This week I decided to toy with ActionScript/Flash a bit (for the first time, really). I’m using the FlashDevelop IDE, so it’s all free goodness, no shelling out $500 to Adobe. Anyway, I wrote an MP3 player that is devoid of any sort of flash user interface, completely controllable through JavaScript. It’s a mere 162 lines of ActionScript and weighs in at 2071 bytes as an swf. It supports a wide range of operations, load, play, pause, stop, setvolume, getvolume, ispaused, getpauseoffset, getcurrentfile, getduration, getposition, getbytesloaded, getbytestotal, getid3, as well as a number of asynchronous JavaScript callbacks (notifications) on various events, loadcomplete, playcomplete and id3found. You can see it in action with possibly the simplest UI possible here: http://evilcode.net/sjg/player/.
The real question that I am trying to answer for myself is, does eliminating the flash user interface somehow make it [flash] more palatable?