Labs

Another link to aid in the transition from 2.0 to 3.0.

AS 3.0 Compiler Errors

Happy coding!

I will be speaking at the Future of Web Design Conference in London in April. I am honored to be part of what looks like a great lineup including Ryan Singer of the incomparable 37signals, and Joshua Davis. Early registration opened today. Check the site for more info.

And don't forget, for those on the other side of the world, I'm giving a workshop in the San Francisco bay area at the end of February. More info here.

We have a lot going on in January and need some help. The position would start out as an on-site contract with the possibility of becoming fulltime depending on our needs and your abilities. We are looking for someone who can start as early in January as possible, and who is available at least through the month.

Candidate MUST have advanced Actionscript 2.0 with thorough understanding of OOP. Other attractive skills include HTML/CSS/Javascript, PHP, MySQL, and any other web technologies. Previous agency experience is also a plus.

Please send code samples, links, and resume to dev.work(at)bigspaceship.com.

I will be giving a two day Flash workshop in the bay area the weekend of February 24-25, covering various topics, including general architecture of rich media sites, and other tips and tricks I and the team have learned through the years.

If anyone has suggestions of topics they would like to see discussed, even if you aren't going to be in San Francisco in February, let me know. I'm interested to hear what questions people have about what we do. It will also help to inform the types of posts that appear on this site.

Click here for more info. Tell all your west coast friends!

Optimizing Flash sites to run efficiently is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple. Despite many coders' frustrations over the performance of the player, there are ways you can make your site run more efficiently.

Here's a couple of tricks we use on a daily basis to keep things running smooth. Nothing fancy or complicated, but guaranteed success.

UPDATE: Tera at trick7 posted a Japanese translation for our fine friends on the other side of the Pacific. We think that's pretty cool. Check it out here.

Those of us who are Director and Lingo savvy (generally) love the message window. For those of you who aren't Director savvy, the message window allowed an author to run methods and view results during runtime. Though the Flash IDE doesn't offer one, you can make your own (if you haven't already). Its incredibly useful for debugging your code especially if you're into using the singleton model.

Last week we sat around muttering to ourselves about how nice it would be to create a simple utility that would port our AS2 code to AS3. Turns out we weren't the only ones thinking about it. Patrick Mineault wowed us yet again with his c onverter.

This week Adobe has discussed the release of scripting engine source code (AVM2) to the Mozilla Foundation. Its called the Tamarin project. Read more about it on JD on EP and on mozilla.org.

If you haven't built in your own debugging system for testing flash in browsers, then this Firefox FlashTracer extension could prove to be very useful. It allows you to see traces made from inside your swfs. Handy indeed!

Furthering the techniques learned in the Tri and Matrix classes, the Quad class makes distortion possible. Manipulate 4 corners of a MovieClip. Give it a try [ view | download | code ]

Have you ever noticed your bitmap fonts looking fuzzy in flash? It happens when your text field is set to non-integer x and y values. If you run into this commonly, there's a perfect utility for you. Check out 5etdemi's unblur text post.

Also, if you do a lot of site testing using multiple versions of flash (and you're a savvy PC user) check out: Sephiroth's Flash switcher Firefox extension.

And last but certainly not least, Asual has a new toy that handles deep linking (and a host of other usability issues) for you. Its called SWFAdress 1.0 and its definitely worth a look.