Is Flash easy or not?

[baby_annie]

I hear somebody say that Flash is easy. But I don't think so. If you master Flash, it's easy with you. Otherwise, you are newbie, it's difficult. Further, when we enter intermediate, advanced, expert level and so on, it's hard to learn(include AS). Not only Flash, but all thing have this reality.
I'm newbie, it's easy when make some basic stuffs. But difficult stuffs are hard to learn with me. But hard to learn --> exciting.
Tell me what do you think !

[tg]

is it easy/hard? depends... on what your experience is...

i came to flash from a programming background. the scripting part of flash was fairly easy for me to pick up on. the hard part for me was understanding the organization of flash... i learn by taking other peoples code apart... and in flash (especially f5), the code could be just about anywhere. the hard part for me was getting to the timeline/nested timeline interface, and debugging code i couldn't find because of the nested timelines.

tell the truth, i still don't use most of the graphical parts of flash, like tweens/masks etc.... thats hard to me.

[fgf]

when you start on actionscript you'll probably find nothing works the way you think at first. I still get this with new objects/commands but I know the one rule.

'Trace is your friend'

Its basically used to write variables and paths etc to the screen so you can check they are what you think they are. I start everything with traces know rather than waiting for it to go wrong.

fgf

[Vman]

I recently had a bad experience with traces. For hours I was trying to get something to work right...when you clicked a button the curent mc had to play an outro before the next one would start. All of the the variables were showing up in the output window correctly, but the movie wouldn't work right.

Finally, I took the traces out and everything worked. Maybe I wasn't using them correctly? If I set a variable, I put the trace AS right after. Isn't that the way to do it?

Vman

[fgf]

Doubt its anything to do with trace.

Best thing is when you have a suspected pathing error. Trace what you've used for a target. The amount of times it comes up undefined (especially when using []/eval)

fgf

[baby_annie]

is it easy/hard? depends... on what your experience is...
It's just my thingking. ^^

[Vman]

fgf,
You know, after replying to this thread, I had to go back and try to figure out why my movie wasn't working with the trace actions. I think, since I was tracing variables that were numbers myVar = 1 and myVar = "1", when I used the trace action it was converting the first variariable into a string when it should have stayed a number. Does this sound like what may have happened?

[Ricod]

Well, usually, the bigger the effort, the more rewarding when you succeed. (although, I'd opt for a less rewarding feeling in order to get that frickin script working ! ;))

[fgf]

Vman, flashes variable typing is a bit arsey (weakly typed) so you have to throw in parseInts and String()'s and things to force types.

It will only convert variables if you are concatenating

stringVar=12

myVar =100

trace( stringVar + intVar)

gives "12100"

instead of 112


fgf

[Vman]

Gotcha. Thanks.

[Grifter]

my two cents:
flash is relatively easy to get into - i.e. to begin animating and even AS coding (up to a certain extent obviously). However, it is most definitely not easy to come up with something that is aesthetically pleasing and/or serves a useful purpose. i think a lot of it has to do with your design skill, so if you're naturally good at designing (eg. drawing, etc) then i think you'll find it easy to do stuff with Flash.

Grifter

[28dead]

WHY THE HELL IS EVERYONE RESPONDING TO SUCH A VACUOUS COMMENT - ??? LETS GET ON ND ACTUALLY ANSWER SOME PROPER Q's ...My lord.....

[Grifter]

ermm. who died and made you boss? (not jesse i hope)
i'll post on the threads i want to post on, thanks.

[Ricod]

I think we all do ...

28dead, if you don't like a thread, don't read it. Don't reply to it. Only way it'll go away (unless you get mod or admin powers, but I think it wouldn't be wise to give you that ... :rolleyes:).

[jubei]

I found Flash isn't too bad to learn. I try to teach myself in steps, with actual projects. So i'll work XML into a project, and then i'll work physics into another, and sound into another, and so forth. There's still a lot of stuff mentioned on this site that i know nothing about, but hey, i've got time :)