two workdays in one!

I literally spent all day working on learning Flash.  14 hours.  I took the day off of work to spend some quality time with Flash Professional 8.

It was fun and potentially very useful, which is why I was able to stick with it.

There was a time when I thought I might want to be a programmer.  I had some less than stellar computer science classes along the way, and decided to focus on the humanities and social sciences instead.  Now I play in HTML and extremely surface level code. That background, combined with my background in philosophy (logic), made it much easier to teach myself some basic Flash than I thought possible.

Here’s what I learned about Flash:

1. Flash is easy!
2. Interactive Flash is hard (if you’re not a programmer)!
3. Getting Flash and Captivate to communicate is impossible!

Learning a new computer language or skill is very game-like in itself.  There’s a lot of guessing and experimenting with variables to find out just why the image won’t do what you think you’re telling it to do.  I don’t let myself have that type of time much anymore because I have so much on my schedule.  Taking a day off to see what I could learn really helped me re-realize the value in playing and experimenting.  It’s something I think I need to make more time for.  For example, taking the time to learn how to do some things in Flash will really save me time when it comes to putting the games together.  Captivate is just so tedious and time-consuming, where Flash seems to be much faster.

I also realized the value of e-books.  I found out that ZSR has an online book completely devoted to Flash game programming (Macromedia Flash MX 2004 : Game Programming by Murray and Everett-Church).  This was far more useful than most tutorials for the basics of Flash (but quickly got too complicated for what I need to do).  After the Murray/Everett-Church book helped me get acquainted with Flash, the built-in help guides were the most useful resource I could find.  Once John got home from work I could ask about JavaScript and coding in general, which helped me with the bigger picture of what I was doing.

So, the tangibles for today are a number of experiments.  My first “working” Flash
game was running a “book” into a “master’s thesis,” and the “book” falls off the page.  By the end, I was able to make two versions of a rearranging game, where in the end the program “knows” if the topics or types of text are in the right order.   I also made a beginning sequence (extremely rough) for the rearranging game.  Now I just have to figure out how to put them all together.  I thought I might in Captivate, but after two hours of trying, I figure that’s not going to happen easily.

I also heard from Susan today about Boolean Slots, so I made several updates there.

New materials are on Library 2!