flashalisious

Adobe put out actionscript 3 (AS3) this year. There are a tone of books and tutorials out there now. So do you dive in or not? The short answer is….Yes. If you want to be able to do some really cool things on your flash or flex projects then you need to start digging in.

AS3 will give you a tone of performance improvements and some are the new features are just great. If you are a new user to actionscript don’t start with AS2. Everything is headed for AS3 in a hurry. There are quite a few changes to the code and the way you code buttons and events are totally different in AS3. If you are a big AS2 user you will feel like this takes a lot longer but you will see and understand the benefit after you start using the new code.

So I guess I am updating my goal. It is Always to “Learn Actionscript” but now it is to Learn Actionscript 3.

There are some great books out there. Check out http://oreilly.com. I would say you need to pick up Essential Actionsript 3.0 and Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook ASAP.

learn more at Adobe Labs

Good luck and keep coding.

See more progress on: learn actionscript

Wow Can you believe this. Check out the original Ubuntu Logo

Now look at this Logo from Microsoft Alumni Network Homepage

Thanks to my buddy John Henshaw over at Sitening.com for pointing this out in a local Nashville User Group of Web Designers and developers that I am a part of. After seeing this I had to post it to my blog.

Now I know as designers we barrow design ideas but you never copy someone’s logo or design. Quite often I will go to web sites and look at logos or Movie Trailers at the Apple Quicktime section of the site. It is great to get the ideas burning and turning in your head. There is one thing that you should stay away from or at least try your best to stay away from. DON’T BLATANTLY STEAL ANOTHER COMPANIES DESIGN OR BRANDING. This is totally unethical and also a violation of copywrite. Hopefully Ubuntu can do something about it that. MSA should be forced to change it. As a community of designers or consumers for that matter, we should do what we can to get this in the public eye. Please digg this store. Just because they are Microsoft and this site is a “Organization of Whatever” (not the .org) does not mean that gives them the write to do whatever they wish.

I am not one to normally write a blog post of this kind but thought that it was important to point out.

I would encourage you to do your part. Get this story some attention. Also if you have two seconds write a quick NICE and I do stress NICE but informative email to Microsoft about this matter. Here is the address.

msalumni@conenza.com

Nashville, TN and the surrounding area has it’s first official Flex user group. We will be focusing on Development of rich internet applications and also desktop applications using the newest platforms from Adobe. This will consist of Flex, AIR (Apollo) and the current version of Actionscript. If you are interested in joining you just need to have an interest in Flash and ActionScript and live in the 615 area code. http://615flex.com to sign up.

Thanks to all the guys that joined the group so far. We are planning our first group meeting for June 30 2007. If you can make it please check out http://615flex.com/polls/meeting.php

Let’s move forward and make this group of developers something great. Our main focus will be helping each members grow in their skills and build some really cool stuff.