A short interview I did with Peter Elst for ActionScriptHero.org has just gone live, as part of the aSH redesign/relaunch. You can check out the interview here.

I will be speaking at a number of conferences over the next few months:

FlashForward San Francisco Aug 20-22

I’m excited about seeing what changes the Metaliq crew bring to the granddaddy of Flash conferences. In particular, I’m very interested in seeing how the new single track format of the conference works out. It could be brilliant, or it could fizzle. I’ll be running a 20 minute session on “Why I (Still) Love Flash”. I think it will be a good talk – after over 10 years working with the technology, and 5 years running my company, it’s something that’s been on my mind.

Flash On The Beach Brighton, UK Sep 28-Oct 1

FotB was my favourite conference last year. It had a great vibe, was a lot of fun, and I came away very inspired. I probably attended more sessions at FotB than I did at all the other conferences I went to last year combined. I’m really looking forwards to a repeat this year. I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to talk about, but whatever it is I’ll be sure to bring my game face.

MAX San Francisco Nov 16-19

MAX is always a great developer conference, but this year Adobe is increasing the design presence, which should add a nice balance to the event. I always enjoy MAX – it’s pretty corporate and impersonal, and definitely not as fun as most of the conferences I speak at, but it’s a good opportunity to learn from some of the top minds of Adobe, and get a feeling for the current corporate gestalt. I’ll be doing a talk on “Making Money with Adobe AIR”, trying to identify some of the obvious and not so obvious market opportunities for the technology.

I’ve always wanted to say that, even if it is a bald-faced lie.

While in Tokyo I had the distinct pleasure and honour of being interviewed by Director’s Magazine. The interview, and a rather silly looking photo of me appeared in the Aug-Sep edition of the magazine. I just got a copy (bit of a delay, but hey, it came all the freaking way from Japan, man!), and while I have no idea what it says, it’s still pretty cool, so I wanted to post it for posterity.

Here’s a scan of the picture page:

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I’ve had the pleasure of attending a fair number of events in the past few weeks, and now that I’ve finally returned home (I’ve only been home for 1 week out of the past 8), I thought I would post a very brief recap.

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I was just asked by Gregg Cohen to post this to the blog. Could be fun, and get you a bit of exposure if you’re in the Bay area.

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I’ve had a lot of people asking me when I’m going to run another workshop, so I thought I should post about it here.

On September 25th, I will be running a one day workshop in Toronto on Introductory ActionScript 3, in partnership with FitC and RMI. As with all my workshops, it will pack a ton of content into the time available (if you don’t leave with a headache, I don’t feel like I’ve done my job), starting with basic AS3 and proceeding quickly into more advanced topics like data loading and parsing, display list management, nitty gritty details on the event model, and more. I’ll also be doing a brief introduction to Flex 3, Flash CS3 and AIR, to get attendees prepared to ask really tough questions at the Adobe onAIR event the next day.

This workshop is targeted at developers with a working knowledge of ActionScript 2, and/or some basic experience with AS3.

We have limited seating available for this workshop, so if you’re interested be sure to sign up. Punching “gskinner” in as the discount code will get you $25 off. If you’re planning to send a few people, fire me or RMI an email and they might be able to hook you up with an even better discount. A full description, and registration information is available here.

If you have any questions about the workshop, feel free to ask in the comments below.

Just a quick note to let people know that the notes from my FitC Toronto session “Flash CS3 Components: A Guided Tour” are now online at gskinner.com/talks/. I’ll try to get my source code up in the next few days.

FitC Toronto 2007 is just a couple weeks away, and I’m working hard to finish off my talk on the Flash CS3 component set.

I was really excited when my team (gskinner.com) was chosen to develop the component set for Flash CS3 (except FLVPlayback), with Adobe and Metaliq. I had the pleasure (and stress!) of leading the architecture and development of this new set of components.

At FitC Toronto, I will be giving a full tour of the v3 components. I’ll be talking about the goals and philosophy behind the new architecture, skinning, styling, and extensibility (extending or creating new components). I’ll also take a shallow dive (I only have an hour) into the inner workings of the new component architecture. I’m hoping to provide content for both designers working with components, and developers that are interested in building new components or extending existing ones.

FitC looks like it’s going to be one of the best conferences in 2007, with a really stellar speaker roster. If you’re going to be there, and want to learn about the latest set of components in Flash, check out my session “Components and AS3” right after lunch on the second day. Also, feel free to pop in on my panel with some really smart dudes (Mike Downey, Aral Balkan, Keith Peters, and Chris Allen) on “AS3, Flex & Apollo: What They Mean For You” on the first day of the conference right before lunch.