Last year I released a first version of the Belgium zipcode components — I’ve made some improvements and have since ported it from Flash to Flex 2. As a little early Christmas present to my loyal blog groupies I thought I’d release the source code for this latest version.
Read more…
Here it finally is, despite having a bit of a cold, my first episode of Skip Intro — a bi-weekly podcast where I talk about Flash platform news and events.
Audio quality needs some improvement but please bear with me for now.
Happy holidays everyone!
… I certainly believe so, if I didn’t see it posted on John Nack’s blog I honestly wouldn’t have believed this was for real.
I won’t profess to be the worlds greatest designer but the whole look and feel doesn’t work for me at all. Particularly the two-letter icons just look horrible. Not sure if its the typography, the uppercase/lowercase combination or something else.
[update] If you own a Wii and read my blog, feel free to add me as a friend – here is my ID: 2344 1118 2775 4961
It took me a while to get hold of one (narrowly missed getting my hands on a Wii on its launch day) but after placing a couple of calls today managed to get hold of my brand new toy.
What can you say — the Nintendo Wii rocks! Took me under half an hour to set up and do a system update over the wireless network. Wii Sports that comes with the console is very addictive but you sure feel the workout 
I had a great time doing an introduction seminar on Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications for Adobe this morning. We covered the basics of Flex Builder, states and effects, data binding, E4X, HTTPService and WebService functionality.
To wrap things up we then built a little Amazon search application from scratch, similar to the 15-minute Flickr demo most of you will probably have seen.
I attended the university session on Flex 2 RIA’s with James Ward and Christoph Rooms at JavaPolis, Antwerp today and have to say it was an absolute blast!
For a moment it felt as if I landed in a parallel universe, wandering through the exhibition area with my rather limited Java skills it almost seemed like I was a Microsoft employee at the MacWorld conference trying to blend into the crowd by sporting the swag and nodding confidently at all the obscure acronyms thrown at me. One minute longer and I’d been offered a job as a lead Java developer at Oracle… well not quite
Christoph and James did a great job introducing Flex 2 concepts and I particularly liked the focus on Flex Data Services and the ease with which you hook up Java back-ends to the engaging Flex interfaces we all know and love. They even went into Apollo and the Flex-AJAX Bridge, which went down a treat.
But then it hit me… the Flash platform has grown up, we’re finally there! Watching Java developers eagerly grabbing for Flex and AS3 API posters, the eagle has landed – world domination is within hands reach!
In some strange way seeing the reaction of mainstream developers validates the work Macromedia and Adobe have been doing for years now. User experience meets enterprise development and we, both as Flash platform developers as end-users, can only profit from this revolution.
woohoo, my recording gear finally arrived… got myself a nice little setup with a Samson C01U condensor mic; shockmount, pop filter and table stand. Its not the most advanced piece of equipment but price/quality wise this is a pretty sweet deal, especially if the main purpose is simple voice recording — and the sound quality is actually much better than I had anticipated.
I’m aiming to get a first podcast out before the holidays, if you’ve got any questions about Flash/Flex or multimedia in general or want to share your view on whats happening in the community drop me a line (or even better, whip up an audio comment ) and I’ll more than likely include it in one of the upcoming episodes.
Stay tuned for more news on this!
I got back from Flash on the Beach a couple of hours ago and have been catching up on my blogging. You can read my earlier posts to get some feedback on the sessions I’ve seen in the last few days but this certainly deserves a post on its own.
John Davey… what can you say, the guy is brilliant! I’m not sure how he and his team have pulled it off but I’m absolutely astounded. The way this conference was organized you’d think they’ve been doing it for years. From conference registration, technical rehearsals, the exhibition area, swag for the attendees, dealing with the speakers and the evening parties it all went flawless!
Its somewhat of a tradition to say how much you enjoyed a conference coming back home but I can honestly say this is the very best Flash event I’ve ever attended (and I’ve seen a fair few all over the globe by now).
If you only have a budget to attend one conference a year, wherever you are located — make sure its Flash on the Beach next time round!
Got in in time for the first session of the day, seeing Geoff Stearns (of SWFObject fame) talk about best practices for Flash in a Web 2.0 world. Some really good info on site indexing, navigation and deep-linking support that I’ll definitely be using on future projects.
Next up Niqui Merret talking about accessibility in Flash, a subject I’ve only encountered when working my way through getting some Flash apps section 508 compliant for US-based clients (which I can tell you is not an easy task). I particularly liked this session for her pragmatic approach to the challenge of accessibiliity and making it broader than just something to consider for visually and hearing impaired users. Specifically accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities will no doubt be something we’ll hear more about with people starting to explore this area.
Had a nice lunch with Martin Smestad Hansen before going to see Folkert Gortert, I was presenting next in this hall and truth be told other than that I probably wouldn’t have chosen it over Hos Gifford’s talk but it was actually really nice. Folkert presented some of his work and it sure sparked my creativity, pleased I got at least one of these sessions in at the conference over just seeing all technical talks.
My session on JavaScript Flash was fun to do, I’ve done similar ones a few times now and its a bit of a difficult topic to present on as its actually quite extensive and most examples are written for very specific projects. I opted for deconstructing a bunch of small examples of tools, commands, windowSWF panels (and explain why I hate behaviors and timeline effects). The talk seems to have gone down quite well, got some interesting questions and Friends of ED was kind enough to have me give away a copy of “Extending Flash MX 2004″, a must-have reference guide for doing anything with the JSAPI in the authoring environment.
Final session I went to see was Mario Klingemann’s — simply astounding, I continue to be amazed at the stuff he comes out with, from a flickr-based clock mashup, through a ‘pizza’ record player to a VJ tool hooking up midi through processing to a Flash front-end. Couldn’t have chosen a better talk to end the conference with.
Next up was the conference wrap-up with a near endless stream of give-aways, tried to make a dash to the podium to grab some goodies but John got the better of me
We went out for some dinner with the speakers at Wagamama’s and had another party planned for that night, only hit the sack around 5am that night after some serious trouble-making at the hotel bar with the rest of the speakers. Its been brilliant seeing so many familiar faces and finally meeting people you’ve been following online for years. See you all at the next one!
Started out today with an *excellent* session by Mike Jones on Flex components, some great in depth tips and tricks that I’ll be using day in day out.
Next I went to see Joey Lott’s session on AS3 Design Patterns, particularly liked his undo/redo commands implementation and the Memento pattern which I hadn’t looked at before.
Over lunch I went to see a Quark presentation on their new Interactive Designer software. It looked like a nice tool for non-technical users and see the advantage of having the ability to go both to print and web from the same file. From a first quick look at the tool I do have some doubts about the usefulness and flexibility of their scripting engine and how well compression/file size turns out exporting from large, high-resolution documents prepared for print.
First session after lunch was Rich Shupe who did some good examples about the usefulness of bitmap caching, filters and blend modes. Had actually expected it to go a little more into bitmap manipulation and some of the more advanced features — looking back might have gone to Jeremy Keith’s instead, but a good refresher nonetheless.
Next up Keith Peters on animation with AS3, he started out with a really entertaining look at the history of Flash and even found some flyer that mentioned as a tag line something to the effect of “stunning animation, no pesky coding”. Loved the irony to see this a decade later at a talk on AS3
Final session of the day for me was Rich Legget’s, I’ve been meaning to get into Flash Lite development for quite a while. The lack of actual commercial projects coming up for it with me has prevented me to go out and buy an Flash Lite 2 (or 2.1 now) enabled device. Suppose I could use the device emulator, but there’s nothing like seeing the real thing. The walkthrough he did of two Flash Lite games were really very cool, can’t wait to start doing it myself.
Didn’t make it too late a night at the party being my usual professional self with my talk scheduled the next day 
Spent some good time doing the finishing touches to my presentation and scripted a few more commands and WindowSWF panels to demo.
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