Oddball Update

God, do I hate Flash. I’m talking about the web-based animation tool. You can create some pretty amazing stuff with it, that is provided you are equipped with superhuman levels of patience. My complaints about Flash have long been that it takes an inordinate amount of time and effort to accomplish absurdly simple things. Either that, or things that the layperson might consider “simple” are not, in actuality, simple.

So for the last several days straight I have been trying to finish this Flash applet for the new website I’m putting together for my company. (No, not my company. The company I work for during the first two-thirds of every day.) The concept seemed simple enough. I wanted a banner-type of area to go at the top of a particular webpage. This area would house a Flash applet which would cycle endlessly through a series of eight “flashcards”, each highlighting different competitive advantages of one of our products. It would use a crossfade transition between cards, and there would be a little list down one side with an arrow pointing to which card is currently being displayed.

Well, my boss wanted to add the ability for people to click on one of those items in the list, and have the applet jump directly to that card and stay there for a while before resuming its rotation. That is the part I cannot seem to make work. The problem is that I don’t understand a whit of what I’m doing here. It’s all ActionScript, Flash’s programming language. The rotation itself is written based on a script I found on a newsgroup, and I don’t pretend to understand how much of it works. I gave it a try because it was much more efficient than the crappy, time-consuming, old-school timeline way of doing this, which is the only method I know how to use myself. Ironically, in trying to save time I ended up wasting a whole bunch of it, because unfortunately the script is either incompatible with what I’m trying to do, or I just don’t know enough about ActionScript. Now it looks like I’m doomed to go back and start over, doing this the old-school way. Even then, there are new and different problems to work out.

What really pisses me off is that I’ve spent an entire week building this idiotic thing and it is only a small part of the huge website re-do that I am currently tasked with, which as a whole prevents me from spending any time doing any of the other bazillion tasks I also have on my burgeoning list. There is perhaps nothing that frustrates me more than getting bogged down on a stupid, asinine detail like this when there is so much other work to be done.

I had a few more paragraphs here, but the asinine function of Wordpress that attempts to clean up your HTML tag syntax deleted most of it, so I quit. Goodbye.

Edit @ 10:05 pm: I threw the whole thing out and rebuilt it using my “old-school timeline method” learned during the days of Flash 4, and got the whole thing done in two or three hours. Score one for the old fashioned way.

Categorized as Rants