What I've Learned About Flash

So I've been knee deep in revamping our video player, but I'll be honest, I hate Flash. I not only hate Flash, but I hate Actionscript. Here's why, and here's how to avoid much of the frustration I'm experiencing.

Lesson #1 (the only lesson)

Actionscript's shortcut functions/components should never be used because in the long run they only provide headaches. Instead, build from the ground up. Let me explain.

Take the FLVPlayback component for example. This is a fantastic way to get a video player up and running in no time. But, let's say you want to use something other than the basic functions. Let's say you want to stream an .mp4 into the FLVPlayback component. You can't! Now all that time you wasted getting the FLVPlayback component working is all for naught. So you have to build the same functionality from the ground up. What a waste of time.

Another example. Transitions. The TransitionManager is a wonderful way to create a quick and dirty transition. So nice and simple you think. But, the TransitionManager doesn't play well with switching between fullscreen and normal. So let's say you want your clip to fly in from the middle of the stage. It'll remember the non-fullscreen state, but not take into account for the fullscreen. This isn't a matter of adjusting the 'x' property, since the TransitionManager manager does you a favor by resetting it. So instead of using the TransitionManager, I had to reprogram everything to use the Tween class instead.

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