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This was once on my list of things to learn, because every time I looked at Flash, I saw that Adobe wanted a three-or four-figure sum for the proprietary toolch
by csense 13y ago
This was once on my list of things to learn, because every time I looked at Flash, I saw that Adobe wanted a three-or four-figure sum for the proprietary toolchain, and the open-source toolchain was very poorly documented (and what little documentation existed seemed to expect you to know the terminology and workflow of the proprietary toolchain).
Imagine a world where gcc is the only open-source C compiler, and gcc required you to run preprocessor, compiler, assembler and linker directly, manually, and you had never used any compiled language before, and the gcc docs assumed you know which of these programs you needed to run, and in what order, to compile your programs, and these components were each separate downloads written by different people and offered for download alongside all the individual tools in the binutils suite. So you have no clue which of the dozens of tools you actually need, in what order you need to run them, you've also never written in any language but Python and Javascript before, and the things you need to do to get programs to run in those languages is nothing like what C wants, and none of the information you lack appears to be written down anywhere that your very best Google efforts can find.
In this world, of course you can pay Microsoft $300 for a C compiler with an IDE which takes care of everything for you, and a lot of people swear by C and do amazing things with it, but really you don't want to spend that kind of money for a tool you know nothing about, and so you just sort-of limp along with Python and Coffeescript, and miss out on the C world entirely.
That's the situation Flash development was in before Haxe came along.
Of course, now you can use HTML 5 canvas for stuff that previously required Flash, so Flash is kind of obsolete.
- dougk16 13y agoFlashDevelop is (and has been for 3 years at least) a very solid and easy-to-pick-up way to develop Flash/AIR applications without having to touch anything proprietary AFAIK, except the runtime of course. The SDK might technically be proprietary in some sense, but is open source and managed by Apache (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex). Overall, you don't need to purchase anything, and the free workflow is IMO even better than those you have to purchase, including FlashBuilder and FlashCSx. FlashDevelop is also a great IDE for Haxe development, so overall, I'd say put these back on your list to learn. :-) I think Flash still has some life left in its newer form of AIR for mobile. Having done a lot of HTML5 stuff the past year, I do miss the relative simplicity of it, not having too many cross-browser headaches. Going to try the Haxe->HTML5 workflow soon and see how that works out.
- csense 13y ago> for 3 years at least I think I researched the state of Flash for developers about 2000, and again about 2005, and last looked at it around 2008 or 2009. Haxe was just getting started the last time I looked at it, and I've heard it mentioned a couple places since then. Anything that's happened in Flash development-land in the last three years isn't on my radar. Really, my early ventures into Flash-land were so discouraging, and in more recent years the advent of HTML5 was so encouraging, that Flash may end up permanently relegated to my low-priority pile of things like Lisp, Prolog, Haskell and Unity, things I want to look into again when I have mountains of free time and/or money to spend on extremely unfamiliar things, which might possibly give me interesting new capabilities, but for which an initial cost-benefit analysis has ended in pointed, skeptical questions that I can't answer very well.