In one month FlashParade in Marseille will be starting off, and it looks to be a great conference in a beautiful location! I’ll be there, speaking on Object Oriented Programming for ActionScript 2.0 – which coincidentally is the topic of the chapter I contributed to the forthcoming “Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Demystified” from Macromedia Press.

In order to whet your taste for both of them, I’m going to be running an expos� on OOP in AS2.0 on my blog. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting serial content on the new OOP keywords and methodologies found in Flash MX 2004 and ActionScript 2.0. I’ll be starting a little later today with the class keyword, and posting new content at least every couple days.

It won’t be completely detailed – but you know where to go for that: the book, or the conference. 🙂

I’ll also point you to some good resources for learning general OOP as I go.

These two source code snippets are great for when you’re developing Flash content for delivery online, that will also have an offline component, or that you will be testing locally.
The first is a simple one liner that sets up a global _online property that indicates whether the swf is being accessed via a web-browser online. The second is a more complex bit of code that allows you to intelligently control caching for loaded assets in a swf (swfs, jpgs, xml files, etc).
If you have any questions on the code, please enter them in the comments.
Read on for the code…
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Some really smart dudes in Toronto are working to “drastically alter the digital landscape” by creating a “catalyst of community”. I’m not sure exactly what they’re up to, but I do know that with the these guys it will be very cool (and definitely involve some heavy drinking)!

Check it out for yourself, and sign up to stay informed: http://www.colab-collective.com/

Tonight, the Edmonton Flash User Group participated in Macromedia’s first worldwide user group event, and I must say, I was impressed.

Firstly, by the attendance. We had 78 people show up for the gathering, and it’s only been 2.5 months since we founded the group. It was a good crowd – friendly, interesting and diverse.

Secondly, by the presentation. It was delivered quite smoothly, and Breeze Live performed very well (once we did an emergency upgrade to the latest Flash plugin). My only real annoyance was that the chat field would lose focus every time there was a mode change.

A good time all round. I’ll have some photos up of the event on the eFug website sometime tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who showed up, Guru Digital Arts College for hosting the packed event, and Phil Chung and Michael Warf (my co-founders) for all the work they put into the event.

I plan to blog useful code snippets regularly. Just little bits of ActionScript that help me in my day to day coding.

To start, I want to share a little snippet that is possible the most useful 14 lines of code I ever wrote. It’s a simple addition to the XMLNode prototype that lets you index and reference a node’s childnodes based on any attribute or the nodeName. It will be less useful with AS2.0, due to the xPath implementation, but I expect it will still be faster, and will do the job in many situations.

I’m not sure I would ever have had the patience to write gModeler if it were not for this little gem.

Read on for the code…

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I’ve had a number of people wondering what the heck I’m up to. Why isn’t gModeler getting updated? Why isn’t FlashOS2 done? Why don’t you pay your bills? (just kidding on that one — usually 😉 The short answer is, I’m up to a bit of everything… read on, and I’ll try to explain.

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