Just finished my first foray into AS3 experimentation. Nothing groundbreaking, but I did come across a couple items of constructive criticism that may be helpful. May just be my initiate status, let me know if I am overlooking something…
See it in action or See the source
Code Editing:
- Double-clicking a property selects the property AND the object.
Not sure about everyone else but this bugs me.. FDT in Eclipse supports prop selection via double-click, so hopefully this is something Macromedia can make (has already made?) as a configurable option. - Lack of drag and drop text
The DnD issue is Eclipse-wide, has apparently been a feature request for at least 3 years, and is yet to be added to the featurelist for 3.2. Almost all code editors I have used support both DnD text and it still slows me down even now that I have gotten used to it. If you feel like having it in 3.2 subscribe to the bugs on eclipse and vote for them.
AS3:
- Effect timers seem choppy
Even with just a simple glow looping on ‘Hello World’ I was getting some choppy animation. Realizing that it is Alpha software, but wanted to mention it so at least there is confermation that it is out there. Would be nice if we could get the effect to have the same quality as having a streaming sound on a movieclip timeline - seems like the timing mechanisms are much smoother on old-skool movieclips than the effects. - Some effects work with MovieClips and some don’t
Perhaps the documentation can be updated to reflect which objects are compatible with what transitions. I had a bear of a time getting the movieclip to scale. Would have rather used mx.effects.Zoom, but I kept getting errors and switched to mx.effects.AnimateProperty. - Can’t use Container Components in AS3-only project?
I tried making my base class extend mc.core.Application, which allowed a Text component to be visible, but it seemed none of the nifty Box components and friends would play nicely. Probably would use mxml in a real project anyway, but I was curious if it could be done without the xml stuff at all. Perhaps someone has an example of how to build an AS3 class structure that includes layout components without having to utilize a bunch of mxml? Also guessing I will have to use MXML to actually embed things like fonts and images into the project, as it doesn’t appear there is an out-of-the-box way of doing this directly in AS3. - Syntax Validation is Slooow…
Hoping this is just because it is alpha software. Now that I’ve had a taste of FDT, most syntax checking would probably feel slow. Keeping fingers crossed that the speed of this will increase as we get closer to launch. - SWF files are pretty large
Again, hoping this is primarily due to it being alpha. Imported 6 classes, swf is 220+ kB. Guessing some of those transition ones are somewhat heavy…
