Peter Elst

I unfortunately didn’t have the chance to do detailed reviews for each of the sessions I attended at MAX Barcelona (15 minute breaks between sessions just isn’t enough) but here is a list of the sessions I attended and a mini-review for each.

The Google Analytics Reporting Suite - Nico Lierman, Wim Vanhenden
Flash Lite 3 Development - Bill Perry
A Guide to Tamarin - Lee Thomason
Building AIR with AJAX and the Aptana IDE - Kevin Hoyt
The mobile ecosystem with FL3 on Nokia Platforms - Christian Buchbauer
Play with Pixels - Bitmap manipulation with Flash CS3 - Koen de Weggheleire
Working with Persistent Data in Adobe Integrated Runtime - Danny Dura
Creating new Flex Components - Marco Casario
Design Patterns in ActionScript 3.0 - Leo Schuman
Flash Player Internals - Lee Thomason

If you attended any of these sessions feel free to comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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What a way to start the week! The aggregators are flooded with all the exciting news, but I’ll just add a quick overview here:

Macromedia Labs goes live — a place where developers can get hold of alpha builds of software and see what technologies the engineering team is playing around with. It also has a wiki, an RSS feed and the latest docs on things like ActionScript 3.

Flex Framework 2, Flex Builder 2, Flex Charting components 2, Flash Player 8.5 public alpha versions are available for download.

Flash Player 8.5 is incredibly fast, Claus Wahlers ported the DENG CSS 3 parser to ActionScript 3 and 20kb CSS file parses 12,5 times faster than in Flash Player 8 (without using any additional optimization).

That kind of makes up for not being able to go to MAX — at least I’ll have some more time to experiment with the new goodies

Can’t believe I only heard about this recently, the amazing guys at Powerflasher.com are working on FDT, a Flash Development plugin for Eclipse that simple rocks! Looking at the demos they’ve got up it will include some of the following features:

- FlashANT integration
- Problems panel that seems to work as you type flagging up any lexical, syntactical and semantical errors
- Easy MTASC compiler setup and SWF viewer
- AS2.0 class wizard that easily creates your class (you can even have it implement an interface and automatically generate the required methods)
- Quickfix feature that can declare variables for you, create classes you references but don’t exist yet
- Organize imports can add import statements to your class or when you move classes to a different package will fix the reference throughout your project.

Be sure to check out the demo videos:
http://www.powerflasher.com/fdt/demos/

I’ve probably only seen the very basics of what this Eclipse plugin can do, can’t wait to see it released! It’ll without doubt be an absolute lifesaver for those of us doing AS2.0 development. Let’s see how Zorn will compare to this

I’ve recently given up on PrimalScript as my default AS editor, its been good while it lasted and its definitely a great tool for AS2.0 projects but over time some minor annoyances started to creep in. Particularly the difficulty in hooking it up to CVS or Subversion, lack of code folding and line wrapping really did my head in. Keith however blogged a little sneak-peek on PrimalScript 4.0 which looks very promising so I might well change my mind again later this summer.

In any case, after trying a few other obvious alternatives (SEPY, SciTE, etc.) I started using Eclipse again. Its been installed on my system for quite a while now for experimenting with MTASC integration but haven’t really used it for any actual Flash development until now. Gotta love it, what an incredible framework especially if you take the time to install some extensions.

With the announcement of Macromedia building its next generation Flex IDE code-named Zorn on Eclipse you really need to go check it out!