Web 2.0 is still half-baked when it comes to making things happen for the web. I was hoping to create a simply slide show player that could be used for our photography web site, so that I wouldn't have to rely on any outside plug-ins. I also wanted it to be able to play on various devices capable of internet surfing. So, I spent a week going over what it would take to simply go through an array of images supplied dynamically, load them up and fade them in, pause for a couple of seconds, load the next image, fade out the current image when the next one has completely loaded, and the fade the next image in and the cycle repeats itself. Sounds easy...
Not for web 2.0.
If I got it to do one thing, it would crap out in another. Either that, or it would work in Firefox, Safari, Opera and everything else, except Internet Explorer. Or, it would load the first image great and then the next image would load in all distorted. It was just one thing after another and no two platforms would play it identically as set out in my style sheets.
After about 4 hours of sleep yesterday, I woke up in the morning going, "Forget it! I know what I have to do in Flash and can get it done in ActionScript 3.0 before the bridal show ends!" That's right... I had a deadline to make this work. It took me only 15 minutes to make a PHP page that will talk to Flash and help set up the slideshow. From there, I designed and wrote all of the ActionScript to accomplish everything that I needed to do for the slideshow. I managed to get it all done in ActionScript 3.0 in a matter of hours where Web 2.0 still couldn't get it right after a week of messing with it. I can live with the fact that it won't show up on anyone's iPhone or iPod Touch for now. However, any browser that does have Flash 9, which would amount to over 95% of them, will play the slideshow alike. No deviations and no quirks.
So, in my battle between Web 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0, the winner was ActionScript 3.0! The proof is in the results.
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