Yesterday I posted a way to maintain scope inside of an XML callback. Today, I decided to take it one step further, and build out the XML object I always wish for (partly inspired by this post by Keith Peters at Bit-101 that someone pointed me to after I made my post yesterday). The sad thing is, it took me about 30 minutes to code – if I had done this 6 months ago, I could probably have saved myself hours of work. Procrastination sucks.
Continue reading →

I’ve run into quite a few people wondering how to get an XML object to trigger a particular method in a class instance on load using ActionScript 2.0. In trying to accomplish this, you will encounter two issues, both of which can be circumvented.

Continue reading →

I’ll be down in SF for FlashForward from the first to the eighth, just chillin’, never illin’ (in my mouth I’ve got one fillin’). Or something like that.

While there, I’ll be doing an Ask The Expert session on “Applied ActionScript 2.0”, which I’ll be leading off with a quick talk on the 5 most important changes in 2.0, and how they impact developers.

I’ll also be speaking at the SFMMUF meeting on Friday (the 5th) on “10 Tips for Writing Efficient ActionScript”. From the session description: “In this session, Grant will share 10 tips for improving the efficiency of your ActionScript code, and take a look at how to measure code efficiency.”

I expect I’ll probably blog some of the materials from my sessions after the conference, so stay tuned (I really need to get back to blogging, but I’ve been so busy with work, and course development).

Hope to meet up with some of you there.

I’ve had a lot of requests to run my Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development workshop in locations other than my home city, and now I will be doing so, starting at the FlashInTheCan conference in Toronto. If you haven’t already, you REALLY should check this conference out – they have 80 (!) top speakers, and its always a really great time (both for learning and for fun).

On March 31, April 1 and April 2 (the 3 days preceding FitC), I will be running this intensive workshop at the conference location. It consists of 24 hours of intense instruction on Object Oriented Programming, Analysis and Design, server communication, coding standards/strategies, and application development processes. The workshop is targeted at intermediate Flash developers who want to take their game to the next level. It will consist of theory, practical examples, and a guided project.

I have been running a trial version of this course locally, and the response has been phenomenal – I’ll post some comments in the next few days.

This workshop is limited to 20 seats, and we expect it to sell out, so corner your boss (this course WILL make you more productive) and jump over to http://flashinthecan.com/ to sign up. It’s only $999Cdn (~ $750 USD) until March 1st.

For more information and pre-requisites visit the FlashInTheCan site and click my ugly mug on the right hand side, or look under the “Details” section for “Extra: Workshop”. Or feel free to send me an email (contact link at the top of this page).

I recently completed a project called “Stories of Your Life”. It was a grueling, marathon project, but I learned a lot and am very proud of the results. As such, I wanted to do a little show and tell on the project, and show some screenshots of the finished product.

Handing off the final CD sure gave me a new respect for software developers. Rolling out web applications is such a forgiving process – you do testing up front, but if something goes wrong after roll-out, it is usually a fairly simple matter to correct it. Sending a CD for mass-duplication, and knowing that any problems are going to be nearly impossible to rectify is a stressful business. 🙂

Stories of Your Life is an application based around the national best-selling book Once Upon a Lifetime by Pat A. Williams. I worked directly with this lovely, vibrant woman in interpretting and enhancing her printed work for the digital medium. Briefly, it is a Windows application that guides you through recording the stories of your life with over 2000 questions in 15 categories and 78 subcategories. In addition to formatted text, you can associate photos, audio and video with your answers.

I believe it is quite unique as a retail product built with Flash, and with its amazing blend of “multimedia presentation” and “desktop application”.

The application was built using FlashMX, and ScreenWeaver. I was very happy with ScreenWeaver, with the exception of a major bug that causes a BSOD fatal exception when writing large files (as yet unfixed, but I worked around it by using a series of smaller appended writes instead). Read on for a short tour of the software.

Continue reading →

Need I say any more? j/k 😉

Quick disclaimer: There’s a good chance I’m wrong about some of how this all works, so please feel free to correct me, I do not want to spread incorrect information or FUD.

Forms in Flash are a little like the apple in the garden of Eden – tempting and nice to look at, but all hell breaks loose when you try to eat ’em. It doesn’t help that the whole time this little snake called Macromedia is whispering in your ear, telling you to take a big bite.

Adding Forms to Flash was a great idea – it provides a nice, structured development environment for state based applications, it makes implementing MVC clean and simple, and it makes the technology far more accessible to programmers familiar with environments like Visual Basic.

Unfortunately, the implementation is – hmm, how to put this politely – substantially sub-par.

Continue reading →

Christmas is around the corner, and its time to start looking up some killer swag. Last year I got a crap load of household stuff (I bought a loft 2 years ago, and everyone thinks I still need tea kettles and towels, blech), so my loving girlfriend decided that this year I should get some fun stuff. Here’s some of the toys she found waiting in cyber space (and don’t worry, there’s no hidden referral links) (or adult content, for that matter) :)…

Continue reading →

To begin the FLAws series, I’d like to shine some light on what looks to be a major Flash Player 7 bug. This issue has had Beau and I ripping our hair out for the past few weeks, as we have sought workarounds for it.
Description
In short, Flash Player 7 will sporadically fail to register Release events under high strain situations. This causes huge problems, as users must click buttons and components multiple times before they will register the click – talk about a usability nightmare.
Read on for a more in-depth description, and the workarounds that we found.
Continue reading →