Personally, I really dislike the new MM interface, I was rather upset when I installed Dreamweaver MX 2004 and discovered you didn't have the option to use the old floating pallettes interface. You can choose crap on the left or crap on the right. You can pull the interface elements off and let them float, but they're much bigger than the corresponding palettes were in previous versions.

It's not as much of a pain in Flash, which has always been kinda that way.

Flash is pretty easy to learn. Make sure you check out Flash Communication Server. That's damned cool.

-Posted by JC on November 4, 2003 11:05 AM

Well there's a lot of resources out there. I usually peruse...

Were-Here
Ultrashock
kirupa.com
and this particular post helped me a lot recently...
funciton

-Posted by jake on November 5, 2003 10:00 AM

I decided to uninstall Flash recently for various reasons...

1. Ads
2. Ads
3. Ads
4. Music and sounds on by default
5. Very little useful stuff is done in it.

I have it installed in IE because it otherwise gives an error on every page, but not in Mozilla. If something is only in flash and is compelling enough I'll open IE. It's kind of a shame that a pretty slick technology has been so abused as to make me dislike it.

I can't argue with your decision Dan, its popular, and it's here to stay (at least for the next 2-3 years minimum). Flash seems to be much easier for designers to pick up than for developers, mostly because developers get very frustrated with its limitations and unorthodox architecture.

-Posted by Eric on November 7, 2003 07:30 PM

I'm picking it up for the application development possibilities (as opposed to the design possibilities, which are imho, anemic).

I know javascript and because of that, I figured learning ActionScript would be easier. I've been doing pretty well so far, but have indeed encountered difficulties in wrapping my head around the way Flash does things. The timeline metapohre doesn't translate well to non-movie Flash projects.

More daunting though has been learning truer object oriented programming ("truer" for me equals using classes, methods and instances). This is a programming problem and not a Flash problem, so I can't fault the application for that. Getting on board with that will be helpful back in the Javascript world where I've never really done anything as fully abstracted as a class.

As a learning project, I'm working on an application based on Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology which is a collection of interleaved poems about the townspeople of a small Illinois town, where everyone is dead. Each (relatively short) poem is kind of an epitaph and they usually make a reference or two to some other person from the town. You can then go look up their poem and read it to learn more about that person and their relationship to the referring poem/person. It's an interesting, if morbid, concept.

(For the record, I have an English degree and wrote a paper in college about Masters, which should explain why I'm using his anthology as my subject)

The idea of the application is to make reading the anthology easier, and the relationship matrix understandable, by showing the poem (with a dynamic text box, that scrolls if neccessarry) and a references box which lists who is related to the current poem. Also, there will be a full list of the people/poems to read so you can read it in linear style if you want.

I'm representing the anthology as an XML doc so I can learn the XML() object and it's methods.

I also have to do the design, but that's sort of ancillary to the main point of learning the system internals. It should be interesting.

-Posted by Dan on November 8, 2003 10:59 AM

you are gay

-Posted by enos on February 7, 2004 03:50 PM