September 13th 2000 | John Dalziel

Getting All GUI

These days your average Flash developer is a very curious beast: A formidable schizophrenic crossbreed of artist and programmer. The job description is almost unrecognisable from a year ago. The reason for this shift of emphasis was a last minute addition to the Flash 4 spec called Actionscript.

It's hard to believe looking back on it that this revolutionary new feature-set almost didn't make it into the final ship, but this simple yet powerful scripting system has completely changed the way we work. Although getting to grips with all these new programming features was a painful transition for some; for others it was the killer feature they had been waiting for. The development community has had a year or so to play with all these new toys and a hardcore scripting scene is really beginning to blossom...

"I truly believe we are on the cusp of re-defining this medium, as standards come into play, technology continues to flourish, and statistics relax a client into taking risks - we just might be sitting on something enormously bigger than we initially thought."
Joshua Davis, Praystation'

HISTORY
Flash has always proffered the luxury of a stable cross-platform GUI but the introduction of variables, database hooks and 'on-the-fly' movie replacement (luxuries previously only available to Generator developers) meant that entire sites could now be built inside Flash. These features allowed the separation of the 'design' from the 'content' and was very much in keeping with mainstream web development trends. Early pioneers made use of these hooks to give traditional site formats such as portals and search engines a Flash makeover. As customised Flash slowly supplanted HTML as a 'delivery' medium, developers found their roles drifting from multimedia designers to application programmers. In general the content remained unchanged but the crucial difference with Flash was that the delivery of that content could be highly customised. Flash now offered a richer and more flexible rendering engine than any mark-up language.

FULL CIRCLE
One of the pre-requisites of any web designer is an awareness and appreciation of the subtle skills of 'information design'. Until recently the tortuous cross-browser design limitations of mark-up languages have severely limited the ways in which a designer may communicate information.

For a while javascript offered the only real interactive opportunities but unfortunately suffered from being designed from a programmers perspective. Actionscript on the other hand is less of a shock to the system because it is comfortably enclosed inside the familiar world of a graphics package. It has consequently been phenomenally popular.

More bizarrely though is the recent trend in programmers adopting Flash because it has a programming language built into it! With the lines blurring all the time it's no wonder that some Flash developers are having a bit of an identity crisis.

Excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency and that is just as true of the new media as of the old
Edward R. Tufte, Professor of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science, Yale University

INFORMATION DESIGN
Gone are the days when all designers had to communicate with were tables and spot graphics. Actionscript has allowed developers to create new and exotic ways of interacting with information. There has been a veritable boom in 'blue skies' development in this area. The surge in popularity of realtime 3D has been quite staggering. This along with a re-investigation of the concepts of data clouds has really pushed the envelope of realtime mathematics.

Not to be outdone there has also been a steady proliferation of realtime physics engines. Customized floating palettes have also been popular as designers jumped at the chance to skin up their own O.S. These research projects have demonstrated the complexity of functionality that is possible with Actionscript and it clearly shows that we are only a short step away from a myriad of full blown web applications built entirely in Flash. We've already had a valiant attempt at character recognition!

...the rising ubiquity of Flash and the advent of actionscripting in Flash 4, it is finally possible to create real 3D environments for websites at relatively small file sizes. All it needs is some basic understanding of trigonometry.
Thomas Noller, Typospace

BACK & FORWARD
Actionscript is very empowering but greater control goes hand in hand with a greater responsibility to the user. Although some of us might hate to admit it, Flash is not perfect. For a start it cripples the Forward, Backward, visited links and any history functions of the browser. But with Actionscript we can code round a lot of these limitations. We all know how to strip a browser window of those offending buttons but that is only half the process. If you are going to remove functionality from the browser it is only polite to provide it inside your movie. Actionscript is more than capable of compensating for all these functions but I have only found two sites that have made serious attempts at it.

Blue skies development is very neccessary and very exciting but we should not overlook basic functionality along the way.

With the arrival of the Flash 5 authoring environment imminent, we can look forward to it being easier to be creative. It will also be quicker to do the mundane tasks, allowing us more time to experiment with the potential of scripting in the most important delivery medium of the moment.
Adam Todd, Amaze

SHAKE YOUR BOOTY
Now is a great time to be a Flash developer. Let's face it: There are lot of techonologies out there, but how many of them can be described as 'fun'? How many can you pick up in minutes but will take you months to master. As trends go, WAP and XML might be the way of the future but Flash is definitely the sexiest technology on the block.

So where do we go from here?

Well if Joshua Davis' upcoming talk at FlashForward NYC is anything to go by (the topic is 'Chaos Theory, Nature and Applied Interactive Design within Flash 4') we've only just scratched the surface!

Are you doing something interesting or new with Flash? We're always interested in hearing about sites that are breaking new ground. Contact us at Flashmagazine.com