I just got back from delivering my Flash 8 Bootcamp in Toronto, and speaking at the Spark conference in Amsterdam (awesome conference – more on that soon). I think the workshop went really well. I had about 30 Flashers with a real diversity of backgrounds attend. Everyone seemed to have fun and learn a lot, and I don’t believe I lost anyone over the two days (except maybe when I got into bitwise operations and color math – I’m planning on allocating a bit more time to that in LA).

It was a lot of fun to teach, and I want to say thank you to everyone who attended. I’d also like to thank everyone at FitC who organized the workshop (Shawn, Liz, Rick). I’m really looking forwards to the Los Angeles run. If you are interested in attending, check out the workshop outline here, or visit the sign up page here.

UPDATE: The bootcamp will be running in London, UK on February 11-12. Please read the announcement for more information.

Here’s some of the feedback I’ve received so far:

Continue reading →

After a week of voting, the winner of the Great Pumpkin Showdown II was pretty clear. Macromedia (Adobe) better watch out, because piracy seems to be all the rage with Flash developers these days.

Unlike last year, where the results were neck and neck, this year was a landslide victory. The pirate pumpkin won out with 147 votes. Frank came in a distant second with 91 votes, and the Puki pumpkin trailed with 78 votes.

Here’s a look at the pumpkins the day after hallowe’en. I was going to take a picture after voting ended, but the pumpkins dissolved into protoplasm by day 3 and had to be poured into the garbage can (ewww).

Continue reading →

I’ve been building out some new demos for upcoming conference sessions and workshops, and really like this one, which generates fire onscreen based on webcam motion. It basically turns you into the Human Torch. I think it’s a nice counterpoint to my Webcam Snowstorm experiment – fire and ice.

Another thing I find really cool about this is that it’s only a 1kb swf. Good work Flash engineering team!

Check it out, Flash 8 Player and a webcam is required:

Continue reading →

Or… how to kill a user’s computer with 1 line of ActionScript.

I’ve been profiling CPU/RAM usage in Flash 8 content in the last few days in preparation for the Flash 8 Bootcamp I’m running in Toronto and LA. Last night I ran into a major memory leak that is wreaking havoc with some of my latest experiments, and this morning I isolated it. This leak makes it ridiculously easy to accidently create a process that increases the Flash Player’s memory heap at a very rapid rate, and ultimately immobilizes the user’s system (I’ve had to do a few slow motion restarts while testing this – I had over 15GB of virtual memory dedicated to the player at one point).

Continue reading →

A week ago we posted a friendly contest to gOOify Mike Chambers charming poonum. There was a ton of great entries – many of which made me laugh out loud. We went through 3 rounds of judging, based loosely on creativity, humor, title and execution.

In the first round, each of our 5 judges (AKA gskinner.com Flash developers) each nominated 3 entries as finalists. The nominees were:

Siamese Chamber Cat

Sumo Mike

Malignant

Mike as a punk

Yogi

My dog wants in on this too

Demonic Mike

Damn! Ugly one

Incredibles

Mike Chambers? or Agent Smith? (Matrix effect)

Just me (near the bottom)

Fat Kid

Alien

Ostrich

In the second round, each judge cast 3 votes for nominees other than the ones they chose in round 1. The votes from both rounds were tallied to find a winner – but we wound up with a surprise tie between Sumo Mike and Fat Kid (apparently we have a soft-spot for obese Chamberses). In the final round, Fat Kid Mike squashed Sumo Mike to take the title. Congratulations to Patrick Pietens of flashaddict.nl for olympic-level gOOification – he will be receiving a free copy of the gProject panel as a reward.

Great work by everyone! Here’s a list of all the web accessible entries we received. We also received a couple of entries by email from Saverio Caminiti and Mads Bjerre which were included in the judging.

Continue reading →

Macromedia has released the second of a series of articles from us Flash developers at gskinner. This article entitled “True Alpha Video in Flash 8” gives you the knowledge and skills to create your first alpha video, and how to use that video in Flash. I learned a lot about the new Flash 8 video in researching this article, and I really hope you take away some good knowledge about creating and using alpha video from reading this. You can read my article here. While researching this article we had tons of fun filming Guirellmo the hamster for the goofy demo below. Guirellmo’s whole purpose was to eat, and run across the screen (easier said then done). Just click to drop food in his feeding area and watch him do his thing.

Continue reading →