Peter Elst

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.
 

Great news for the Flex community, the inaugural issue of Flex Authority is here!

It was great working as a technical reviewer with the various talented authors and I can promise you its chuckful of interesting articles on Flex and AIR for readers of all skill levels.

Here’s to many more issues to come, an excellent technical journal has seen the light! Be sure to subscribe today, its just 49.95 USD/year for a printed copy and 29.95 USD/year to get all four issues as a PDF.

 
https://secure.houseoffusion.com/flex-authority-subscriptions.cfm

 

I attended the MIX Essentials event in Louvain-la-Neuve this Thursday in an attempt to get some perspective on Microsoft’s roadmap for Rich Internet Applications (yes, you read that right — Internet) and Silverlight 2.

Note that I’m looking at this as a Flash Platform enthusiast, while I walked away excited about what Microsoft is doing don’t expect me to hold back on criticism where I see things lacking. It is in no way meant as a personal attack and welcome your thoughts.

Here’s breakdown of the sessions I attended, with my commentary and a couple of videos.

 
Opening Keynote – Luc van de Velde
Building RIAs with Silverlight 2 – Tim Heuer
Beauty & the Geek – Ian Griffiths & Paul Dawson
Data and Web Services in Silverlight 2 – Gill Cleeren
Steve Ballmer Keynote
Summary

Read the rest of this entry »

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’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

There’s nothing quite like writing a book — definitely one of the most exhilarating yet at times frustrating things you can do. Sas Jacobs, Todd Yard and myself have been hard at work getting the update to Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8 written and we’re now coming ever closer to a release date.

The previous edition was one of the first major book projects I’ve worked on and was absolutely thrilled to see how well it was received by the community. I think it fills in a great niche for those wanting to get involved with OOP with ActionScript. Its not a full-fledged language reference like Colin Moock’s must read Essential ActionScript books but rather provides a down to earth and pragmatic look at OOP principles and how to apply them to your projects.

While quite a bit of the new book is a straightforward port of the ActionScript 2.0 code to 3.0 syntax, there was a lot of focus on improving the code examples and case studies making them more practical and easy to follow.

I’m looking forward to seeing the book released and hope for an equally as positive reader response this time round. If you’re interested in getting your hands on the book sooner than later, it is now available for pre-order (the links below are referrer links and help support this site if you are so inclined).

Pre-order from amazon.com
Pre-order from amazon.co.uk

Just heard my article on the ActionScript 3.0 debugger in Flash CS3 has been published on the Adobe Flash Developer Center.

Its great to finally have a powerful debugger available in this latest release of the Flash IDE that just works — I’m sure you’ll love it!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/as3_debugger.html

I’m a little late blogging this but was recently interviewed for the Dzone Adobe Special edition about the Flash platform revolution (Dutch).

Other friends and colleagues featured in the magazine are Peter van den Wyngaert (NRG), Serge Jespers (Webkitchen), and the guys from Nascom.

http://www.digitaalbladeren.com/adobe/special/

Its just over a month since the book was first published and was informed that “Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8” is already planned for a reprint.

Thanks to everyone who’s been sending in feedback, its great to see so many people enjoyed the book and even see it as an ideal hands-on accompaniment to Colin Moock’s infamous “Essential ActionScript 2.0” book.

With the reprint in mind, if you have any possible errata to report please get in touch as soon as possible!

Ultrashock.com is celebrating its 5 year anniversary with a contest including a grand prize of a 60Gb video iPod. Additionally they’ve launched a new series of articles on Flash 8, Photoshop and Illustrator well worth a read!

I’ve contributed an article on new features in Flash 8, giving a quick overview changes that should hopefully persuade you to upgrade if you haven’t done so by now.

http://www.ultrashock.com/tutorials/