Archive

Archive for the ‘Flash’ Category

FlashCamp San Francisco video

June 22nd, 2009

Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:

 
These are some really good in depth presentations that I can highly recommend you check out!
 

AIR, Events, Flash, Flash Builder, Flex, Video

Google updates Flash content indexing

June 19th, 2009

It seems Google did an update to how it indexes Flash content yesterday. Some of you might have already heard about the headless Flash Player aka “Ichabod” that Google and Yahoo got from Adobe — it seems it is now being put to better use.

Google has been indexing Flash content for years, basically extracting any static text that might be embedded in there. If you do a search with the filetype:swf flag you’ll see what that turns up.

Now with this new headless Flash Player, rather than trying to extract static data from the SWF file, it runs it over a command-line (non-visually) and gets back information about the contents of your Flash file, it will simulate button clicks etc. and capture the text results for indexing.

The important update now is that Google will also follow external resources, so for example XML files or other data that gets loaded in and not index it as a separate URL (as before) but in context to your Flash content. If you want to avoid your SWF files from getting crawled you can simply include them in a robots.txt directive like any other content.

 
More information here
 

Flash, Flex

Creative Programming in ActionScript 3.0

May 18th, 2009

I just finished my “Creative Programming in ActionScript 3.0″ session at day 1 of Multi-Mania 2009. Really enjoyed doing this new presentation though from the looks of it seemed I had more of a designer audience — so might have been a little code heavy.

As promised here are my slides, along with the example source files for download.


 

Events, Flash, Flex

Flex Builder gets rebranded to Flash Builder

May 17th, 2009

Something had to be done about confusing Flash Platform product names and if you paid close attention you could see this one coming for a while now. From the upcoming release onwards Flex Builder will be known as Flash Builder.

I initially had some reservations about this but it does go a long way in making the name more accurately describe what the tool does. Flex Builder is more than a development environment for Flex framework based applications. Myself and I’m sure many others in fact use it primarily for creating pure ActionScript 3.0 projects.

The Flex name will still be used but now exclusively to refer to the framework. If you call yourself a Flex developer and code using the Flex framework that is still a perfectly valid job title. This seemed to be a particular sore spot for some people, but I don’t get their argument — after all, you don’t call yourself a Dreamweaver or Visual Studio developer when talking about HTML or C#. Surely your job title describes the technologies rather than the specific tools you use.

If you still have your doubts, Josh Tynjala posted some very insightful comments on Lee Brimelow’s blog post that I can highly recommend reading.

One point I do feel strongly about: Flash Builder vs Flash Professional naming. The epithet “Professional” doesn’t cover what the Flash authoring environment really is. With the new name changes it comes across as though Flash Builder is a basic tool and Flash Professional an extended version of that.

I’d recommend going one step further and rebranding Flash Professional to something like Flash Designer and get it back on track to being primarily a tool for animation and interface design.
 

Flash, Flex

Heading to FFK09 – Cologne

April 23rd, 2009

FFK09

For a moment it looked as though I was going to miss out on this years FFK in Cologne — the largest German speaking conference covering web products and technologies organized by Marc Thiele and Sascha Wolter of Flashforum.de. This is already their 9th edition and not surprisingly it has completely sold out!

At the last minute I managed to secure a spot (thanks to Marc) in the “Discover the third dimension” workshop on Away3D that Jens Brynildsen is teaching on Monday. I’ve already experimented with Papervision3D quite a bit but was eager to look into what Away3D has to offer so this is the perfect opportunity.

I’ll be sure to blog about to workshop and perhaps share some experiments after I’ve familiarized myself with the code.
 
Ganz toll! ;)

 

AIR, Events, Flash, Flex

Flash at the Lake – Zurich, Switzerland

April 21st, 2009

Flash at the lake - Swiss Flash User Group Conference.Flash at the Lake is a two day conference organized by the SFUG (Switzerland Flash User Group) taking place at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich, right by the lake side.

Confirmed speakers include: Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, James Ward and many more.

I’ll be doing a new presentation on using SQLite in Adobe AIR hopefully introducing the persistence framework I’ve been working on for a while now.
 
Tickets are for sale now at very reasonable prices: two days of sessions and workshops including lunch will cost you 205 CHF or 135 Euro.
 
www.flashatthelake.ch

 

AIR, Events, Flash, Flex

Flash Platform Round Table Discussion

April 1st, 2009

What do you get when you put Stefan Richter, Mike Jones, Dave Williamson, James Whittaker, Bola Roibi and Andrew Shorten in the same room?

An interesting discussion on the power of the Flash community and some of the new challenges the Flash Platform faces, that’s what!

 

(via Serge Jespers)
 

AIR, Flash, Flash Lite, Flex, Video

Joshua Davis at TOCA ME 09

March 23rd, 2009

I must have seen Joshua Davis present at least half a dozen times over the last few years but there’s something about his work that keeps inspiring — pushing Flash beyond its limitations to create some beautiful artwork. Definitely one to watch!


 

Events, Flash, Video

Flex, ActionScript and AIR Training

March 10th, 2009
Comments Off

I’m happy to announce a new set of intensive one-day courses on Flex, ActionScript and AIR that I’ll soon start delivering at Skills Matter in London. During that day you’ll get a thorough overview of the technology and some good hands-on experience building various real world examples.

Here are the next few teach dates you can register for:

30-03-09 Introduction to Adobe Flex
06-04-09 Adobe Flex for Flash Developers
14-04-09 Beginning Adobe AIR
11-05-09 Introduction to Adobe Flex

More information here: http://skillsmatter.com/go/flex-flash

 
If you’ve got any questions about these courses, feel free to get in touch!
 

AIR, Flash, Flex

Seb and his magic particles

February 3rd, 2009

I came across another great presentation by Seb Lee-Delisle that you’ll want to see — he talks about augmented reality and working with the FLARToolkit, some incredibly cool and fun stuff to try with Flash.

Well worth 15 minutes of your time to sit back and get inspired!
 


 

Flash, Video

"Schöne Harz Ferienwohnung im Herzen von Deutschland. Weitere Ferienwohnungen im Harz finden Sie auf der angegebenen Urlaubsseite.
Falls Sie einen Partner für erfolgreiche Suchmaschinenoptimierung suchen, sind Sie bei Bullz-Eye an der richtigen Adresse."