Author / Grant Skinner

Grant Skinner

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

@gskinner

by Grant Skinner

eFug Worldwide User Group Meeting

Tonight, the Edmonton Flash User Group participated in Macromedia’s first worldwide user group event, and I must say, I was impressed.

Firstly, by the attendance. We had 78 people show up for the gathering, and it’s only been 2.5 months since we founded the group. It was a good crowd – friendly, interesting and diverse.

Secondly, by the presentation. It was delivered quite smoothly, and Breeze Live performed very well (once we did an emergency upgrade to the latest Flash plugin). My only real annoyance was that the chat field would lose focus every time there was a mode change.

A good time all round. I’ll have some photos up of the event on the eFug website sometime tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who showed up, Guru Digital Arts College for hosting the packed event, and Phil Chung and Michael Warf (my co-founders) for all the work they put into the event.

by Grant Skinner

Code snippet: XMLNode.indexOn()

I plan to blog useful code snippets regularly. Just little bits of ActionScript that help me in my day to day coding.

To start, I want to share a little snippet that is possible the most useful 14 lines of code I ever wrote. It’s a simple addition to the XMLNode prototype that lets you index and reference a node’s childnodes based on any attribute or the nodeName. It will be less useful with AS2.0, due to the xPath implementation, but I expect it will still be faster, and will do the job in many situations.

I’m not sure I would ever have had the patience to write gModeler if it were not for this little gem.

Read on for the code…

Continue reading →

by Grant Skinner

Is there room for one more?

Well, due to urgings of friends/colleagues and my own interest in giving this blogging craze a try I have decided to join the plethora of Flash blogs. I won’t promise scintillating new content, but I will try to maintain an up-to-date, easy to read log of my thoughts and ideas regarding Flash, internet technology, and my own work (conferences, projects, articles, etc). I’ve also tried to create an aesthetically pleasing blog – hopefully I haven’t failed too miserably.

I’d certainly welcome input on this new endeavour – critiques of the design, thoughts on content, and ideas for growth are all welcome.

I hope this blog is useful to many, but most importantly I hope it serves as a place to preserve my thoughts (and my writing skills).

Cheers!