Thursday, January 17, 2008

The RIA world is pretty awesome

I've had about a 2 1/2 year break from FT Flash work and I have to say that a lot has happened since then -- both personally and in the Flash/web world. Personally, I've had the wonderful opportunity to learn more about server and web infrastructures including unix, apache, dns, mysql, VMware -- pretty much the works. I'm even comfortable now with command line (that's saying a lot since I only got my first computer with windows 95 -- and come from a graphics design background). I've also been able to work more with css and am thoroughly impressed by what can be done now in straight html, css and javascript that used to only be possible with flash.

But at the same time, my real love has been Flash and since 2005 A LOT has happened there as well. I had done most of my work at AETV.com in ActionScript 1 (I actually started with Flash 4 so the slash syntax was my first intro into actionscript). But since 2005 Flash has been through so many changes, from being taken over by Adobe, releasing AS2 and AS3, the maturation of Flex (and the happily lowered price) and finally the release of AIR which will allow for Flash apps on the desktop. Anyway, my life is now coming full circle and I have been able to get back into Flash -- and starting in March it will be my FT job again! In the meantime, I'm very busy learning AS3 and Flex2 as quickly as possible and have been able to complete work on the first version of a memorization tool using a bit of AS2. My goal before March is to rework it as an AS3 Flex app so that it can be ported into AIR as soon as the final release is announced.

Exciting times!

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