Peter Elst

If you’re into JSFL you’ll no doubt know about “Extending Flash MX 2004” by Keith Peters and Todd Yard which is essentially the bible on Flash extensibility (though I have to admit there is little competition).

After reading Keith is letting the accompanying domain FlashExtensibility.com go, I got in touch and he graciously transferred the domain to me. Pretty cool, looking forward to building it up to a nice little resource on extending the Flash IDE!

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I’m very happy to announce “Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8” is finally done and going to the printers. This was definitely one of the biggest book projects I’ve worked on and must say it turned out great. With the help of contributing authors Todd Yard and Sas Jacobs (and the original work of William Drol) we covered tons of information you rarely find in ActionScript books.

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I’ve got a free article up on DMXzone.com that shows you the basics of using an XML file to configure your Flash applications.

The idea behind it is that you can use an external XML file to override default variables that are hardcoded into the FLA. If the variable isn’t defined inside the XML the Flash application just falls back on the default values.

Its very useful to have something like this in place for your applications as it allows you to make quick changes without having to recompile anything

Interested? Go check out the site and feel free to leave me some feedback!

http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=11482

I’ve found Firefox has one of the best popup killers around, perhaps a little too good in fact. Since the 1.5 release, getURL statements that launch a page in a new window from Flash are also blocked.

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Just got back from the Flash Thriller Night event (yes it’s Friday the 13th)– featuring sessions by Belgians best and bravest Serge Jespers and Christophe Herreman talking respectively about “Flash 8 design features” and “AS3 and Flash Player 8.5″.

Must say it was great to see, even though they both barely had half an hour to present they managed to get me excited about a lot of features I only realized later I was already using

Presentations were followed by a private screening of the brilliant “Corps Bride” by Tim Burton (with an equally brilliant website, mind you), an open bar and a brisk stroll to a local pita bar. This sure sets a great trend for a first Adobe event, thanks to Distrilogie and Multimediacollege for organizing!

There’s been a lot of hype around the support for event bubbling in AS3 recently, and after Ralf Bokelberg posted an ingenious method to get it to work with AS2.0 thought I’d look at it more closely and post an example.

First of all, what exactly is event bubbling? Well the concept is relatively easy, an event dispatched from a nested view ‘bubbles’ up the chain to its parent views so they can listen to and act upon that event. Without event bubbling the parent views need a reference to the nested view to listen to subscribe to the events.

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For me 2005 has been a year of change, too many late nights and stressful deadlines but also one of great opportunities and finally meeting up with some long-time friends and acquaintances from the Flash community. The deadlines and late nights probably won’t change any time soon but with some exciting things already planned, looking forward to what else the new year will have to offer.

As for the compulsory list of my New Year’s resolutions:

• - be creative
• - spend some more time offline
• - embrace my geekiness
• - learn Ruby on Rails
• - get my corporate site finished

Wishing everyone all the best for 2006, and let’s hope for a year with some more peace, happiness, understanding and Flash!