Earlier this evening I realised that it’s my birthday in two days time, and as tradition goes, I must choose a new language/tool to pick up and learn over the next year. Last year was Rails, the year before that was getting a proper grip of Javascript and jQuery.
So, what’s this year? Well, it’s a bit of an odd one as it’s not really anything new to me, but something that is now dramatically different from when I last looked at it – and that’s good old Flash.
My last run-in with Flash was using Flash 8 and Actionscript 2 back in my days at 2nd byte. Whilst there I developed the Flash interfaces for a number of the used vehicle locators that the company builds for UK car manufacturers. Looking back at them now, they’re nothing amazing, but back in the day they were cutting edge.
So, why should I be revisiting Flash? Well, since I last had a play Flash has gone through two major revisions (CS3 and CS4) and ActionScript itself has changed dramatically. Tie this in with the necessity to make todays Flex applications a better experience for the user, there’s an increasing need to create animation and flow that you just can’t really get from Flex alone.
Plus, there’s the fact that I’ve never been a 100% analytical type developer. At college I was training as a product designer, and was even taught to draw properly at one point, but since then I’ve never really gotten the chance to flex any creative muscle so to speak, having largely been stuck on the back end of applications development with ColdFusion and Rails.
So, there you go, that’s my promise to you lot over the next year – that I will take a good long look at Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3 and try and really get them into my head. You never know I might even document some of my new found experiences here for you all to laugh at 
perhaps Flex?