Software Upgrades – Who benefits?

Okay, so I’m finally able to dig into Actionscript 2.0 and have some comprehension of the structure and “thinking process,” when suddenly… they come out with Actionscript 3.0. It is a restructuring of the Actionscript language. This is supposed to make it more robust and lend itself to complex application development. But what about those of us who are more of the designer type, and not the programmer type? Doesn’t anyone care about us? I know there are a lot of people like me who can understand basic programming, but who do not want to spend their lives relearning a language that was not easy to learn in the first place. Those of us who are not programmers, have been given very little to help us apply even basic scripting to our movies.

And what about Dreamweaver CS3? Remember that lovely feature that was added in MX2004 where we could insert popup menus into our navigation? Well they took it out in CS3 and said if you want that feature you must create your menus in Fireworks and then import them into Dreamweaver. How cumbersome.

Also in Dreamweaver, they added a whole new toolbar of features called Spry which use the AJAX language (which I had never heard of until it showed up in Dreamweaver). At first glance you might get excited because these new tools would enable you to add so many cool features, like the accordion menu. But when you actually try to apply these new features, you find it’s not so simple. So maybe you go through the online tutorial that shows you how to apply these features in real world situations, but what you realize is that you’ve spent hours learning this, and that developing these features in your web site will be quite time-consuming. Yes, I’ve heard programmers rave about AJAX and all the fantastic things you can do with it. But for us non-programmer types, it’s all a bit discouraging.

It will be interesting to see how Adobe fleshes all this out over the next couple of years. Since Adobe bought out Macromedia and has begun the process of merging (or discontinuing as with GoLive) the software programs, I will be curious to see how the less program-minded people will be treated.

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I am a freelance web site designer and developer and part-time instructor at the College of DuPage, a local community college. One of the great benefits of teaching is how much I learn! Students are always coming up with new questions that cause me to “do a little research.”  The web world is an ever-changing ever-growing life-force, and I think it’s impossible to know it all.

This blog is about sharing information with anyone who is interested in increasing their understanding of designing and basic development for the web. I am not a “programmer,” by which I mean I have “a guy” who does my interactive back-end coding. If you’re not one of those, you should find someone who is!

Please look here for brief articles on various ideas and tips about web site design and development. Even if you are an advanced web site creator, you may still find bits of beneficial information. I always tell my students, some of whom already know how to make web sites, they will still inevitably glean some new information in my classes.  I hope you’ll check back soon.