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The "animation" is most likely a side effect of the integration process, it's hard to avoid considering the high running time of force directed layout algorithms, especially because in this case it is brute force O(n2) rather than using something like Barnes-Hut that makes it more like O(n log n).

You are right of course on both points, I was talking about Therevadan monks and was referring to an interpretation of the Pali canon when talking about what the Buddha said.

Actually most Buddhist monks depend on alms, so they aren't required to adhere to a vegan diet; they eat whatever the populace around the monastery offers. The only thing the Buddha ever said about eating meat is that one should not accept meat if they even suspect that the animal was killed specifically for them.

If you're referring to type notation, I'd argue postfix works much better for languages that are mostly type inferred, as then there is a consistent way of declaring things.

That was my thought too, Eclipse JDT at least is pretty impressive, some of the other plugins not so much. I was surprised to see IntelliJ mentioned as supposedly good too, I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I find it somewhat lacking in comparison to JDT.

Re: assets, you might not actually if all the assets are vector. It's not that uncommon in Flash, since originally it was just a vector animation tool.

I don't think there is any special Wacom integration despite the "Works with Wacom" (what doesn't?), it doesn't take notice of pressure or anything like that anyway.

edit: My mistake. It detects when you're using the eraser, but that's it.

edi2: Actually some of the brushes do seem to be pressure sensitive but it doesn't seem to work on all of the brushes it should.

Actually the Flash version is done by drawing at a pixel level too (although some of the filter effects are indeed done by the player). The source is here: http://code.google.com/p/in-spirit/source/browse/#svn/trunk/...

From my experiences with canvas it seems the calling the drawing methods is the major bottleneck for this sort of thing. Minus the visuals I would guess the JS on V8 would run comparably to the AS3.

This is a good illustration of how much slower JS/canvas is than AS3 at the moment, unfortunately.

For comparison: http://blog.inspirit.ru/wp-content/uploads/fluidsolver/Main.... - a much more complicated algorithm running with more particles and additional visual effects, and it runs more smoothly (although admittedly this does use 10-15% more CPU on my machine, still I don't believe the same thing implemented with canvas would run nearly so well).

That's also why they're "bad" though, when you let the machine handle your form you aren't getting the full benefit of the exercise.

It's been out as a beta for quite a while: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Not sure when the release is due though.

The line breaks are classed as nodes (as is all whitepsace) unless you tell XML parsers to ignore them usually.

That's the point, the same applies to Flash.

That's just laziness or lack of foresight on the part of the developers, adding customisable keys should be trivial.

Flash is vector based for the most part, but a few versions back they added objects that deal with bitmaps the traditional way, it works pretty well. But on the other hand, why bother with the vector stage at all? The image will have to be rasterised before being displayed anyway, so what difference does it make whether you have a bitmap surface you can draw bezier curves on, or a vector environment that ends up as a bitmap?

An aside, bizzarely I find it's often faster to redraw some graphics "vector style" (calling the lineTo/bezierCurveTo etc methods again) on canvas than it is to use drawImage and use a cached version of the same graphics.

It looks to me like this only exports animation, which I can certainly see how it might be useful, but isn't really that exciting. The menu they ran the export from is all JSFL scripts (a way of automating operations in the Flash IDE to a certain extent) so they're probably just analysing the timeline and exporting the shape and animation data as JS.

I don't expect to see any kind of Actionscript combined export any time soon though, performance is too much of a hurdle in the near future.

Verdana is designed for small type on monitors, so above about ~12px it becomes quite ugly and the kerning doesn't work as well.

Well, as it happens, this does indeed run incredibly badly in Flash. I didn't try to optimize it at all (I probably couldn't anyway) and it ran at about 8fps, whereas the JS runs at about 12-15 in Chrome.

What does Flash playing video have to do with raytracing in AS3? The AVM has nothing to do with the video decoding in Flash.

That's one definite advantage Canvas has over Flash, everything you do in Flash is restricted to the framerate the SWF is running at, so all interaction has a little extra lag before the UI updates.

This is also why some movies seem to hog an undue amount of resources, to ensure it feels as responsive as possible people use excessively high framerates when they're not needed.

There is a mechanism for forcing render updates between the usual frame timer but in my experience most people don't seem to understand it, so it's rarely used.

Interesting to see the variety of results people are getting here. If anyone is using the Flash 10.1 beta they'll probably find the tests never get above 60FPS due to alterations in the timing system from previous versions.

The one slightly misleading thing about this test case is I'm pretty sure canvas would fall behind quite quickly with a scene with more complicated shapes (understandably so, you have to call JS functions to redraw everything every frame, whereas in Flash you could draw once and then move objects around and let the renderer deal with it without the overhead of calling the drawing functions every time).

Flash does have hardware acceleration support, but it wouldn't be helping in this situation. It actually makes things slower in most cases apart from video playback.

I'm not sure anyone is arguing Flash will be better forever, it's just at the moment everyone is getting excited about Canvas even though it's not a viable replacement in most situations yet.

It depends what side of it you're trying to do, just getting a tree structure of Sprite-like things working is actually quite easy - canvas' drawing transform stack is ideal for resolving the nested transforms for each shape. The trickier part is re-rendering the smallest region of canvas possible when you do change part of the display list.

Maybe I should post a link to my stuff when I get around to working on it some more!

Actually I think you just agreed with everything I was saying!

My point was canvas isn't quite there yet, not that it never will be, and also that I think the Flash-has-an-editor argument isn't the reason why canvas isn't ready yet.

As a side note, I'm already one of the people writing a library/framework to overcome the things I mentioned, the problem is I don't think it's going to be fast enough to do much with for a while.

Actually a lot of Flash apps are mainly code + assets now, that's certainly the way we make things.

I've tried using canvas to replicate some things that we've made in Flash, and quickly ran into some problems:

1) There is no way of interacting with elements drawn to canvas, as it's just a flat image (as someone else mentioned in the comments here, canvas is just a way of drawing bitmaps). You could obviously write your code to deal with mouse and keyboard interaction, but it's even more overhead on something that is already quite slow, and even if you could interact with individual elements it brings me to the other thing...

2) Flash has everything in layers that can be updated independently, when it comes to canvas if you want to change something you have to redraw that section of the image entirely, something that isn't always practical which means you end up redrawing the whole canvas. Essentially Flash does the same thing, but as the compositing is handled by the plugin it is far faster than anything you can do in Javascript at the moment.

Also related to the above, the drawImage method that draws bitmap data to the canvas is painfully slow at the moment, so compositing using that is out of the question. If that can be optimised significantly it will certainly help.

Basically canvas is too low level to duplicate the kind of functionality Flash offers at the moment. Until manipulating the canvas and Javascript is optimised further it's not possible to layer in the interaction or flexibility of rendering that Flash has. I'm sure a framework offering this will happen one day, but it won't be any time soon.

The difference in appearence is because it's based on what was going to be ES4, you can actually write it like Javascript for the most part if you want to.

I don't think that will be a problem, he mentions the throttling is different when audio is playing and I'd be surprised if that didn't include video with audio too.

..."Turns out that’s not totally true, but within the realm of Actionscript there are, without a doubt, more possibilities, and more opportunities to innovate. This is why I learned Actionscript."

It's not really the impression I got from playing it, it just seemed to me like they made a sandbox game and then remembered to throw some cutscenes and missions in at the last minute to break up the driving around and getting shot at. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but that was my take on it... don't get me wrong though, I actually quite liked playing it. I just thought the story side of it was very rushed.

edit: Oops, I didn't mean to reply to your message. The game story is a bit of a jumble. You start by chasing this arms dealer (The Jackal mentioned in the article) but spend at least 2/3rds of the game running errands for two factions in a civil war (they both offer you missions and you can choose which to accept). I've tried playing it twice but never made it too the end, it gets a bit monotonous by hour 20. That's mainly because you don't care about your foes or allies in the game. Unlike the author of the article, I ascribe that to completely uncompelling and irrelevant storytelling rather than careful manipulation.