I usually don’t like to talk about mere technology but something really remarkable due to one technology is happening. The tecnology I’m talking is ActionScript 3, the most recent version of ECMAScript-standard object-oriented programming language for Adobe Flash. Althogh it is still a beta technology, and we know how Macromedia used to keep safe this kind of things, people can already put hand on it thanks to the looking forward initiative of Adobe Labs.

Nothing so impressive maybe so far if we don’t consider the impact that the Flash fanaticism, said in a good way, can have when it is given to fancy developers a much lower level programming language. “Fancy” because Flash’s nature as drawing tool (remember Future Splash?) always made Flash developers deal with aesthetic. So, considering the freshness of this technology, it is impressing the hear which and how many projects are already on the way based on it. Here, for instance, the ones I heard recently:

- FC64 (C64 Emulator) by Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall: probably you could think “how the hell could it come in their minds?”, but it should have been a very nice challenge and for sure it will be a helpful project for old skool and nostalgic video gamers. Can you imagine a new trend of C64 games development?

- Brevity by Keith Peters: it’s delcared like the Flash version of Processing. Because the new heavy IDE that AS3 will have, based on Eclipse, and the compexity of the language, could be handy a meta-language to make the sketch development faster, and maybe to be as competitor of Processing as teaching tool. If it wasn’t for the probability that Flash Virtual Machine, because AS3 will need one, will be more diffuse than the Java one I would have some doubts about the utility of this tool. But since the expansion Flash had these last years I think this can become really popular.

- Visual Brain Storms by Branden Hall: I heard about it in the linked interview. As far as I understood it will be an application modular based (like Max/MSP) that will make the prototyping of projects intuitive and quick. I look forward to see it! Compare to Brevity, it seems this will use more a visual approach, so useful also to non-programmers.

I just hope it is not already too late to start thinking about other interesting applications based on AS3

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 10:13 pm and is filed under flash, platform, critic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.