Question

I have a predicament regarding my future as a programmer, I’ve been a Actionscript developer for 4 years now and want to move on, the only problem is I don’t know where.

Maybe some of you (former AS3 developers) already did this transition and have some good suggestions.

Thank you!

P.S. I get if this is somewhat off-topic but I really think this is a good place to ask it.

Answer 1

I am a developer with 10+ years experience with flash/actionscript. It doesn’t matter that I still love it, the clients want everything to work on their iOS devices and that is just the world we live in today.

HTML/CSS/JS are the path forward and it can be debugged. I would hold off on html5 features that are not fully supported (like canvas, svg) and learn to do everything with divs, css, sprite sheets, and js/jquery.

Recommended tools:

• jQuery ( + plugins as needed)
• greensock’s tweenMax is now available for js and faster/better then jQuery’s animate.
• sprite sheets – learn to make and use them

Think of divs as movieclips to hold your assets. Use greensock to animate just like you can with it in AS3.

As for debugging, use chrome and learn to use the console. console.log(“test”) == trace(“test”). The console will also point out the javascript errors and what lines they are on.

Also Flash is not dead and is still useful if you are making a mobile app that will be exported from flash for android and/or iOS. The new version of flash I think has some sprite sheet export options as well, or at least I remember reading that somewhere.

You have to remember that with this type of work, what you do today will be different just 2 years from now. It is always moving, don’t get stuck with one tool.

Also check out labs.adobe.com and download Adobe Edge. Edge is going to be Adobe’s HTML5 version of flash. It is currently limited but promising if you need a tool to break the ice for you.