January 02, 2007

Kudos! They make it look easy!

Wow, I'm super stoked to say that today I am beyond proud of my compadres at Teknision - dudes work on FineTunes has finally been recognized - it was listed as one of the top 10 web sites of 2006 by Times Magazine. That's so awesome - I love the application and the various ways they have pushed the technology ( like the new Wii version and many other deployment arenas... yay baby!).

To me, this is great personally to see the innovation and forward thinking Tony brings to the table be recognized in ways his Flash peers cannot possibly do. Rawk on brother!

Posted by bitch at 04:58 PM | Comments (2)

2007 Already

Rather than do a year in review, I thought I'd do a "resources in review" to share some of the good stuff that has made its way to me this past year. People have been generous - and I've had the good fortune to be on the receiving end ( get all your minds out the gutters, eternal perverts of the flash community...)

Books. I'm really lucky to get a bunch of books, I was especially lucky when I taught a Flash course to get books so that I could put them on my recommended reading list for the students - I was able to sift through the stuff out there and make sure if someone was spending 60 bucks, it was well spent.

I recently got a copy of Flash 8 Video - a Friends of Ed publication. I think that an excerpt or two on the book have made their way to the adobe developers resource site as well. It does a pretty decent job of giving a primer/introduction to the various aspects of video in flash - from effects, to masking and components. It's a pretty solid book and would make a great resource for instructors teaching Flash, but I don't think I'd recommend it to a higher level Flash developer - from the ActionScript samples in the book - its best for a beginner or intermediate developer who hasn't done much with video and isn't familiar with the various facets of video production.

GSkinner Panels
Undoubtably one of the best examples of JSFL in action, gProject has long been something I've raved about to many developers who prefer to stay in the Flash IDE for their development workflow. The panel is simply a necessity to increase productivity if you are not one to adopt an external editor. Having said that, I've started using a couple of the other gUnit developed panels - gSearch, gTweens, gToDo, and gTextStyles. The most useful out of the bunch, for me, is gSearch which allows you to search everything from the library to the timeline and beyond. How many times have you gotten a file where the library is just a fricking mess and you need to find some symbol that is nested beyond belief? Perhaps of course, you wouldn't organize your library that way, but if you're dealing with a legacy project or something that a client needs "fixed" you might and very well have that experience. For these kinda things, I love gSearch - it even lets you search files as well which is pretty kickass and a nice integration with gProject. For me, that panel alone makes using Flash an entirely better experience.

Flex Charting Components.
Wow, there is a bit of a learning curve here I suppose - if you look at the examples - how often do you get data that is formatted exactly how you want it so that its perfect for the charting components. I'd say not often, unless you're bum buddies with your server side developer. But once you get past the data formatting for the charting components, they are pretty awesome and highly customizable.

NetLimiter
This tool is awesome for simulating realistic bandwidth experiences - no more of the " it looks good on my machine running local" bs you always hear from people.

Anyways thats it - hope you enjoy!

Posted by bitch at 03:10 PM | Comments (3)