March 17, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Finalist for Best Canadian Flash Developer!

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Wow, this is awesome! I was just directed to the Flash In The Can 2004 Awards Finalists page, and am really excited to see that I’m one of the three finalist for Best Canadian Flash Developer. I’m up against two other great developers: John Iocaviello (developer of Fresh Media Interactive, Gum Blondes, etc) and someone (Jeff Vermeersch, perhaps?) from Unplugged Studio. I’m thrilled, eh! 🙂

Click on over, take a look at the great work vying for the can openers this year, and vote for your favourite site.

FitC is going to be a great conference, so be sure to check out the conference site. Also, a quick reminder that I am going to be teaching an intensive workshop on “Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development” immediately before the conference that we still have a few seats left for.

March 17, 2004 by Grant Skinner

EULA Update Discussion

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Following my previous post on the Flash MX 2004 EULA update, there was some interesting discussion in the comments about the changes, which I thought was worth moving into a proper post, because the content seems valuable. I’ll try not to misrepresent anyone with my inexpert editing.

If you have your own thoughts and ideas about this issue, please post them in the comments at the end.

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March 16, 2004 by Grant Skinner

The ultimate AS2 LoadVars solution.

Having extended XML into an ActionScript 2.0 friendly class (see: The ultimate AS2 XML solution!), I didn’t feel it was appropriate to neglect poor old LoadVars. Sure LoadVars is getting a little old and rusty, but its still useful at times, and it sure would be nice to have it in an AS2 friendly format.

So I toiled away, and the end result is LoadVars2, which supports EventDispatcher events, and configurable timeout periods….
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March 11, 2004 by Grant Skinner

EULA update: Close, but no cigar

Macromedia quietly released a supplemental EULA tonight (more info), to address some of the concerns I and other members of the Flash community have previously expressed.

If I’m going to carry the burden of being the #1 Flash Bitch, I may as well earn the title. So here’s my take on the new EULA…

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March 5, 2004 by Grant Skinner

FlashForward update

I’ll post a proper blog entry on this when I get back from San Francisco, but I wanted to provide a link to the slides from my short introductory talk to my Ask The Experts session on the 5 coolest features of ActionScript 2.0, and what they mean to developers.

Also, for those who attended the session, and are looking for more information on my Flash Development workshop, you can find it here, here and here.

February 27, 2004 by Grant Skinner

The ultimate AS2 XML solution!

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.
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February 26, 2004 by Grant Skinner

XML vs. AS2 – scoping callbacks

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.

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February 24, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Aww… I’m blushing.

Flash

Just ran into this lovely commentary on my Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development workshop from one of my students (I didn’t even have to pay her for it ). I’m very happy it was so well received, and am really looking forwards to instructing it in Toronto.

FYI – there’s just a few days remaining before the early-bird pricing on the Toronto workshop ends (the price increases on the 1st), so if you’re interested in it, now’s the time to check it out.

While I’m busy with shameless plugs, here’s another student comment:

“Thanks Grant for the excellent instruction, I came into this course

hoping to get up to date on Actionscript 2 and A solid understanding of

OOP, ( And hopefully learn a couple of your amazing Flash tricks ), and

you delivered as promised. I can confidently say I am now a better

coder all-around because of your course.”

D. Yuhar – Multimedia Programmer

Learning Technologies Branch

Government of Alberta

And I promise some real content here soon. 🙂