The latest BFPUG (Boston Flash Platform User Group) occured tonight. The topic, ActionScript 3.0.

About 30 people showed. Probably more … remotely. There was a live cast going on you see.

Keith Peters did a quick history of AS, and then Sam Robbins carried on with some of the new features/capabilities … as well as a couple of walkthroughs (one on the new event system and the other on DisplayList).

I was able to follow along readily, so looks like AS 3.0 isn’t quite the jump I thought it would be. Clients will ask for it at some point.

Keith showed us a dynamic spectrum generated from an .mp3, which was a very cool proof of concept.

Did I mention, during the whole sha-bang, there was also a live cast courtsey of NEIA?

However, like all live events (or at least the ones I’ve been to lately), this one, much to the disappointment of the geograhically impaired, like Eric Doleki, was plagued with a few technical glitches (drops & hiccups).

But not to fret … from what I hear there may be a quicktime archive of event posted later to the BFPUG site.

Anyways, back to the event … during Q&A, someone brought up the ever lingering notion that Flash might be a “Director Killer” at some point. With Adobe at the wheel, anything is possible. My thoughts? I won’t comment, for fear of reprisal and nasty emails from Director die-hards. Each tool has its uses.

Another thought, during the presentation … that of the possiblity of further alienating designers from ActionScript with 3 … I’m all for a stricter and more “tight” language, but there is no question AS 3.0 is dedicated to the hard core developer folk out there. But, I suppose that’s the whole point of Flex 2.

If we ever get to pointers, threading, etc … I’m sure designers will raise their hands, right?

In terms of mobile … well, I think it’ll be a while until the roadmaps meet …

But who knows, mobile phones are getting more sophisticated, like, every hour it seems … dual processors, sharper screens, blah blah blah … a look at a DoCoMo capable phone, and you know it’ll happen sooner or later … For now, I think it’s still impressive to be able to do, for all intensive purposes, Flash 7 (AS 2.0) on mobile.

Here are some quick photos from the event … sorry about the blurryness. I was jacked on some great coffee from Starbucks.

All in all, a great presentation.

Photos of the dynamic duo (Sam & Keith):

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Actionscript, BFPUG, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.