In My Experience... | More on learning Flash. (2605)

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More on learning Flash.
[ Posted by Dan on November 11, 2003 | 6 Comments ]

Please forgive the comment recycling here, but this Leapster thing reaffirms my decision to pick up Flash as a web development skill...

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.

Now, back to the Leapster; the opportunities and possibilities offered by that sort of product are two fold for the web developer who cares about usability and interaction design. Learning materials are all about interaction design and information architectures that are so well designed that they are transparent. "Leveraging" that thru development skills is good fun work that pays well. Too bad much of my recent work has been of the Systems Administration persuasion.

Strange, I wonder why they chose Flash as a development platform instead of something like Java. The only thing I can think of is that they were more interested in having pretty programs than flexible/powerful ones. Given that the audience is kids I can't say I could find much fault with that.

-Posted by Eric on November 11, 2003 06:47 PM

>The only thing I can think of is that
>they were more interested in having
>pretty programs than flexible/powerful ones

Back that up please.

Within the scope of the subject (an interactive hand held learning toy for kids), why would Java provide more flexible and powerful apps than Flash?

I'll help your case a little here and say that I wouldn't be surprised if a major factor in the decision to go Flash was more availability of designers/developers on the Flash side who could make the games/apps look good and still have the ability to make the games/apps be sufficiently complex for 6 year olds to be interested in.

I don't know anyone who has ever done the graphics work for a Java application (and I can't ever remember anyone on the net say that they have done that). In my experience, I've never met a UI in a Java app that I liked (because they have always been AWT or Swing apps).

I'm sure it's possible to make a Java app look good, but I've never seen it. On the other hand, I can point to many good looking and complex apps produced in Flash (which REALLY needs to dump the timeline metaphore, but that's a different post for another day).

-Posted by Dan on November 12, 2003 09:57 AM

Yeah, basically if you're talking about graphics, Flash spanks Java. Kid's games aren't very advanced beyond visual effects. I can't say I've ever seen a Flash app I would consider complex, because it's an extremely limited toolset when compared to a language like Java or C. I'm struggling to provide a balanced argument here, because even the thought of writing a server or content management system in Flash seems absurd.

As far as UI in Java, I think the main problem is that it is just more geared towards "standard" application UI like VB. There are very few mainstream Java desktop applications, Limewire is probably the most popular one I can think of.

I guess I'm basically saying that Flash exists almost wholly in the presentation layer/tier, which is all there really is to this device. Maybe if you can point me to some complex Flash apps I can make a better reply.

Paraphrasing what you said, I think that if you want people to develop for your platform, you need to bait them, and you pick your bait based on the kind of people you want to develop for it. If you want fun, good looking apps, Flash is a good choice. If you want people to write business or communications applications, Java would be a better choice.

-Posted by Eric on November 12, 2003 07:13 PM

I gave it some more thought, and I can better state my position as follows:

1. Are there things you can do in Java that you can't do in Flash: Yes.
2. Are there things you can do in Flash that you can't do in Java: No.
3. Are there things you can do easier in Flash that you can't do in Java: Yes.
4. Are the things that satisfy point #3 more common in Leapster than the things that satisfy point #1: I believe so.

-Posted by Eric on November 12, 2003 08:08 PM

I have seen Flash applications that I thought were more complex in their utility and user interactions than any Java app I've seen (and I don't mean java/j2ee/MVC-web-app). Usually this falls under the Rich Internet Application genre (sometimes built thru the Laszlo Systems scheme).

-Posted by Dan on November 12, 2003 10:11 PM

WE LOVE THE LEAPSTER AND WHATEVER IT TOOK TO MAKE IT HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!

-Posted by KARINA on December 27, 2003 04:14 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).