I started a separate blog for the Go beta here: go.mosessupposes.com. This will give us a public forum where we can get into specifics. Note that the blog is also linked from the MosesSupposes category under the BlogRoll at right.
Animation is an important element of many Adobe products. Following the Macromedia buyout and the addition of a fully standard-compliant scripting language, it is one area that could use some tidying up in looking toward the future.
This is a call to developers in the Adobe user community to work together to create a standard shared codebase for any animation system.
Update: A more recent post on this topic can be found at the Go blog, here.
There are several reasons to make this step. First, at this time various animation systems tend to have different APIs but contain similar code. As systems proliferate this can lead to conflicts, behavioral discrepancies, compounded filesizes, with no clear path to correct such problems. (If working from a common base, systems would be more synced and efficient, similar elements can be combined, and developers will have a clear common thread to work between various packages at once.)
Secondly, it will truly be putting our best foot forward to demystify animation scripting for the general Adobe developer community. We should provide a helpful stepping stone, a simple and clear path to writing animation code with little up-front study, and the assurance that this work will be easily shared and used by others. Complete packages that adopt the standard will likewise become far less opaque and easier to modify or tie into larger programs.
Finally, physics scripting should be supported by the same standard. By creating a shared base for both physics and linear animation (as Robert Penner suggested several years ago in his book), we will be truly defining a central hub for motion scripting that can function together.
Currently the focus is on AS3.0 for Flash and Flex, but this standard should be ultimately portable to other Adobe animation products such as After Effects.
I am currently leading an effort to define such a standard in AS3.0 along with a small pool of Adobe developers who have expressed interest in the end goal, and I plan to pass the project into public domain as soon as it takes shape. We are naming the standard Go. That's not a brand name, just the shortest word that implies animation.
Please contact me if you're interested in participating in this project!
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