I enjoy learning new things. However, I can now admit to myself that if I have not produced something cool within a relatively short period of time, I will certainly lose interest. I remember trying out an after-school class with a friend of mine for the purpose of learning Japanese (the reasoning at the time was that my friend and I might fly out to Japan and develop games for a living. A very common teenage dream, I’m sure). Of course, I ended up quiting after the first class because I couldn’t form a complete sentence (maybe something like “Hello, where is the SquareSoft headquarters?”).
I eventually came to realize that I really only learned new things when it HAD to be done (ie. school projects) or was delivered in a game format (ie. FF7’s materia system). But there was one exception to this rule for me: Flash/Actionscript. I can’t really explain why I had stayed loyal to the Flash overlord because it was never taught to me in school and it certainly wasn’t a part of any RPG’s that I played. Sure, there was a course in college that focused on Flash but by that time, I was already exploring more advanced stuff like Remoting and Components. I suppose I can give the reasoning: “it allowed me to combine the logical practice of coding with the artistic flow of design and motion.” But I really only use that one for job interviews and the occasional person who asks “Why Flash?”
The truth is that I don’t know why I love Flash and I don’t care. I have made a career out of it and I truly enjoying working with it (I even managed to get nominated at a FlashintheCan sometime ago). At this point, I have memorized damn-near every ActionScript command and design technique (I say damn-near because there is always a little gem hiding somewhere and I haven’t completely gotten through Flash 8’s new API). All of the projects I do at work are private intranet stuff and can’t be shown here but the work does require learning every trick and bug workaround.
However, recently I have found myself looking to learn something new. Why? Well, it’s not because I think that Flash is dying anytime soon or anything like that. I think it’s mainly because I like knowing a technology inside and out and I wouldn’t mind having more than one item on that list. In my search for a technology that I could pick up quickly, I tried technologies that have a large developer base (which usually means more tutorials) and coding syntax that transferred easily from what I know in ActionScript. C# was actually a pretty good direction. Plently of tutorials, a couple of people at work know it (so I can bug them for stuff) and it even has a few ways you can get into it for free (Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and SharpDevelop). The best part was that I found a tutorial that explained step-by-step on how to create a simple web-browser using the .net 2.0 framework. I even went through a similar tutorial for mac and created a browser using Xcode, Cocoa and Objective-C.
After trying these languages out, I thought “Great, I have a new toy to play with!” But as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I don’t need to start from zero in a new (to me) technology just to try something new. There are actually plenty of areas of the Flash Platform that I’ve yet to explore (mobile devices, Flex, ActionScript 3.0, JavaScript integration, security, accessibility, Breeze, and other stuff).
And so, what was supposed to be a post on using ActionScript skills to learn a more “serious” language has now turned into a “screw it, I’m sticking with Flash” post. I guess the overlord still has it’s grip on me.
