Peter Elst

Hej Danmark, vi ses snart!

When planning my schedule for 2009 got some good news from Skills Matter, my training partner in the UK, we’ll be taking the “Core ActionScript: Object-Oriented ActionScript in Practice” course to Århus, Denmark.

If you’re not already familiar with this particular course, its a two-day introduction to Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 with a strong focus on Flex. You’ll learn about concepts like classes, inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism but more importantly learn how to implement it in real-world projects.

Hope to see you there!

 
More information here: http://skillsmatter.com/go/ajax-ria
 

Training

“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life”

- Nelson Mandela

 
Today is Blog Action Day — thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue - poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!

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General

I was happy to hear the Kuneri SWFPack beta has been released to the public today, a web-based tool that allows you to very easily package up Flash Lite content to a SIS (NFL, CAB and DRM support is planned).

All basic Flash Lite packaging features are free of charge, they do plan on adding some extra commerical options later on. SWFPack allows you to generate signed or unsigned SIS files, you just upload a SWF or ZIP file (for projects that include multiple files and folders) and press Done.

I’ll definitely be giving this tool at try really soon, packaging has always been one of the major obstacles holding me back from doing more Flash Lite authoring.

www.swfpack.com
 

Flash Lite

Some of you might already be familiar with a new site called ActionScriptHero.org, set up by Pablo Parrado.

The idea behind this community portal is to explore the social aspect of the Flash community, find out what inspires people and how they see the Flash Platform evolving. I’ve already been helping Pablo out by doing some interviews with various well known community members and we are now looking at taking things further.

I’m happy to announce I’ve recently been invited to join the editorial team for the site and together we’ll start covering various Flash conferences and events world wide. While we will obviously report on any interesting announcements coming out of Adobe, particularly anything to do with the Flash Platform, our main focus will be looking at news from a community angle and gather your perspective on the technology as it evolves.

Exciting times ahead, I’ll be reporting on the first edition of “The ActionScript Conference” in Singapore next week and a little later this year will also be doing coverage from Adobe MAX Europe in Milan.

www.actionscripthero.org
 

Events

I just found this great video on the future of programming languages by Anders Hejlsberg, who was the lead architect of the C# programming language. Its definitely an interesting presentation to watch to get a perspective on where things are heading. (via Sean “the Flex Guy” Moore)

Video

I don’t generally blog politics and this is going to be the one and only time I’ll bring up this years US Presidential election.

While the campaign so far has arguably resulted in some of the best political satire out there, the world is facing some serious challenges and whether we like it or not, the US plays and will continue to play a substantial role in getting this resolved.

Some people are frustrated to see how in Europe and other parts of the world the public consensus seems to lean heavily towards one candidate. That may well be true, and that bias could be explained in part by overcompensation because of our need for change and inability to make a difference through voting.

Those of you in the US can make that difference, I’m not going to ask you to vote for one candidate over the other but please do your research and most importantly vote. We are counting on you to turn the page on the last eight years.
 

General

When you go to conferences as much as I do and meet up with old friends and acquaintances, the number one question is: “So, Peter what have you been up to?”. I realized that, unless you follow me on twitter and actually read the dozens of messages I post there every week, fairly few people have a clue what I’ve been doing these last few months.

Well here goes, apart from the Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 courses I teach in Belgium and the UK, I spend a good bit of time tech reviewing several books. Two great titles that are coming out soon are AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of ED) and the Adobe AIR Cookbook (O’Reilly).

I’m also co-authoring a couple of books, one that has already been announced is AdvancED AIR Applications (Friends of ED).

Turns out I’ve so far attended 10 events and conferences this year, presented a total 12 sessions and have enjoyed every minute! That said I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep things going at that rate.

While I’d love to be in the position to speak at all conferences that would like to have me over, unless my basic travel and accommodation expenses can be covered (which thankfully and increasing number of conferences are able to do), I’m going to have to become very selective in what I take on. I’d prefer to spend my personal travel budget on community events that genuinely have limited resources or are just starting out. That’s not a dig at Adobe MAX by the way, there are different reasons why I won’t be speaking there this year.

The ActionScript Conference in Singapore is going to be my last conference speaking engagement of the year and have not confirmed anything for 2009 as of yet.

We’ll see how things go, after Singapore I’m heading to India for a couple of weeks and will get back to business again by the end of November.
 

AIR, Events, Flex, General, Publications, Training, Twitter

Thanks to Zohar Babin for pointing me to some further information about the FlaCC project on the LLVM.org website. Scott Petersen gave a talk on August 1st at the Apple Campus for the “2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting“.

The title of his session was “Flash C Compiler: Compiling C code to the Adobe Flash Virtual Machine” with the following session description:

FlaCC is a research project that compiles C code to ActionScript using llvm-gcc with a custom flash code generator. This enables almost arbitrary C and C++ code to be executed safely and efficiently within a Flash container on web pages. This talk describes the implementation of the system and shows several compelling examples that use it to run other language and CPU interpreters within Flash as well as run existing large programs within C. The demos are also extremely impressive

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AIR, Flash, Flex

I’ve been doubting whether or not I should blog about this, seeing controversy seemed to me what he was after, and this post would only be adding to that.

Jonathan Harris’ session at Flash on the Beach blew me away with some of the most inspirational art projects I’ve seen to date, I was genuinely moved by the work he presented. At the same time this talk left me incredibly frustrated after hearing his perception of the Flash community and a message that seemed devoid of any sense of reality.

He started off by saying he was going to present a different session than was previously announced and he had “something important he wanted to say to the Flash community for a long time now…”. That line came back at regular intervals during his talk, seemingly building up to his big message. It almost felt to me as if he was after a “Michael Moore addressing the Republican National Convention” moment.

Photo taken by schobiwan
 
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Events, Rants

If you paid close attention during some of the Adobe sessions at Flash on the Beach you’ll have heard about a project called FlaCC, basically a way to compile C and C++ libraries to ActionScript bytecode.

I haven’t seen a whole lot of people talking about it as of yet even though - if this works out - it is in my opinion one of the most exciting developments in the last few years!

From what I can tell this project goes back to what we saw presented by Scott Petersen during the sneak peek sessions at MAX Chicago 2007, the most impressive of his demo’s was without a doubt running a cross-compiled version of Quake in the Flash Player (or an AIR app as it turns out).

Here’s the video I recorded back then:

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AIR, Events, Flash, Flex, Video