Peter Elst

Every time a year draws to a close you start thinking about what defining events happened and what might be in store for the coming year. For me one of the most intriguing things I noticed is not so much the emergence of web 2.0 technologies but the increasing push towards collaborative and personal environments.

I remember the days when the defining factor of browsing the internet was anonimity and a wealth information, slowly but surely this moved on to a stage where all people wanted was “web presence” and networking which gave rise to online communities which to a certain extend are still popular today.

What is noticable however that people don’t generally commit themselves to a specific community or set of communities, information is everywhere and with the increasing ease of syndicating it people themselves start to take on the role of what community sites used to do and have become hubs filtering out data that is useful to them. This is also an evolution you see in the blogosphere, moving from personal diaries to an aggregator role. You could call this process the decentralization of information filtering.

Now this is where it gets interesting, what used to be simply web presence has now become an actual online persona which reflects nearly every aspect in the real world. Its difficult to even talk about real world or offline existence because the line is blurring to such an extent that online presence is becoming nothing less than an extension to your daily activities.

Here the social aspect comes into play, looking back at communities you now get more organicly formed groups of people with similar interests that interact but do so as separate entities, somewhat along the lines of creating a neural network. I believe we’re only seeing the very beginnings of this coming into play but it seems to have potential to grow into a very significant phenomena.

My prediction for 2006 is that the we’ll see the social aspect of the web take an increasingly important role and see new forms of it implemented in numerous web and desktop applications. The technology is there to be used and with people more than ever before using the internet as their means of interaction with the outside world this is something that will also become an essential part to the online experience.

Igor from play.ground has just blogged about his improved doLater method for postponing ActionScript calls. Its a very useful function similar to setTimeout in Flash 8, be it frame based rather than using a timed interval.

http://play.ground.gr/?p=82

As soon as I have some time to spare I’ll make one that supports both frame and time based intervals, shouldn’t be too hard to do. Would also be nice to have the doLater interval be relative to a specific event but will have to give that some more thought.

These are two great new features in Flash 8, but they might cause you to pull your hair out if you try to use them in a class and get nothing but compiler errors. There are a couple of ways around these compiler errors:

One way is to use array notation to access them, i.e. this["setTimeout"] and myXML["idMap"] (the setTimeout method could also be accessed via the global scope: _global.setTimeout).

Another approach is adding definitions for them in the intrinsic classes of Flash 8. You can do so as follows:

toplevel.as (C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Classes\)

intrinsic function setTimeout():Number

XML.as (C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Classes\FP8\)

var idMap:Object;

I’d personally recommend simply using array notation to avoid any compiler issues when you share your code with others who might not have made the necessary changes to the intrinsic classes.

Not sure why this is the case, whether it is simply an oversight of adding these to the intrinsic classes for Flash 8 or there is a larger issue at play – but this workaround is good to know nonetheless.

Over the last few month I’ve been working on a set of components to help with creating and validating forms in Flash — you’ll hear more about those some time early 2006.

Before that component set gets released I thought I’d go public with something that has a rather smaller target audience, a Belgian zipcode lookup component. What the component allows you to do is search for Belgian cities by zipcode, or zipcode by city. You can also have it return a full list of all Belgian cities or zipcodes making it very useful for your Flash forms and applications.

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XML is one of those technologies you take for granted as a Flash developer and probably use practically every single day without giving it a second thought. That said I was interested to see if “Foundation XML for Flash” would be my cup of tea and go beyond the typical introduction to the XML object in Flash.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised, the book offers a whole lot of information you seldom see covered in books on XML and Flash including XSLT, DTD’s, namespaces etc. One of the major strengths of this publication is the chapters where Flash integration with XML files taken from Word, Excel and Access are discussed. Its something I hadn’t really thought of before and opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Flash applications interfacing with documents, spreadsheets and databases and definitely an approach I’d like to try with my install of OpenOffice.

One thing I didn’t see covered was the idMap property of the XML Object that was introduced for Flash Player 8 but other than that, this book is a must-have reference guide to Flash and XML, highly recommended!

I didn’t particularly know what to expect on week one after the Macromedia acquisition, but as far as I’ve seen everything is moving relatively smoothly.

Apart from a few minor communication hiccups early in the week and some concerns from the developer community about Adobe’s policy on the availability of SDK’s etc. the general consensus with most people I talked to seems to shift from “let’s wait and see” to “positive signs”.

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I’ve been invited to speak at the webDU conference in Sydney on March 2-3 2006 where I’ll be doing a session on JSFL entitled “Scripting your tools of the trade” and showing off some of my latest experiments.

Really looking forward to the conference and my first trip down under!

http://www.webdu.com.au/

	We all knew this moment was coming for a while now but still kind of sad to say goodbye to a friend. Thanks Macromedia, its been a swell 5030 days!

Guess I’ll now have to get used to calling myself a Team Adobe volunteer for Flash, certified Adobe professional and Adobe usergroup manager. That is, if those programs will continue to exist as we now them today. We should know pretty soon now the combined company can start releasing information about its future plans after the acquisition.

The mothership has been entered, all hail our new benevolent overlords!

http://www.adobe.com

[update] the Macromedia.com website has been updated with the Adobe logo and there is some more information up about the acquisition:

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/…