August 9, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Session Info for Upcoming Conferences

On October 23 and 25th I will be speaking in Ottawa and Montreal respectively as part of the FlashInTheCan 4 city tour. Then, November 3-5 I will be in Barcelona to speak at the FlashEurope conference. Both of these conferences have a great looking roster of speakers (can’t wait to meet some of the European Flashers I’ve known online but never met, particularly), and should be hella fun.

I’m going to be doing the same talk for both – diverging a bit from my usual semi-dry topics (OOP, OOAD, development process, usability, etc), and doing something a little bit more creative. It should be a lot of fun! My session info follows:

Object Oriented Procrastination

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.

I hope to meet some of you there. Be sure to post in the comments if you’re going to be attending one of these, or if you have ideas for things to do/see in and around Barcelona.

I’m planning to get back to posting, with some new techniques we’ve discovered internally, and some more news on glic over the next week or so… things have just been super-busy! (which is good for business, but bad for blogging)

July 13, 2004 by Grant Skinner

FFNYC Session Notes

I have posted my slides for my FlashForward NYC 2004 session titled “The Essential Development Process: From Pitch to Final Product” online. You can find a link to them on my list of session notes here.

I’ll try to post a recap of the conference, along with some photos in the next few days.

July 12, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Announcement: Gskinner Lightweight Interface Components

I’m really happy to announce my latest internal project, named glic (previously Daedalus), or “gskinner lightweight interface components”. My company (gskinner.com) spends a lot of time building rich internet applications, and we grew really tired of working around v2 issues, and explaining major issues like file size and CPU usage to clients, so we finally decided to do something about it, and glic is the result.

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June 25, 2004 by Grant Skinner

MIA – Where the heck have I been?

Yikes, it’s been nearly a month since I last posted anything, and it’s not as though I haven’t had anything to post. In fact, the problem is more about having too much to post, and not enough time.

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June 3, 2004February 2, 2015 by Grant Skinner

Conference Session Notes

Here is a collection of some of the session notes and source files I have put together for various conferences (generally from newest to oldest). I will try to keep it up to date.

This list will have a permanent link on the right nav bar of my blog.

Newer talks will generally require the latest available Flash Player to view.

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June 2, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Experiment: Crystallization in AS2

I recently decided to see what would happen if I recreated my Flash 4 crystallization experiment using ActionScript 2.0. With the speed gains in Flash Player 7, and some pretty heavy algorithm optimizations, the results are pretty impressive, at least from a pure data handling perspective. Unfortunately, it still slows down on slower systems due to the heavy graphics requirements.

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June 1, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Back from Flashing London

I just got back from 11 days in London. I had an awesome time!

The 3rd run of my Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development workshop was a big success, with 9 very smart students (with some really great questions). It went really smoothly, and the feedback so far is excellent. A big thanks to all the attendees, Aral & Emilie (Bits & Pixels), Guy and everyone else who helped make it possible. I’ll post some photos and comments from the workshop in the near future.

I also did a talk on “Playing God: Simulating Nature in Flash” (or “FlashHubris 101”) at the London MMUG, alongside Mike Chambers who spoke about the future of Macromedia’s projects. You can check out some photos of the evening here, including a shot of my beautiful title screen. You can also check out a screen capture of one of the experiments I put together for the session here (zoom).

I also had a great time meeting new people and hanging out with Peter, Guy, Aral, Mike, and exploring London and area with my darling girlfriend.

May 13, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Flash RTE on next-gen portable game systems

I was just reading about the next generation portable game consoles coming out from Sony and Nintendo via a post on FreakSauce. These units will feature large color screens, 802.11 wireless networking (presumably with internet capabilities), and processing power to spare. The Nintendo even has a touch screen built in.

I sure hope Macromedia is considering deploying a Flash run time environment Flash for these system. There should be a large user base for both of these consoles and there are so many possibilites: occasionally connected apps; apps that communicate with other nearby consoles for community, collaboration or gaming; rich productivity and commerce apps; apps that use the network to synch data between your portable gaming system and your home computer. The idea seems really exciting to me, and I haven’t even had a chance to think them through yet!

Obviously though, this could all be muck, if there are hardware, orlicensing limitations on these systems that would preclude it.

Anyway, I need to get some sleep. Enough ranting.