Peter Elst

One of the downsides of being a freelancer is that you generally don’t have a lot of opportunity to switch off and take a break. Evenings, nights and weekends are buffer time for projects that are running late and the concept of a holiday is usually speaking at a conference.

The rare moments you do have some time you want to make sure your blog doesn’t gather too much dust, or heaven forbid record a podcast episode (not sure when I’ll get round to that again)

I’ve been living the geek lifestyle for a good three years now and its slowly taking its toll on my sanity. It have without a doubt been some very exciting times, making money doing what you love to do and seeing more of the world than I could’ve ever imagined (Africa, South-America and Antarctica are still left on my todo list though).

That said, I’m taking some time off this summer — heading to my home away from home India for a good few weeks — without a laptop and with very limited access to the internet. Lets hope I can keep the technology withdrawal symptoms under control. I’ll be having a little think about how to move forward with the business, most likely I’ll be focusing more on consultancy and training for Flex and AIR.

Looks like you guys will be getting your hands on the OOAS3 book before I do, so enjoy the read and be kind in your reviews

Never fear, I will be back and have some great events to look forward to including Flashforward Boston and the Adobe MAX conference.

General

Having had Ralph over to our user group last Thursday was a real inspiration to get experimenting with Papervision3D again. Last night I decided to try out John Grdn’s new PV3D components for the Flash IDE — I was stunned.

Its been ages since I last played around with the API but its ridiculously quick and easy to get a Collada model loaded in and apply your custom materials. Just a couple of lines of code and you get it animating. Thought I’d share my little experiment here, if you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare during a coffee break be sure to give it a try.

Read more…

Flash, Flex, Open Source

I’m excited to see the Adobe Developer Center has put up the “Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript 3.0” article I wrote for them a little while back.

The article runs through the basics of inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism and is aimed at those of you that haven’t made the step to class-based development yet. While the examples use Flash as an authoring environment, these concepts can just as easily be used when doing doing development in Flex Builder.

If you enjoyed the read and want a more indepth look at OOP with ActionScript 3.0, there’s the book coming out this summer that should help you along.

Its always great working with the developer center team so thanks to Stefan, George et al. for their hard work editing the article and putting up with me

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/oop_as3.html

Flash, Publications