I get all this up and running.

And so, to install Haxe on OS 10.5..5

This is important because it allows me to use textmate as my editor. I freaking love textmate. For instructions of how to do this go here:

http://flashalisious.com/2007/07/30/installing-as3-and-flex-bundle-for-textmate/

Do what he says, copy and paste the code he gives into the terminal all at once and press enter. Terminal will run the commands one at a time. When it gets to the last command (“osascript -e ‘tell app “TextMate” to reload bundles’”) it will throw the error “0:1: syntax error: A unknown token can’t go here. (-2740)”.

Don’t panic, just press the up arrow to bring up the line “osascript -e ‘tell app “TextMate” to reload bundles” again and then go through and replace the single and double quotes with new single and double quotes. When you cut and paste them from the website it puts curly quotes in, which the terminal can’t read. Voila’!

This was easy enough:

1. Download the Mac OSX package from http://www.mtasc.org/#download
2. Unzip it and change the name of the folder to “mtasc” for ease of use
3. Put the unzipped folder in your Applications directory
4. Put a new entry in your .bash_login file that says:
   1. export PATH=”/Applications/mtasc:$PATH”

Vague instructions from the book led me to my first roadblock. Can’t blame ‘em, there’s just to many OSs out there to write for all of them. But we’re smart right? Right.

This video includes step by step instructions for how to install the Flex SDK and the correct way to add it to your path:

http://learnhub.com/lesson/video/108-start-using-flex3-for-free

I haven’t written for a while but there’s no time for apologizing. I decided (after years of swearing I never would) its time to learn flash. I’m doing this totally open source, so I’m going to post all the steps it takes to get up and running in sequence, post by post. I’m following the installation instructions from the free downloadable chapter of “The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development.” This is available here:

http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430209935

There are several resources out there but this is the only clear getting-started guide I’ve run into. Plus, my friend Moses was a contributing author! He develops on a mac and is a has worked on some very high profile flash projects. Thanks Moses! I swear I’ll buy that book if I get this to work.

Here is a rundown of my system that I will be attempting this on:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook
Model Identifier: MacBook2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB

The text editor I use is TextMate, and the browser I use is Firefox 3. If I use it, you can assume that I highly recommend it.