First, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the news. I think the best explanation comes from Mike Chambers’ Blog and a corresponding post on the Flex Team’s Blog.

Don't panic! Take a deep breath and look at this cute bunny

Not much has changed with the Flash Platform

If you read closely, not that much has really changed. The problem is perception. Let’s review what is going away and why it’s not as crazy as it might sound.

Mobile Flash Player

Adobe is discontinuing work on the mobile Flash Player. I don’t know the numbers of people building Flash content for Android but I suspect it’s not incredibly high. I would also wager that even Air on Android/iOS is still far from critical mass, but Adobe say they will continue to support this. The desktop Flash Player will stay the same and for the foreseeable future continue to surpass HTML5 in features and cross-platform functionality.

Another way of saying this is that the Flash Platform remains the best choice for the tasks that it was already the best choice for. Mobile was never one of these and some applications, like video players, may have lost that title to HTML5. But in cross-platform, rich-media, deeply interactive experiences on the web, Flash is still ahead of the competition.

Flex is still here

Adobe is discontinuing its support for the Flex SDK. However, it will stay around as an open source project (it was already open source.) It may never get better than it is already, which so far has been good enough to become the platform of choice for many Flex developers.

Flex cannot get any worse than the next version 4.6, which you were probably looking forward to until today. And you know what, that’s okay. We don’t need to be so obsessed with the next thing that we change careers because the next next thing has an uncertain future. I happen to know of some projects that are still using Flex 3 and will probably never upgrade. Why? The user doesn’t know the difference between mx and spark skins.

It may also get better after being untethered from Adobe and in hands of the Flex Community. In other words, we’re in charge now. The Spoon community, who is inheriting the Flex project, already have plans to make a version 5.x.

Fear itself

The real issue now is the way the public will preceive this news. This announcement has sapped the confidence of a lot of people, customers and developers alike. In my opinion, it’s not the time for us to decry Adobe as evil jerks. It is a time for us as experts to try to help our clients, companies and the public to make sense of the news. It’s time to remember that Flash is just a tool in the arsenal of an interactive developer. In fact, Flash’s popularity, due to largely political reasons, has already been on the decline for a while now. But, it will certainly be dead if the Flash users themselves don’t believe in it.

The next time a client wants an awesome, interactive video, 3D puzzle game, website thing I will still recommend Flash. I don’t want to have him tell me “it has to be HTML5″ because he read online that “Flash is dead.” In fact, I think it’s our job to talk about its strengths and its weaknesses in a totally objective way. We should all dwell in the middle ground between Adobe zealotry and jumping on the next bandwagon.

Your next job

I feel hopeful that the shit will not hit the fan, at least not immediately. That being said, I am always an advocate of looking at other technologies and keeping those abstract coding skills honed. Good developers are in a prime position to port our skills to whatever platform comes next, and those skills are almost always in demand. Even HTML5 (JavaScript) apps share a very similar language with AS3 (really AS1). I was able to pick up JQuery and build my first HTML5 project in a matter of a day or two.

As Mike Chamber’s writes:
“I think it is a HUGE opportunity for the Flash community. As browser support for richer content and motion graphics improves, so will demand for designers and developers who have experience working with motion graphics on the web. The Flash community has been doing this type of work on the web for over a decade and is uniquely qualified to fill demand for similar work in the browser. I don’t think it is a coincidence that some of the most cutting edge motion graphics work being done in HTML5 today is being done by developers and agencies with extensive experience in Flash (such as Grant Skinner, Branden Hall, Big Spaceship, etc…).”

Joel Hooks adds some great notes on this in his blog post. I’d like to also add HAXE, Java, C# and Dart to the list of languages that you should be able to pick up with little effort.

The Community

In LA, our local Flex group shut down abruptly after this news was released. I personally feel this was very hasty indeed and wrote a letter about it upon which this blog post was based. I see that a lot of people are really pissed and their identities are in question. If you’re in this position, I would suggest instead of jumping ship, why not continue to talk about how this will impact our jobs and what skills we can port to other platforms. If there really are people out there who are going to lose their jobs over this, and I think it’s too soon to say, we should still be able to support each other as a community.

Even with all this positivity, I still have to agree with @neurofuzzy “Anyone who has ‘Flash’ in your job title, scratch it out and write ‘Interactive.’” It’s something we should have all done a long time ago because I believe we are more than just Flash dudes.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please leave comments. It will be very interesting to look back on this post in 6 months and see whether I was right to keep a cool head or being terribly naïve.

First, let’s get one thing clear… Flash is NOT coming to iOS per se. To quote the press release from Adobe:

“With Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers can extend their already broad mobile reach via Flash-enabled devices, with the new ability to deliver video content to Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices, enabling them to reach the widest audience possible.”

Unless I’m misreading this, it seems that this is only going to allow Flash Video to be viewed on iOS and only when streamed from the new Flash Media Server. This will be achieved by serving the video in an iOS compatible format so there’s no new player or plugin involved at all. Flash content in general (games, interactive sites, &c) will still bring up that familiar
.

This is only a little bit exciting (unless you host a lot of Flash Video). What the end user will experience is potentially more video content available on their iOS device, perhaps from sites that they couldn’t get it from before, and they may notice a performance improvement. It’s a far cry from the headlines stating things like “Adobe releases Flash player for Apple products” or “Adobe Flash coming to iOS”. Still, it’s a (small) step in the right direction.

Frustratingly, most of the articles I’ve seen are tinged with insinuations that this is some sort of surrender, for example, “Apple did not fold, Adobe did.” Really? Are we still acting like these two companies are having a little schoolyard rivalry? Nobody folded or cried “Uncle”. A company just found a solution to a technology problem. As I said in my last post, this sort of talk creates an artificial sense of certain technologies being inherently “good” or “bad”. It misinforms the general public and turns the choice of platform for a project into an emotional or political battle.

On the other hand, as much as I want people to get the story straight, this is more good news for Flash developers. If the general consensus is that Flash will run on iOS then our clients will perceive it as less “bad” and more “good”. So I guess this is bad reporting of so-so news that will make very good PR for Adobe.

This version will not be backwards compatible, however, there’s finally some Decent Documentation!!! There’s also a new blog devoted to KS.

GO GET IT NOW!

Here’s some of the new features. You can view all of them by checking out the change log.

• Usability
  • REFACTORED all classes with usability and stability in mind.
  • UPDATED all ASDocs
  • ADDED several new methods in the TweenFactory for easy tween creation.
• Synchronizer and Time
  • REFACTORED The way time is handled throughout.
  • ADDED ISynchronizerCore and example core classes. This allows advanced users to switch between different methods of timing (e.g. enterframe or timer based)
  • ADDED FrameRateUtil for getting instantaneous and averaged framerates of the system. The FrameRateView now makes use of this class and has more options.
• Action Architecture
  • REFACTORED action classes and extracted several interfaces from them.
  • ADDED jumpToTime and jumpByTime functionality to actions.
  • ADDED Looping via a new group called KSLooper.
  • REMOVED complicated and rarely used action triggers from AbstractAction.
  • ADDED togglePause() method and progress variable to AbstractAction (for getting percentage complete of an action).
• Tweens
  • CHANGED constructors in KSTween. Emphasis is now on using TweenFactory.
  • IMPROVED Object parser in TweenFactory
• Action Groups
  • ADDED Syntactic sugar to the group constructors. using an array in the constructor for a parallel group adds a sequence and vice versa.
  • ADDED totalDuration to groups to show the duration of all child actions in a group.
  • ADDED KSRandomGroup.
  • REMOVED KSSteppedSequenceGroup because it seemed kinda useless.
• Loading Actions
  • REFACTORED Loading actions. Now they’re much easier to use and more powerful.
  • ADDED KSLoadQueue for quickly creating a class to load files from the network in a batch.
  • ADDED the resultList property to the ILoaderAction interface so that you can quickly access the loaded files in a batch.
• Misc
  • RENAMED several classes and reworked package structure
  • ADDED KSAsynchronousIteration for running processor-intensive for loops spaced out over a period of time so that they are essentially asynchronous.
  • FIXED several minor and major bugs.

Mims

Prepare to be devastated, ladies and gay gentlemen, for I am getting married next Saturday the 19th! As the day has been drawing closer, I’ve been more and more consumed by wedding planning as well as general stress and excitement which is my main excuse for dropping of the face of the blog.

After the wedding, I’ll we’ll be making my our way through Europe, driving from Barcelona to Amsterdam via Provence, the Black Forest, and a few Belgian breweries. I know many of you hail from Europe so give a shout out if you know some great, strange places to visit along the way!

In between tasting cake and buying championship quantities of wine for the wedding, I’ve managed to keep busy with some really great gigs. I recently built the media-rich Toyota Tundra Experience site in collaboration with Bad Assembly and Saatchi & Saatchi LA which launched this summer. I contributed Gumbo skillz to the insanely extravagant Cannes Multi-Touch Wall with Schematic. I’m also very excited for a project I recently finished in collaboration with the very talented and funny Duncan Brothers and Atom (It’s not launched yet but I’ll announce it when it is).

Sadly, I’ll be missing Adobe MAX and the infamous Flashapaloozastock even though they’re in my own back yard! But after returning in mid-October, I’m looking forward to getting back out there and working my face off! That includes dabbling in some new technology like XNA or iPhone, blogging about some of the stuff I’ve learned on my last few gigs and hopefully, getting my shit together and finally speaking at some conferences. I’m also working on a completely revised version 2.0 of KitchenSync, my incredibly underused tweening and sequencing library.

I hope you’ve all had a great summer!

Roger

Gentlemen, WE CAN REBUILD IT. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s finest programming book. The ActionScript 3.0 Bible Second Edition will be that book. We can make it better than it was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.

That’s right, I’m hard at work tearing the AS3B to pieces and building the second edition from the ground up, and I can’t wait to share it with you. I’ll post more about it when it’s ready to go to press. You won’t believe all the awesome new features in this book!

While writing, I’ve been traveling the world with my trusty laptop. This summer I’ve trekked out from my home in Brooklyn to Peru, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Montauk, Pittsburgh, Orlando, DC, Los Angeles again, Seattle, Portland, and Puerto Rico. Don’t worry, I’m taking lots of photos. I love traveling!

I’ve been working on some really cool projects, too! I made a website for the most wacky, creative filmmaker of our time. I helped to design (and hopefully I will soon program) an iPhone app for a gorgeously illustrated series of books for teens. Sorry I can’t be more specific!

When I’m not doing all this I’m rollerskating, going on long long bicycle rides, watching lots of movies, exploring all the amazing restaurants in NYC, and having adventures. I’m taking an intensive culinary class at the French Culinary Institute this Fall. I also got my motorcycle license and I can’t wait to use it more! Sadly, I’ve completely fallen off learning piano, but I really hope to start again soon!

What have you been up to, readers? Did you have a great summer?

Caleb

Caleb has left New York City. He is now studying hard at Cornell University in Ithica, NY. Aside from the mathy homework, he is kept up at night trying to determine what has gone wrong with his ray tracer. However, there may not be any better reason for a nerd to lose sleep!

Check out the latest ridiculous multiplayer chaos unleashed by those crazy, crazy test tube babies at IILWY, Balloono! I developed this game, but it wouldn’t exist without the awesome assistance of EJ, Ken, Daniel, and Charles. For taking it the last mile (or five) and adding lots of great art and polish, THANKS! Great work you guys! Oh yeah, and you’re cool too, Mark.

Keep coming back, ’cause I’m sure IILWY will be adding more levels and other bonus monkey jams! And hey, if you like the game, it couldn’t hurt to vote for it on Newgrounds, right?

Wrong.

I’m just as lazy as the next guy when it comes to updating my portfolio page. In fact, I have for the past many years neglected to keep my portfolio page up-to-date as I imagine some of you probably have.

Since about 2003, it’s looked like this mucous-coloured collection of bad links:

As of this week, it looks slightly better!!!

But more important than looking better, the work on this page is up to date!!! I used object oriented PHP and mySQL for the backend and it actually stores an archive of every project I’ve ever worked on. The images are pulled in from Flickr using  phpFlickr. It also generates XML data from the database so I could move this to Flash later (5 years from now).

Even though I’ve designed and re-designed my site over the past few years and had very lofty ambitions, I actually managed to finish the new portfolio page and the homepage in less than a weekend. I know it’s not gonna win any FWA‘s, but I’m proud of myself and I hope it is an inspiration for you to stop thinking about updating your site and start updating your site.

KitchenSync version 1.6 is released! Guess what feature it doesn’t have yet… That’s right! There is STILL NO Color Tweening (unless you count ColorMatrixFilter tweens which it does have). However, I hope I can crank out and release version 2.0 over the next two weeks which would have it.

Here are some of the features that 1.6 DOES have:

• Added a TweenFactory which provides an easy to use interface for creating new tweens including an object parser similar to FuseKit’s interface. You can now use something like:
  var tween:ITween = TweenFactory.newTween({target:foo, properties:"x:0~100, y:500~200", duration:"3seconds", scale:1~5});
• Altered KSTween to use multiple tween targets. Now includes methods like addTweenTarget(). This allows you to tween multiple properties with a single KSTween object!
• Added an optimized implementation of IAction called KSSimpleTween. This class showed a 25% performance increase over KSTween!
• Added SoundTransformTarget for changing volume or panning of a sound.
• Added new action groups including:
  • KSSimultaneousEndGroup which causes all children to end simultaneously. This is like a parallel group in reverse.
  • KSSteppedSequenceGroup for sequencing PowerPoint-like applications. This automatically pauses the group after each child is completed. Instant slideshow!
• Finished adding IAction interface. This allows more flexible and customized use of the synchronizer by allowing you to create actions without using the AbstractAction superclass.
• Also added ITween and ISynchronizerClient interfaces
• Changed the license from LGPL to MIT license.
• For a complete list, check out the ChangeLog!

To get the latest version, go to the Google Code project page. Thanks and enjoy!

If you’re a resident of sunny L.A., drop me a line! Let’s be pals.

I may be in the (rare?) position of being highly interested in two disparate technologies. The first being an online scripting language standard governed by ECMA (used in Javascript & Actionscript). The second, an open standard for real-time rendering governed by the Khronos Group (OpenGL). In recent days these two languages have faced most unfortunate developments. First the ECMA script 4…

On Nov 7, 2006 Adobe announced the contribution of their ECMA scripting engine to the open source community under the name “Tamarin”. Tamarin is also being used as the JS scripting engine for Mozilla Firefox under the name “SpiderMonkey“. It seemed like a good idea at the time of release. But now look at the situation: we have AVM2, directly connected to Firefox AND the ECMA committee –slowing the progress of Actionscript and the Flash Player (and the internet for that matter). Needless to say, this is a disappointment. But it doesn’t end there…

Though having plenty of contributors, the realm of real-time rendering is primarily controlled by Microsoft, Nvida, ATI/AMD, Apple, and (more recently) Intel. Microsoft hasn’t really contributed to the Khronos Group because long ago they decided to pursue their own 3D graphics rendering API known as Direct3D. The evolution of OpenGL has become painfully slow while DirectX and Direct3D are becoming the (de-facto) standard. Finally, the Khronos group promised to improve the long lost API by introducing an object-oriented structure in stark contrast to its current state machine model. That was in October 2007. Last week the specification was finally unveiled and it remains largely the same. Not only is this a big let down, but it will definitely damage all future 3D software and game development releases for non-Windows platforms (including future consoles). Very unfortunate.

DISCLAIMER: Both of these developments are FAR more complex than what this post outlines -and there’s justification behind both developments. But on the whole, they both seem bad for everybody (or just me?).

1. The most glaring thing I learned from the survey is that NOBODY’S USING IT! Come on people!

Aside from myself, only 5 people reported that they have actually used KitchenSync, of them, only one has used it for a real project. The good news? That person is none other than Aral Balkan and that project is GAE SWF, so it could be worse.

2. People love Tweener and TweenLite.

People listed Tweener as one they’ve tried but TweenLite came up more as a favorite. Not surprisingly, people loved TweenLite because of it’s incredible small size and speed.

Two people voted for KitchenSync as their favorite. Hey, that’s the same number as the people who have used it for a project. Coincidence?

3. People think KitchenSync is okay (even though most haven’t used it) but to make it better will require matching the features of the other leading tween engines.

People want performance above all else which would explain why TweenLite, currently the fastest of the competitors, is the favorite of the group.

Here is how people prioritized individual features.

4. In the tools department, Flash and FlexBuilder came in at a tie. For those of you who do your coding in Flash and have never used FlexBuilder, I suggest you give it a shot. Flash is miserable as a programming tool (but that’s a topic for another post). Also, despite the cries of distaste from the FlashDevelop crowd, people apparently love TextMate.

In conclusion, I think KitchenSync has a lot to offer. It’s a unique with a sophisticated architecture and some advanced features. However, these tests are proof that to be taken seriously, KS will need to add the basic, missing features that are found in other systems. So the big aim of version 2.0 will be to patch the holes and optimize for speed. I guess that’s what I was planning to do in the first place but it was great to get everyone’s input on the project.

That’s it! Thank you so much for taking the survey! Stay tuned for updates to the project over the summer.

One of the most interesting things that I saw today was the Independent Game Design Competition. Here were a few of my favorites from the competition finalists.

Flipside

In Flipside, you play an escaped mental patient with bipolar disorder. You start out a happy-go-lucky person in a brightly lit field
but at any time, you can let your dark side show and flip the screen into a nightmarish version of reality. You have different abilities depending on which world you’re in so you’ll need to go through both modes to beat each level. The amazing visuals for this featured a lot of DIY-looking textures such as cardboard and the character really looks like a paper doll.

Fez

At first glance, Fez is a classic 8-Bit, 2-D platformer with incredibly cute graphics. Then the camera flips around and you realize that your character is actually in a 3-D space. Well, mostly. Your character only interacts with the environment in a two dimensional way so using the depth-squashing adds a puzzle-like element to the gameplay.
Pay special attention to the faux-Engrish used in the dialog.

World of Goo

In world of Goo, you control a colony of crude oil-like creatures who are able to stretch themselves into complicated structures. The goal of the game is to engineer a structurally sound scaffolding to move your colony to a destination. The gameplay is quite a lot like Stick Remover but in reverse.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a very simple yet very expressive game. The goal is to move a ball to a target across the screen and all you have to work with is a crayon. All you do is draw something with your crayon and it becomes an object with physical properties. The genius thing is that there are as many ways to get the ball to the goal as you can think of.

KitchenSync is more than an animation library

KitchenSync is more than an animation library. Tweens are a major part of KitchenSync but that is not the end. It also allows you to sequence sounds, functions, and event dispatches among other actions. The framework is open-ended allowing you to come up with new ways to work with the virtual timeline.

KitchenSync was designed with developers in mind

KitchenSync was designed for developers who want a smart way to handle animation or other time-based functionality with code. Written from the ground up in ActionScript 3.0, KitchenSync relies on smart object-oriented architecture rather than complicated shorthand. It includes a number of features and shortcuts, such as the clone() method, that save effort for developers. KitchenSync makes extensive use of events and informative runtime errors and is quite flexible when it comes to extending the functionality.

KitchenSync aims to…

• offer a well-architected, extensible framework for working with time-based animations and events.
• take advantage of the power of ActionScript 3.0 while using OOP best practices and design patterns and without requiring the Flex framework.
• respond to the needs of developers with a rich set of features.
• be a full-featured library for animation and timeline based actions.

Links

• Getting started
• Types of synchronized actions
• Units of time, parsing time strings, and sync mode
• API Reference

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Dictionary

Garage Band

iTunes

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After nearly a year in development I’m very proud to announce that the ActionScript 3.0 bible has hit the shelves. This is our first book and its very exciting for us. The AS3 Bible is not just an update to the previous edition, the Flash 8 ActionScript Bible, but was written from the ground up with ActionScript 3.0 development in mind. We tried to focus on topics that matter to real world developers and to make it just as useful for experienced AS2 developers as it is for beginning programmers.

We’ve put a lot into this book and sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Get it at Amazon

NOTE: many people have been complaining about the lack of code on the companion site. We’re currently working with our publisher to get that sorted out as soon as possible and hopefully it should be up by the end of the week.

I asked a passing hobo to pose for a picture with the new Bible