Thursday, September 28, 2000
Too much Flash, not much substance
More work with Flash 5 for the web project I'm working on. I headed over to Rob's house (the graphic designer) and ended up finding the entire experience very frustrating—I don't like IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) very much and the metaphore that Flash uses for development is very confusing to me.
There doesn't seem to be a beginning or ending to the creation.
I mean, there probably is one, but the manual isn't exactly clear on
anything. For instance, the _root object is an alias for the
current layer, say _layer0, you are working on. But while the
language manual lists _layer0, _layer1, _layer2, etc, you can't
actually refer to them as such.
What the?
Another problem: we want to automate the creation of dynamic text objects yet it's not very clear how you do that, if you indeed can. Nor is it very clear that you can create arrays out of anything other than simple types like integers or strings.
While the scripting language might seem adequate to a graphic artist, to a programmer it's very limiting and annoying. I know how this stuff should work yet the scripting language seems very ad-hoc and tacked on. Which it is to a degree.
But the environment gets in the way of my creative endevours.
