The Flash Connection Make mine Actionscript 3.0!

The Flash Connection: It's Hall in a day's work

Jody Hall is a Flash designer and developer of a different sort. Mostly self-taught, he pursues Flash and Actionscript 3.0 as a side hobby, all the while working a full time job in an unrelated industry (construction). Since no major multimedia companies have snapped him up yet, he's blessedly free to explore the intricacies of Flash and Actionscript 3.0 in his spare time and loves to report the results back to you!

Spending hours and hours doing experimental coding, debugging hundreds of files for fellow members of actionscript.org (his favorite website, on which he goes by the handle Mazoonist), watching instructional videos, and writing his own tutorials are his passions, and help sharpen his Flash skills.

In fact, writing tutorials with the idea of taking complicated subjects and explaining them in simple terms are what he likes best. He wishes everyone did that.

In previous chapters in his life, he aspired to be a cartoonist, drew a bunch of mazes incorporating his cartoons, and dubbed them Mazoons (a put-together word composed of MAZes and cartOONS, get it?). He still owns the now-neglected domain at mazoons.com, and even had a book of his mazes published in 2002 ("Super Silly Mazes") from Sterling Publishing company in New York.

Alas, the publication of the maze book didn't exactly put him on Easy street, even though sales were in the high dozens. But eventually the desire to apply programming to his cartoon mazes and make them online playable took over his attention, and led him to realize that Flash might be the ideal programming environment to make it happen. Learning to program the mazes led to learning a lot more about programming in general, a subject he always dabbled in but somehow never quite mastered completely. Early attempts at OOP were often more like "oops!" and his fla files were often more like "flawed" files. But he's a stubborn sort, and when he decides he likes something, he keeps hammering away at it until he either mashes it or masters it!

At the end of 2007, he entered a tutorial contest that actionscript.org was running, with his entry "Make your own reusable classes with Flash and AS3." He won the contest, and decided he liked writing tutorials and wanted to keep doing it! The joy he got from helping others understand actionscript 3.0 more completely almost made up for the fact that he was new and semi-skilled at it himself. In 2008, he passed (by a less than completely comfortable margin!) an Adobe Certification test for Flash CS3 (hence the "expert" label on these web pages). 

He believes that Flash and Actionscript 3.0 are creative tools, not necessarily an end in themselves, and that the average person can learn to use them effectively to create their own masterful works, even if they are not professional designers or programmers!

He lives with his wife and kids in Redding, California. He also enjoys writing about himself in the third person as though he were someone else! Hope you enjoyed it!