Speaker: Colin Moock, www.moock.org, the full presentation for ActionScript 3.0 and Flash CS3

Veteran ActionScript educator and author Colin Moock discusses the new links between ActionScript 3.0 code and content created in Flash CS3. Topics covered include the document class, linking symbols to classes, automatically generated classes, accessing on-stage instances from linked classes, and symbol instantiation.

Colin is a regular speaker at FITC and has been for a couple years now. His presentations are always informative and he never fails to humble any self-proclaimed flash guru. Colin’s new book Essential ActionScript 3.0 is due out in early June.

This presentation is particularly timely in light of Adobe’s recent launch (March 27) of Creative Suite 3 which includes Flash CS3 (or the much anticipated Flash 9). Although ActionScript 3 isn’t a new technology (released last summer), there is a lot of new and neat stuff in Flash CS3. For a full review see (P)review of Flash CS3.

A few highlights of the presentation:

• The mechanics of AS3 is rooted deeply in objected oriented programming. The presentation focuses on the new APIs and changes in actionscript and how the changes affect development.
• The display API (documentation on Adobe.com) provides control over all shapes, bitmaps, video on the stage. It provides control to draw and move any objects in a movie. Although this isn’t a new concept, the changes in the construction of the language provide a more flexible approach for object oriented programming.
• A major change in the architecture is the addition of the document object inherent on the root in all flash documents. This simply means the Flash cleans up any non-object-orinetd-programming objects on the timeline and makes them accessible (programmatically) to the root document.
• Like document object model programming (others include XML, HTML, etc), you can reference document objects with functions such as addChild(), getChildByName().
• disabling stage instance auto-declaration: [Open File > Publish Settings > Flash > ActionScript Version > Settings] Under Stage, uncheck “Automatically declare stage instances”
• *** AttachMovie is gone. Attaching a movie to the stage is to be done by creating a new instance of a class (class name is set through linkage of object) – in true OOP form.