Peter Elst

Some exciting news today with Adobe partnering up with companies across the board like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, ARM, Intel, NBC, MTV, BBC, etc. for an initiative they call the Open Screen Project.

What the Open Screen Project attempts to address is getting a consistent runtime not just on the desktop but across to mobile and devices. Adobe has a clear solution for web with the ubiquitousness of the Flash Player, Flash Lite is getting traction with over 500 million copies shipped with mobile phones so far and AIR is bringing RIA’s to the desktop.

When I initially heard about the project I was a bit skeptical thinking it was more of a marketing announcement than anything else, but there are a few important points to consider and I’ll walk you through them.

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I traveled to London yesterday to do an “In-the-Brain” session on ActionScript 3.0 with the wonderful people at SkillsMatter.

Had a nice group of enthusiastic people turn up, gave away a few copies of my “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0” book and went out to the pub afterwards. This session was a little teaser for the “Core ActionScript: Object Oriented ActionScript in Practice” course that I’ll be teaching with them starting in April.

Thought I’d share the slides for those of you that weren’t able to attend. Nothing fancy but always enjoy looking back at the Flash authoring environment throughout the years. We’ve come a long way!

I’m really looking forward to my In-the-Brain session at SkillsMatter in London next Wednesday evening, February 13th.

I’ll be covering the basics of ActionScript 3.0, new features of the language and several examples of inspirational projects (mostly from the vibrant open source Flash community) that show the power of the new virtual machine that was introduced with Flash Player 9.

If you’re in the area and want to attend this free event, just register on their website.

Starting in a April I’ll also be teaching the 2-day “Core ActionScript: Object Oriented ActionScript in Practice” course — the first few dates have been announced on the SkillsMatter website. Further dates for my “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″ course in the Benelux will be coming soon.

I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

FITC is coming to Amsterdam next month and am very happy to be speaking there along with lots of fantastic international speakers, friends and colleagues from the Benelux and several Adobe evangelists.

If you’ve never been to an FITC, Shawn Pucknell and the team do a fantastic job making it an event to remember with lots of opportunities to network and party with fellow attendees and speakers.

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I’m excited to announce that I’ve finally got my training curriculum worked out and will start delivering courses on ActionScript 3.0, Flex and Adobe AIR in early 2008.

As many of you know I’ve spent most of last year traveling and speaking at various conferences. I saw this as a great opportunity to try out different ideas, get feedback and fine tune my training material. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and constructive and would hereby like to thank everyone that sent in their thoughts.

I’ve joined forces with training partners SkillsMatter (UK, Ireland and Scandinavia) and Multimediacollege (Belgium, Luxembourg) to deliver these courses and am available for custom training and consultancy worldwide.

More information as the courses roll out, in the meanwhile I’ve got a first event happening at Multimediacollege:

» AfterHours, January 17th - An indepth look at AIR API’s

I look forward to the first training events kicking off in the next few months. If you’d like more information on the various courses and training solutions feel free to get in touch!

Some more good news coming from Adobe with them contributing a new virtual machine to the open source Tamarin project. This new VM - internally called QVM - known to the outside world as Tamarin-Tracing essentially brings the power of AVM2 (ActionScript 3.0/ECMAScript 4) to mobile devices.

It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see this as a first step into bringing AS3 Flash content and eventually Flex/MXML to mobile and devices. Exciting times ahead, given the current restrictions of a technology like Flash Lite I hope for widespread adoption of this new engine.

Read more
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/12/meet-qvm-new-tamarin-vm-contributed-to.php
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/12/18/qvm-mozillas-new-mobile-vm-for-ecmascript-4/
http://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-tracing

I’ve had an article on component skinning in the works for several months but finally got it done and its now published on the Adobe Developer Center.

The article walks you through the different options for skinning components in the Flash CS3 authoring environment: manually editing the assets, code-based skinning and talks about how you can package up your skinned component as an SWC to easily share it with the rest of your team.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/skinning_flash_cs3.html

Enjoy!

I recently got a question about what the ActionScript 3.0 equivalent is of the LoadVars sendAndLoad method. It may look like a lot more typing (and it is) but the whole implementation is very clean by separating out the request, loader and variables which you can only benefit from in the long run.

import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.*;

var myRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.myserver.com/myscript.php");
var myLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
var myVariables:URLVariables = new URLVariables();

myVariables.firstProperty = "first";
myVariables.secondProperty = "second";

myRequest.method = URLRequestMethod.GET;
myRequest.data = myVariables;

function onLoaded(evt:Event):void {
  trace("here we get the data back: "+myLoader.data);
}

myLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
myLoader.load(myRequest);

What happens in the code above is we set up a URLRequest instance that points to the server side resource you want to target. Next an instance of the URLLoader class is instantiated and we assign an instance of the URLVariables class to its data property.

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“Remember, remember the Fifth of November”

After doing the Flashforward, MAX Chicago and MAX Barcelona conferences just in the last two months — I almost decided against going to this years edition of Flash on the Beach in Brighton.

Luckily that temporary loss of sanity soon made way and I will indeed make it to one of the very best Flash conferences out there. John Davey did an amazing job last year and I’m sure this year will be even better. The FOTB parties are legendary and with Guy Fawkes night on the Monday it promises to be spectacular.

I’m not speaking this year so should have lots of time to hang out with friends and colleagues and make the most of this last conference of 2007.

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For those of you that attended the conference and are interested in my slides for the Adobe MAX Chicago and MAX Barcelona conferences — you can now access them from the website (login with your registration details).

MAX Chicago - Introduction to Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0
https://secure.adobemax2007.com/na/sessions/library/

MAX Barcelona - Best Practices for Developing with ActionScript 3.0
https://secure.adobemax2007.com/europe/sessions/library/

Feel free to contact me with any feedback if you attended any of these sessions, the book raffle is still open for another week!