Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

Support your user group…

Just wanted to make a quick post asking people to support their user groups if possible by purchasing MX2004 through the affiliate program. If your user group doesn’t have a banner up, email the manager.

If you’re not part of a user group, but don’t want those affiliate dollars going to line Macromedia middle management’s pockets 😉 – the Edmonton Flash User Group could definitely put them to good use – just click this link, and click the Macromedia Affiliate banner at the top of the page before purchasing your software from MM.

A little house cleaning

Following my move to NetKeepers hosting, I had a lot of links and content go down for two reasons:

1) Case sensitivity on the new server

2) All of my ASP scripts are now useless

I’ve just gone through and fixed most problems caused by number 1, and will be learning either CF or PHP (most likely the latter, but I welcome comments) to fix number 2.

The 1000+ of you who tried to download gPathFinder while the link was broken will be happy to learn it is now back up. Grab it from the gskinner.com site in lab / source / FLA / pathfinder.

OOP4AS2#1: Classes and instances

This post on classes and instances begins my little expos� on ActionScript 2.0 and Object Oriented Programming. I won’t be going into tons of detail (for that you’ll have to buy the forthcoming “FlashMX 2004 Demystified” book from Macromedia Press!), but I’ll be giving a basic introduction.

I’ll also be covering a lot of these materials at FlashParade in October, and more briefly at the next Edmonton Flash User Group meeting on September 15.

Read on for the real content… 🙂
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Lots of OOP in AS2.0 goodness

In one month FlashParade in Marseille will be starting off, and it looks to be a great conference in a beautiful location! I’ll be there, speaking on Object Oriented Programming for ActionScript 2.0 – which coincidentally is the topic of the chapter I contributed to the forthcoming “Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Demystified” from Macromedia Press.

In order to whet your taste for both of them, I’m going to be running an expos� on OOP in AS2.0 on my blog. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting serial content on the new OOP keywords and methodologies found in Flash MX 2004 and ActionScript 2.0. I’ll be starting a little later today with the class keyword, and posting new content at least every couple days.

It won’t be completely detailed – but you know where to go for that: the book, or the conference. 🙂

I’ll also point you to some good resources for learning general OOP as I go.

A big sloppy thank you!

I just wanted to wish the whole Flash community a great big sloppy thank you for all the support and interest I’ve received over the past year. I looked over my long term web stats for the first time in months today, and realized my humble home on the web has had over 200,000 visitors, 5 million hits, and 2000 referring URLs in one year – I find that astounding!

Combine that with the wonderful response I’ve received to starting this blog (thank you fellow bloggers), and the 40,000 accesses to the gModeler application to date and I’m veritably giddy. 🙂

Keep on being wicked-cool everyone,

g.

PS. Stay-tuned… starting Monday I will be blogging some great serial content on FlashMX 2004 and ActionScript 2.0.

_online and antiCache code snippets

These two source code snippets are great for when you’re developing Flash content for delivery online, that will also have an offline component, or that you will be testing locally.
The first is a simple one liner that sets up a global _online property that indicates whether the swf is being accessed via a web-browser online. The second is a more complex bit of code that allows you to intelligently control caching for loaded assets in a swf (swfs, jpgs, xml files, etc).
If you have any questions on the code, please enter them in the comments.
Read on for the code…
Continue reading →