Mathew Browne

As part of my job at UCL, I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some Flash-based gimmicks for the sites I’m putting together. Very whizzy and Actionscript-laced they are, too. Except I have a meeting with my boss later and I only have one-and-a-half SWFs to show off.

How come Flash programming eats up my time so much? My problem is I get caught up in unnecessary details - turning the slightest movement into a carefully-described variable, rather than just tween an instance from A to B (you know, just in case…) or defining dynamic text boxes and filling them out via Actionscript rather than - you guessed it - just writing it in a static box and forgetting about it. Granted, these examples only illustrate a workload increase of seconds rather than minutes or hours, but over the course of a fortnight these really have stealthily gobbled up my time.

I’m approaching my work too much like a programmer and not enough like a designer.