by Grant Skinner

Upcoming Conferences You Should Check Out

Two of my favourite conferences are running events across the pond this year, and I’m totally stoked about it.

FitC Amsterdam

On Feb 22-24 FitC will be running a conference in Amsterdam. I spoke at Spark Europe a couple years ago, and I have to say that Amsterdam is an awesome city for a Flash conference. Pair that with FitC’s solid reputation to deliver a well-organized conference with a great vibe and a killer speaker line-up, and I think it will be an amazing event. Downing a magic muffin prior to some of the inspirational sessions (Josh Davis?) could be interesting too. FitC Amsterdam sold out last year, so you might want to grab tickets while you can.

Flash On The Beach Miami

I’ve been to Flash on the Beach in Brighton two years running now, and it just keeps getting better! This year, John (the organizer) is bringing FotB to North America with an event in Miami on April 6-8. This means you will get to experience all the awesomeness of FotB, and there will actually be a real beach! (sorry John, a bunch of pebbles on a cold, grey stretch of ocean doesn’t count as a beach for me) It’s hard to quantify, but there’s something special about FotB, my theory is that it’s a trickle down effect from John, whose boundless enthusiasm, good humor, and general niceness rub off on speakers and attendees alike. FotB also sells out every year, and “Double Early Bird Pricing” ends December 19th.

I’m going to be running a rewritten version of the “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know” talk that I did at FotB08, focused more on the technical specifics of architecture, optimization, and memory management. Basically distilling things I’ve been working out for myself over 10 years of working with Flash into a one hour session.

With the uncertain economy, now is a good time to upgrade your skills, and get in some networking (time and money permitting). Hope to see some of you there!

by Grant Skinner

Adobe Company Wide Layoffs, Pulls out of Macworld Expo

Breaking news: Adobe has announced company wide layoffs of about 600 full time positions, and has pulled out of Macworld Expo. Among the cuts, Mike Downey, who was a Flash evangelist and well known by the general community.

I know a lot of really great people at Adobe, and my thoughts are with them all. Hopefully everything works out for the best for everyone involved.

Hold on to your hats folks, it could be a bumpy ride.

News here:

TUAW

Mike Downey’s twitter

Adobe Provides Preliminary Q4 Fiscal 2008 Results

by Grant Skinner

Curly Braces: To Cuddle or Not?

Should you place curly braces on the same line as the statement (cuddle), or on the next line? It’s a debate that has raged for years, and is unlikely to be resolved until curly braces in code become obsolete. Despite that, I thought I would share my opinion on the topic.

First though, let’s look at both sides of the argument. I will try to represent this as fairly as possible, despite my own bias. I’ve numbered the arguments, so it’s easier to reference them in the comments.

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by Lanny McNie

GPSD’08 Results are in!

Another year is gone, and another gPumpkin contest has come to a close. Many a beer and chocolate was consumed, and overall it was a great break from our normal routine. Congratulations to Grant and Wes, whose pumpkin “The Horror of Corporate Conformity” took first place. Between Grant and Wes, one of them have been on the winning team each year. Conspiracy? Probably.

Highlights this year included:

  • A landslide victory by the “Horror of Corporate Conformity”, which sat at around triple the votes of the second place pumpkin
  • Carving with steak knives instead of the traditional tools, which have been lost since last year

  • The very first “dropped” pumpkin. It didn’t break, but it took a good dive from the table.
  • Phantom votes for a non-existent pumpkin, which showed up in the voting app. It turned out to be an old testing file

Overall it was great fun. We leave you with a shot of all the pumpkins together. See you all next year!

by Grant Skinner

gTween beta 3: AS3 Code Tweening Library

I’ve just wrapped up beta 3 of gTween. It’s been a busy few weeks, and is just getting busier with the Korean Game Developer’s Conference, and Adobe MAX around the corner, so it’s not quite as well tested as I’d like, but it seems to be working without problem.

The main feature additions are support for 3D rotation with smartRotation (always rotates in the shortest direction), a rewrite of custom progress points to make them more robust and reliable, the addition of a global defaultEase property, and the ability to globally control what properties will be rounded.

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by Grant Skinner

The Great Pumpkin Showdown, 2008

Keeping with our yearly tradition of squash mutilation here at gskinner.com, I’m happy to present this year’s Great Pumpkin Showdown.

We broke into teams of two, based on seniority, and hacked the crap out of a bunch of defenseless pumpkins while drinking beer, eating pizza, and gorging on candy. Also keeping with tradition, we made the most recent hires build out the pumpkin voting team.

This is our largest batch of jack’o’lanterns to date (five), and definitely our best voting app. Nice work freshmen!

Player 10 is required to view the app below.

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by Grant Skinner

Simple Flash Player 10 3D Demo w/ Source

Here’s a simple tech demo showing a 3D music visualizer using the flash player 10’s new 3D APIs, with a rotating sphere that transitions into a disc using GTween. Nothing too complex, but the result is kind of neat, and it is simple enough to serve as a quick entry into using the new APIs if you’re getting started. It also uses the new Vector type in player 10.

To me its cool that you can now whip out simple 3D content right in Flash in a matter of minutes, and then step up to the big guns with PaperVision 3D or Away 3D as necessary.

I’ll be sharing some of the other simple 3D experiments I’ve been working on over the coming weeks.

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by Grant Skinner

gProject and the Flash CS4 Project Panel

In May I blogged about Adobe acquiring gProject from us. At the time, I wasn’t allowed to talk about what it was going to be used for. Still, it probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone that the new Project Panel in Flash CS4 is based on gProject.

We did a lot of work with Adobe to rebuild gProject in Flex, removing some features (that are either too obscure or don’t have wide enough appeal), adding others, and doing an extensive clean up of the UI and code. We’re all very excited to see our baby grow up into such an important part of Flash authoring.

Some of the key features:

  • file system based file browsing (no more need to manually add your project files)

  • multi file compiling, just check the checkmark beside an FLA to add it to the list

  • class generation from templates, with the ability to specify templates per project

  • locations provide quick access to related files from your project

  • add file types to display in the panel, and open those files in their associated application (via right click menu). For example, you could add AI files and open them in Illustrator.

  • manage class and library paths on a per project basis

  • quick project feature makes it effortless to create a temporary project to manage files

We tried to create something that would have a lot of value for developers who do some or all of their coding in Flash, while not getting in the way of designers who just want a good panel for browsing their project files. Hopefully we succeeded.

Obviously there’s still a bunch of things we would love to add (things like a JSFL API, file rename / moving, file system update polling, external code editor support, and maybe version control integration spring to mind), but I believe this is a huge improvement to the previous project panel, and am excited to finally be able to talk about it openly. As with Badger, I think it’s a sign of our maturing ecosystem that you can build new tools for the tools, with the tools. We even used gProject to manage the project when building the new Project Panel.