Currently the Rich Media Institute is offering over 9 hours of free training. The online lessons comprises of video tutorials with practical examples, providing you with a comprehensive overview of ActionScript 3. You will have to act quick as the offer expires on February 15th. Once signed up, you have 365 days to complete the course.

HYPE is a “visual” framework conceived by Branden Hall & Joshua Davis with the rather lovely goal of making AS3 more accessible to designers.

Flash has matured incredibly in the past decade, but it has done so in a way that has blocked non-developers from even getting started. The simple fact of the matter is that with older versions of Flash you could learn the tool and how to program ActionScript almost entirely through creative play. With the latest iterations, unless you have a background in object-oriented programming, that method of learning by doing is simply not an option. This is where HYPE comes in.

This rings true with me as I know many former designer/coders who have simply given up with AS3. HYPE really does makes complex animations\interactions much easier to build. The only downside is you do have to invest a little time learning the language of the framework itself, but really this is very small price to pay.

One of the first things you will notice when you start using Actionscript 3 is Movieclip’s no longer automatically invoke the hand cursor once you set a mouse event. Fortunately the solution is simple:

yourBtn.buttonMode=true;
yourBtn.useHandCursor=true;

Now if you just have a textfield inside your Movieclip you are probably wondering why that blasted hand cursor is still hiding from you. To solve this add:

yourBtn.mouseChildren=false;

Setting mouseChildern to false ignores the mouse clicks of all the children inside the Movieclip. What’s super handy about this property is you no longer need to included hidden hotspots as the whole text area becomes the hotspot (not just the text)

If you are still mourning the loss of your carefully crafted AS2 code library, ease the transition pain with Adobe’s excellent migration guide. The cookbook is a free pdf designed to aid AS2 developers wanting to get up to speed with AS3. Its really well put together, covering all of the pitfalls, misconceptions and benefits of the new language.