Best Way To Find Freelance Flash/Actionscripters

[ashantieaton]

So I'm finding since the recession it's been considerably harder to find qualified and talented flash/actionscript coders. I've had to do hiring from the UK, Greece, Spain and Canada but want to find some talented people much closer to New York but it's been pretty difficult. This website is one good resource but what are some others the community would recommend I look at to try to post jobs or find talent in the USA?

Also, as an actionscript community I'm curious to hear if others feel this might be a technology that is being abandoned? Many of our clients are moving to HTML 5 and the full flash website is something that's not been requested since the release of the ipad 1. Combined with the fact that talent "appears" harder to find I'm wondering what peoples thoughts are on this technology being something that is just slowly fading. Interested to hear people's opinions.

Martin Eaton
Ashanti Eaton

[dmb85]

For sure, embedded .swf files are seeing much less use on the web. But this is not the only realm that Flash development occurs.

The company I work for does a lot of ipad apps. In the past few years we've mainly used Titanium, which is basically a form of HTML5 and Javascript converted into a standalone Ipad app. It works, but it is kind of limited and performance ranges from "acceptable" to "god-awful".

However, since Adobe released AIR 2.7, the performance of flash-based apps vastly improved, to a level where you can now make an ipad app that performs just as well as native applications (especially on second and third generation ipads). All the Titanium development work that used to be done by our developers is now being done in Flash by me and a few other flash guys. So from my perspective, Flash use is not only increasing, its exploding. And with the new Stage3D API, Flash is positioning itself to be the one-stop development environment for mobile, web, and desktop.

So long story short, I would strongly argue that Flash development is not going away, its just moving its focus from web to other platforms.

[ASWC]

A freelancer like me can be found easily. What's really difficult might be to afford me. Fortunately I work with a few companies that know how to pay a freelance engineer but I also face once in a while a company or individual wanting a 200 hours app made for $2000 or less. In that case I must explain that I'm not the kind of coder they are looking for.

Flash is used on many markets and not only as the major development platform. Sometimes you see all assets for a major ObjectiveC project made with Flash then exported to suitable formats. As far as animation goes Flash is still the easiest and fastest solution especially since you can then export everything in about any format you want even for use in HTML5 app. Stage3D opens new markets for Flash (maybe) but Unity has already took the bet and is now a major player in 3D for the web thanks to (FP11) swf export (they weren't before cos their unitywebplayer wasn't trusted enough by internet users).

I get a lot of Flash work but it's mostly high level coding stuff. I don't know what's the situation for the low level coding stuff market (the one where 'everybody' can do it as long as they don't ask for a lot of money). But for me there's definitely a market well alive and still growing and expanding.