Labs

I will be attending and participating in the inaugural Future of Web Design conference this week in London, and the always super fun FITC conference next week in Toronto.

These events are great chances to hear from leaders in the industry, be inspired, and learn about what Adobe is up to .. specifically more info about Apollo and CS3 .. straight from the source.

In London, I am giving a three hour workshop this Tuesday and speaking and sitting on a panel on Wednesday. In Toronto, I will be on a panel on Tuesday, April 24th.

If...

If you can answer YES to all of these questions:

- I am legally allowed to work in the USA
- I can work fulltime, on-site at Big Spaceship HQ in Brooklyn
- I have skills programming some or all of the following:
     Actionscript 2
     Actionscript 3
     HTML/Javascript/CSS
     PHP
     MySQL
     Any other front-end or back-end Web technologies
- I think Guitar Hero and Foosball are keys to a quality work environment

We are looking for developers at all levels, from intern to senior. Please send resume, cover letter, and code samples to dev.work (at) bigspaceship.com.

New in ActionScript 3.0 are user defined namespaces. ActionScript 2.0 already came with built-in namespaces, public and private. These gave you the ability to, at compile time, check your code for inconsistencies in your class definitions and timeline code.

Along with more predefined namespaces (public, private, protected, and internal) ActionScript 3.0 now comes with user defined namespaces. Those familiar with lower level programming languages (such as C++/C# or Java) may already be well acquainted with these concepts. If not read on and you'll be on your way in a couple of minutes.

I was in San Francisco this weekend attending the Apollo Camp event at Adobe on Friday evening. Between hanging out with some friends on the Apollo team .. Mike Downey, Mike Chambers, Danny Dura, Christian Cantrell .. and from the community .. Mims Wright, Roger Braunstein .. and enjoying complimentary pizza and beer, I learned a little more about the capabilities of Apollo.

Anyone reading this who isn't up to speed on Apollo and what it can do, now is the time to get caught up. Adobe has released the

Extremely talented developer and friend of the Spaceship, Roger Braunstein, has released Introduction to Flex as part of the O'Reilly Short Cut series. If you've been thinking about giving flex a shot, we recommend this as a starting point.

Apparently someone is clamoring for a class that we use here called "Out". This post will deliver said class, as well as provide a brief overview of its usage.

"Out" really doesn't do anything particularly useful, but it does make it a lot easier to scan through large volumes of trace() output and find the information you're looking for by formatting it nicely. This means that every line traced out is prefixed with the classname of the instance executing the trace, as well as the type of event the trace is intended to represent. There's also the option of filtering the outputs such that only traces from specific classes or of specific types are displayed.

Now click on through for more ad impressions!

Way back in Performance Tips Part I, I mentioned the idea of using BitmapData to capture a dynamic "screen shot" of the movieclip when transitioning between different sections of your site/application/whatever. The idea is to render a flat bitmap -- a JPG, basically -- instead of all of those PNGs and videos and vector graphics you have floating around here.

I issued a challenge to Cathy, one of our finest designers here, to come up with something so fantastically slow that there was no way even BitmapData could save it. She did not disappoint. She's got our test beachball from the Visualizer, some rare interview footage from our elite Foosball Team, alpha PNG clouds, and on and on.

Check out the results here, or down load the demo for yourself.

Click from Josh to Caleb and back, clicking the "Capture Screenshot" button to toggle whether or not you want to generate bitmapdata of the section before transitioning or just play it out as is. When on, you should notice the transition is significantly less "chunky" in playback.

Useful!

(Via Mike Chambers.)

We here at Big Spaceship use TextMate as our text editor and shortcuts are a big help to me. The things most common to every programmer are copy and paste. But there are so many more shortcuts to aid in the every day tasks. Read on for my most commonly used shortcuts and of course, any additions are welcome.

Everybody likes Google these days. In fact you can even get Google apparel right here.

On more important note, not that looking like a Google employee shouldn't be your highest priority, Google provides several great services, which they encourage you to use.

Let's take a look at some of their APIs.