I’m up later than I wanted to be because the timed PowerPoint/MP3 -> Flash presentation transfer I agreed to do for a friend ended up taking longer than I thought. The PowerPoint part of it wasn’t bad. MSDN turned up a nifty object model chart and reference and the VBA debugger does everything you’d expect and want it to do. While I suppose Flash MX is an improvement, the development environment is still woefully lackluster. The included ActionScript Dictionary is shitty, there’s no object model chart (I still don’t know what the built in objects and collections are), and the debugger is weak sauce. Not to mention ActionScript itself still sucks. Oh sure it’s mostly ECMA on the outside, but it’s still a hacky Lingo-ish bastard child on the inside. I spent a while looking for a proper timer/sleep function (it’s not there), and also under the false impression that I’d be able to implement a controller model / actionscript without having to attach it to a frame (also not there). I ended up hacking it together with nested clips and gotos. Que lame-o. I should probably start throwing up full write-ups of these things on their own pages…
On the bright side, I thought up of some things related to this that I can add to Rasmus’s presentation system. I’m actually still sitting on some code that I should check in. It’s on my todo-list, but I’m just so busy right now that I’m not even thinking about anything other than making it through the next few weeks.