IDIA 619 Lab 1

On the second week of class, we started in on ActionScript. Our first assignment was rather easy… well, as easy as you make it. Starting with an animated ball, add something to it. I created the monstrosity referenced at the bottom of this post by using ActionScript. Over the next week, I’ll try to re-implement it in Adobe Flex.

The obvious advantage of Flash is the ability to draw and work on a timeline. I haven’t used WPF yet, but Lee Brimelow suggests that one of the great features of it is that it will generate code from the graphics you produce. Presumably, you will be able to do the same thing with Flash 9. If you could do both of these things in Flex, then it would it would be a killer tool. But, as he notes, Flex still produces very large projects as compared to Flash. Right now I’m thrumming my fingers on the table wishing I could be learning Flash 9. As it is, I’ll try implementing this Lab in Flex as an exercise in ActionScript 3 and also to get a feel for the differences between Flash and Flex.

So what about WPF? It’s supposed to be an analogue to Adobe Flex. As Andrew Shebanow notes:

WPF, WPF/E and Expression Blend were all designed first and foremost to address the designer-developer workflow as practiced in the Windows group at Microsoft. And based on what Robert Scoble wrote above, and on what I saw when I worked at Microsoft, this is a workflow that is all about having designers fit in with how developers want things to work. That’s why they put so much focus on things like having Expression Blend use the same project format as Visual Studio, having it work with Visual Studio’s version control mechanism, and so forth. When was the last time you heard a designer put any of those things near the top of their wishlist?

He goes on to say:

By contrast, Adobe feels that designers developing modern, interactive applications (whether using Web 2.0/Ajax or RIA technologies) want to build workflows that are first and foremost about delivering great designs to your clients. Those clients may be developers, but they might also be a corporate marketing department, or an online or offline content publisher, or any one of a zillion different content consumers. Adobe has designed Creative Suite, Apollo, Flex, and so forth to enable all these workflows, in a way that lets designers focus on what they do best.

Well, I’ve got a long ways to go to become a decent visual designer… but here’s what my lab does:

• Updates a dynamic textfield based on the location of a movieclip object
• Changes properties of that movieclip when certain conditions are met
• Chooses a random color from a list every time those conditions are met
• Plays a sound when these conditions are met
• Responds to a keypress

Not very exciting… but there you are. You can see and download the lab here.