Blog comments are back on. Sorry for the outage. If there is much trouble with blog spam, we’re going to switch to an approval system.

gModeler has been updated to v0.6.1. This version includes minor fixes including:

• AS2 stub code generation now includes the return type of methods properly.
• Online help works again.
• Feedback system works again (or will shortly).
• Version number is now display on the right side of the toolbar

gModeler 2 is in progress as well, but with the amount of work we have on the go right now, it’s hard to say how long it will be before it’s complete.

I was recently browsing through the SWFs and FLAs I’ve collected over the last few years because I thought they were interesting or unique. During my reminiscing, I stumbled on this vein-1 experiment by Mike Johnson from May 2002.

It caught my eye, and I decided to rebuild it in OOP, and spice it up a bit. I wanted to make it look like an old anatomy textbook come to life. My fiance thinks it’s creepy, so I must have done ok – judge for yourself though, the result is below (warning: it’s fairly CPU intensive, and requires FP7).

I’ll be releasing the code to this once I’ve cleaned it up a bit. I’ll also be talking a bit about how it came together at my upcoming conference sessions.

Also, to give credit where due, the original experiment by Mike was part of a 25 lines experiment. I’ve nearly doubled that for the Vein itself, and then nearly doubled it again to add camera motion, grids, and labels.

UPDATE: The source code for this experiment is available here.

I’m going to be at a fair number of conferences over the next few months, so I thought I’d write up a quick entry to let people know where I’d be and when I’d be there (and to help me remember dates and places).

Feb 17-18: MXDU, Sydney Australia

March 9-11: FlashEurope, Barcelona Spain

April 6-8: Flashforward, San Francisco USA

April 9-11: FlashInTheCan, Toronto Canada

I’m running the same session at all 4 conferences (trying to preserve my sanity this year). The session is called “Object Oriented Procrastination”, and it has been very well received thus far. The description is something to the effect of:

Object Oriented Programming is commonly associated with application development (boring but profitable), but it can also be used to create less practical (and much more entertaining) pieces. This session examines the inspiration, architecture and code of a number of Grant’s recent multimedia experiments. Designers and Flash newcomers will be introduced to the basics of OOP and programmatic motion in ActionScript 2, while more experienced coders will learn architectural best-practices and hopefully be inspired to use their skills for more creative pursuits.

Don’t worry, I’m not a complete slacker (yet). I’m already working on a brand new session for conferences coming after those four (debuting in FFNYC perhaps).

I’m looking forwards getting together with all the regular Flash gang (you know who you are), and meeting up with some new people. Conferences are always a blast – and once in a while I even learn something new (when I slide out of my drunken haze long enough). I hope to see you there!

One of the things that we use quite frequently in application/game/component development is test suites. I’ve never seen anyone post on this before, and since we have been developing a large set of test suites for the gskinner lightweight interface components (screenshots below), I thought I would give them a mention.

Continue reading →

I just updated the OpenBoundClasses JSFL. This update should work smoothly on a mac (was tested, but not thoroughly), this version should support just about any path you feed it.

This version supports an array of classpaths (similiar to the IDE), you can setup the array exactly like you have yer paths set in the IDE and everything should work as expected. This will require a minor edit to the .jsfl file.

You can download the file from here and again if you have any issues, comments, or suggestions please leave a comment.

This is a little JSFL script I put together the other day after being inspired by a similar idea from Tony at Teknision.

The purpose of this script is to launch any AS2 classes bound to the selected items in your library. Comes in super handy if bound to a keyboard shortcut.

The concept is pretty simple so there isn’t much to explain, two things to look out for:

1) There is a variable (var classPath) in the script that you may (or may not) have to change to reflect yer own development enviroment.

2) Right now it only works relative to the .fla, so like /classPath/com/gskinner/etc ..

I do have some idea’s for more/better functionality, but I’m not sure it’s quite possible in this iteration of JSFL.

The script can be downloaded from here, and if you have any comments/suggestion for improvement or whatnot please leave a comment.

Hope you enjoyed my first gBlog post, stay tuned for more.

For those of you going to MAX this year, be sure to check out the introNetworks installation. gskinner.com worked with the social networking geniuses over at Mixed Grill to develop version 3 of this awesome application. We also had the opportunity to work with Ben Allfree who did the back-end work that supports the application.

Continue reading →