Toying with Actionscript. Finally made a Flash .swf file with an animated square spinning around. Used haxe and swfmill. Searching web for good tutorials, examples, tips and tricks suitable for linux users doing it all from scratch at the command line. Here is one: The Natural Entry Point Method (Tutorial & Source Files) - Introducing A New Way to Create Flash Applications Using Swfmill and MTASC by Aral Balkan, an Earthling.

So far i have made a SWF containting arbitrary images, final SWF files that display something barely interesting in an HTML page, and made moving shapes. I haven't gotten rollovers to work, haven't tried forms or other RIA-type stuff, and have totally ignored fun add-ons/plugins/componets/whatever like Grant Skinner's Fire Effect or PaperVision3D (the site seems to be malfunctioning today) or other wonderful things - gotta master the "Hello World" level of haxe coding first. For sure, haxe leads to working SWFs while mtasc has been a struggle.

Spend most of this 4 day weekend on this and helping with an audio recording. Had trouble getting SONAR to work. It wouldn't let me pick an input source, and when finally i got things lined up for recording, it wouldn't record. Strange, balky behaviour. The GUI was very sluggish - submenus coming up 5 to 10 seconds late rather than immediately - that made made me suspicious of low memory. In the Windows System settings, turned off all eye candy, changed all settings i could find to "faster performance" or whatever setting seemed speed-favoring but memory-light. Also increased the allowed maximum swap file size. After those changes, it all worked magically well.