Or, “why I haven’t done any Flash work for a year”

I effectively gave up Flash when I came to Public and it’s now a whole year since I did any significant Flash work. In this short time AS3 has really come of age, there are tonnes of serious libraries, from fractals to physics, and PaperVision 3D seems almost omnipresent. The prospect of going back to the ActionScript freelance circuit after a year on the wagon would be quite daunting.

The reasons I’ve done little Flash since I’ve been at Public are perfectly sound: I work with two brilliant Flash developers who make up 50% of our development team, and rather than everyone doing a bit of everything, we all specialize quite specifically. I cover all the back end work, and do a lot of server admin; so ActionScript in my personal world is now just a fond legacy of my freelance career.

ActionScript is still of great interest to me – JASPA is closely modelled on AS3, and at Public Flash makes up the majority of our projects, so I obviously stay up to date on its progress. But I’ve spent so many hours writing ActionScript that it seems a shame I won’t be so directly involved in its future. I started using Flash in version 3 and so I’ve seen ActionScript develop from nothing in real time. I remember when Flash 5 came out and we could finally write real code. I made a concious decision there and then to ditch Lingo, because it was starting to become obvious that Flash had a brighter future on the web. This turned out to be a very good decision.

As usual with my blog posts I feel I need to write some kind of conclusion (recalls GCSE English lessons), but I don’t have one; except I miss Flash, it’s awesome. The end.