flash developer

Yesterday I saw this post in my RSS feeds, and I just want to remember this (and make sure that I’m really a senior 😉 )

So here is a list of stuff you need to know when you say you are a senior Flash/ActionScript developer:
http://pv3d.org/2009/08/28/10-things-every-senior-flash-developer-should-know/

I don’t like to regurgitate so I only show you the top 10, for examples visit the list by John Lindquist

The Elastic Racetrack
FlexSDK, mxmlc, compc, and all that jazz
Player Events, Custom Events, Event Bubbling
Statements, Keywords, and Directives
ASDoc
Managing visual assets (images, fonts, CSS, etc)
Arrays, Collections, Dictionaries, Mapping
Programmatic motion (tweening, easing)
OOP and Coding Against Frameworks
Version control

And after reading this I remembered gskinner had a similar list:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/07/flash_actionscr.html

This is a bigger list and a lot of comments, so you need to visit the list and read it and all its comments

Another post about the subject: “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know” –> http://gskinner.com/talks/things/

Box2DFlashAS3 Refactored

If you are a Flex/Flash developer (and not familiar with another programming language), you will agree that the syntax for Box2DFlash is not following the AS3 coding conventions and seems funny.

Not that I’m so good at it (seem to have a lot of problem shaking the suffix “_mc”) but other people have the same problem: read this, this and this.

And one of them refactored the code, and not just someone: it done by John Lindquist (box2D user-name is pv3d).
John is one of the “Committer team” (?) of papervision3D and writes tutorials for papervision3D on pv3d.org.

You can find the code at http://code.google.com/p/box2dflash/ and John started working on tutorials (http://box2dflash.org/) but stopped after completing one… 🙁

[swf]http://box2dflash.org/sites/default/files/flash/RefactoredBox2dSpeedTest.swf, 520, 390[/swf]

I’ve took a quick look in the examples made by John, and I must confess that it seems more familiar/easier.
Conventions are you friend…

But what to do? Use the box2D port to AS3 from C++ or use the refactored one.
I’m using the original Box2DFlash AS3 2.0.1, not only for this reason (shaktool is one of two programmers responsible for the C++ to AS3 conversion and maintenance) but a lot of tutorials are based upon the original.

But I can’t wait for Box2DFlash AS3 2.0.2 and see what skatehead, shaktool and borisTheBrave have decided (I’m secretly cheering for John’s version!)