Flash in the Peg

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move is a new edition of Keith Peters’ Foundation ActionScript Animation. The main difference, implicit in the title, is that the code in the new edition has been updated to use ActionScript 3 in Adobe Flash CS3 Professional.

If you’re familiar with Keith Peters and the tutorials on his bit-101 blog, you’ll have some idea of the kinds of things covered in this book. Creating animation with ActionScript is all about math, and this book dives right in. Peters’ writing style is clean and direct. Even if you’re not comfortable with math, difficult concepts are explained clearly and simply. I already have other books on my shelf devoted just to physics and trigonometry, but “Making Things Move” comes very close to replacing those altogether by with its effective explanations of the concepts behind the code.

After the introductory chapters, which include an AS3 primer (more on that below), Peters begins by covering the most basic type of animation. Subsequent chapters build on the foundation created by the previous chapters. As new concepts and formulas are introduced, what started out as a simple ball moving across the screen becomes something much more sophisticated. In a relatively short period of time, you’ll have multiple objects zipping around the stage, colliding and interacting with one another. Seeing those basic elements repeated and tweaked helps reinforce what you learned earlier on.

This edition follows the same well-structured format as the previous edition. Each chapter covers just the right amount of material, so you never feel like you’re taking in too much at a time. Like any good book on programming, it encourages and rewards a leisurely pace. Simply running the sample code to see what it does before moving on to the next section will teach you something, but it won’t exhaust what you can get out of this book. Peters points out where you can experiment with the code, suggesting values that you can change to see what effect it has on the animation. Playing around with the sample code will deepen your understanding of what’s happening, so it’s worth taking your time.

As I mentioned earlier, the book opens with a short primer on ActionScript 3.0. If you’re at all familiar with Object-Oriented Programming in ActionScript 2, the primer does a nice job of bringing you sufficiently up-to-date with what’s new/different in AS3 to help you get the most out of the book. If you’ve never done any OOP with ActionScript before, the chapter provides enough information to get you going, and you can use the framework Peters provides and concentrate on the animation.

(If you are familiar with AS2, and don’t see yourself making the jump to AS3 in the very near future, I’d recommend that you buy this book instead of the version specifically for AS2. The principles are the same, and the code can be ported to AS2. Plus, when you finally do start working with AS3, you’ll be ready to go.)

Besides what you’ll learn directly, this book is valuable for the ideas and inspiration it provides. I didn’t get very far into the book before I was adapting the code to work in my own projects, and also thinking of games and user interface elements that I could build around some of the concepts in the book. Just one such idea can repay your investment of time and money. All in all, if you have any interest in using ActionScript for animation, this book belongs in your library.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, November 1st, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. As usual, we’ll meet in room W411, Red River College, Princess Street Campus. Our topic for this meeting is prototyping web sites using Adobe Fireworks CS3.

Lots of people think of Fireworks as just a simplified version of Photoshop. While you can use Fireworks as ‘Photoshop Lite’, if that’s all you do with it then you’re missing out.

One of Fireworks’ many features that set it apart is the ability to easily and rapidly prototype web site designs. Taking your design mockups from flat jpegs to an interactive prototype can help you test your design, and can help communicate your vision for the site to your client.

We’ll walk through the process of taking a site mockup from a Photoshop file to a working prototype using Fireworks’ new Pages feature. That’s right: we’re not saying goodbye to Photoshop. Fireworks CS3 is nicely integrated with Photoshop, so you can continue working in Photoshop to create your original design, then import that into Fireworks to build your prototype. (Fireworks is also great for creating mockups from scratch, and we’ll look at that, too).

Plus, we’ll also talk about some of the announcements that were made at MAX. You may have heard some of them already, but I thought it might be interesting to chat about a few of those, as well as my general impressions of the conference. I’ll send some links around next week if you want to read up before the meeting.

And of course there are prizes! Since this is the last meeting before the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow, it’s your last chance to win a free admission to the second day of the two-day event. We’ll also have a few other goodies to give away.

So I hope you can make it out! I’d appreciate it if your emailed me to let me know if you can attend. Personally, I think Fireworks is a great piece of software, and I hope you’ll see it in a new light after our next meeting!