I felt the exact same way for a very, very long time. A few things changed my mind.
The first was the realization that Adobe wasn't going to make any more cool fun stuff for me. I feel like they've just lost their way with all that and now that I look back on it, it seems like Macromedia actually made all the aspects of Flash that I enjoy. The most recent thing Adobe has done for me is Stage3D but even that is so technical that they're relying on 3rd parties like Away3D to build the friendly API on top of it.
The second was doing a project that was as close to an art piece as I've ever come doing ad agency work that was entirely in HTML/CSS3 and JS. It was actually this project if you want to see some pictures: http://inchwormstudio.com/?portfolio=samsung-coast-to-coast-...
What I found while I was doing that project was that the web has changed a lot while I've been doing Flash and I didn't realize how much annoying obtuse boilerplate I had to write in AS3 that just becomes total cake when you're using HTML for markup, CSS for style and JS for slick transitions and communication. My main love affair is with HTML and JS, I still think CSS is...CSS. With HTML I'm getting all the great structural stuff that Flex devs love, without the mind numblingly elaborate class structures they have to deal with. With good JS libraries like jQuery I'm getting the cross browser DOM support that I need because I just don't have those sea legs yet. And when you combine it all you can work really, really fast. I spent the whole first half of that project cursing JavaScript up and down the office. I would make little examples showing how setInterval loses scope and demo it for my team and be like "look! this stuff is retarded! I want AS3 back!" Then one day I had to build this twitter widget, and I sat down and I just cranked it out in no time. And I thought, 'You know, if I had been doing this in Flash I would have spent so much time dealing with URLLoaders and cross policy files and coreLib for JSON parsing...' It just felt like things had gone smoother because I wasn't fighting against the web to make it fit inside my Flash app. And that was about the time that I felt like I got over the hump, and from there it was all downhill.
It totally had warts and I got stung by IE transparency bugs but in the end we sorted it all out and now I know how to deal with those issues. And to be honest, they were pretty minimal. The Facebook API was far worse than the cross browser stuff.
If you're making the transition then read this: http://jqfundamentals.com/
I read it start to finish and it made things so much easier for me. Then once you're comfortable with jQuery, leave it behind and try the other stuff. It feels like there is SO much more to experiment with in the JS world than the AS world and I think that's largely because the community is exponentially larger. Hope that's helpful.
Thanks for your story, it's good to hear some success from someone who felt the same as I do now. I certainly hope I get past that hump, but after 2 years of using jQuery I haven't yet. I can see there being a turning point in 4-5 years, but that's in itself still rather depressing. Here's to hoping it's sooner.
Thanks a lot for the jqfundamentals link! I'm a front-end developer who knows nothing about JavaScript and hasn't ever found a good place to start. This looks like it might be really useful.
The first was the realization that Adobe wasn't going to make any more cool fun stuff for me. I feel like they've just lost their way with all that and now that I look back on it, it seems like Macromedia actually made all the aspects of Flash that I enjoy. The most recent thing Adobe has done for me is Stage3D but even that is so technical that they're relying on 3rd parties like Away3D to build the friendly API on top of it.
The second was doing a project that was as close to an art piece as I've ever come doing ad agency work that was entirely in HTML/CSS3 and JS. It was actually this project if you want to see some pictures: http://inchwormstudio.com/?portfolio=samsung-coast-to-coast-... What I found while I was doing that project was that the web has changed a lot while I've been doing Flash and I didn't realize how much annoying obtuse boilerplate I had to write in AS3 that just becomes total cake when you're using HTML for markup, CSS for style and JS for slick transitions and communication. My main love affair is with HTML and JS, I still think CSS is...CSS. With HTML I'm getting all the great structural stuff that Flex devs love, without the mind numblingly elaborate class structures they have to deal with. With good JS libraries like jQuery I'm getting the cross browser DOM support that I need because I just don't have those sea legs yet. And when you combine it all you can work really, really fast. I spent the whole first half of that project cursing JavaScript up and down the office. I would make little examples showing how setInterval loses scope and demo it for my team and be like "look! this stuff is retarded! I want AS3 back!" Then one day I had to build this twitter widget, and I sat down and I just cranked it out in no time. And I thought, 'You know, if I had been doing this in Flash I would have spent so much time dealing with URLLoaders and cross policy files and coreLib for JSON parsing...' It just felt like things had gone smoother because I wasn't fighting against the web to make it fit inside my Flash app. And that was about the time that I felt like I got over the hump, and from there it was all downhill.
It totally had warts and I got stung by IE transparency bugs but in the end we sorted it all out and now I know how to deal with those issues. And to be honest, they were pretty minimal. The Facebook API was far worse than the cross browser stuff.
If you're making the transition then read this: http://jqfundamentals.com/ I read it start to finish and it made things so much easier for me. Then once you're comfortable with jQuery, leave it behind and try the other stuff. It feels like there is SO much more to experiment with in the JS world than the AS world and I think that's largely because the community is exponentially larger. Hope that's helpful.