BitchWhoCodes

FITC Feedback

I got my feedback from FITC already ( they are on the ball... ) and I got a nice 9.20 overall. Yipeeeeee!!! Thanks again for anyone who commented - its nice to get constructive feedback and really helps the presenters- never mind the fact that you could have won something .... :)

So thanks again for everyone who attended my session so early in the morning!

Incompatible Override

So for the first time, I've seen this lovely 1023 error - Incompatible Override. I checked the code - the signatures are the same, the number and type of arguments are the same, the method declaration are the same... etc etc. It looks as it should be, but suddenly upon compilation, boom - getting this awesomeo highly descriptive error. If there was a difference between the methods in any way, I'd understand... but there isn't.

Any thoughts, ideas etc? People have suggested linking and unlinking classes in the fla etc as well... that has often worked for me in the past but not in this case...

Bizarre Signs of Success

Pirated copies and ebay sales - two really bizarre signs of what I'd call success for a project we recently released at Fuel Industries - Fairies and Dragons. Now being handed out in various places throughout the UK and Europe, the interactive McDonalds happy meal toy was probably one of the largest projects I have worked on in terms of sheer team size, and is one of the bigger projects I think to come out of Fuel.

And for the first time, I just realized, I'll be able to go in-store and pick up the happy meal toy from hopefully one of those Alice in wonderland looking London McDonalds -taking the project from one of development to experience. Can't do a European vacation without picking up one of those...

I guess we have two more benchmarks for success now.

FITC Keynote Preso up

I am in the process of uploading the keynote file for my preso... the pdf export option is great but it screwed it up with the transitions and all.

Same Place different file - http://www.bitch
whocodes.com/fitc2008/preso.zip

Thanks again to everyone who attended, and more so for those checking out the preso who weren't there and giving me feedback!

FWA Interview

Shameless self promo I suspect but an interview I did with FWA is now online - you can read it here. I think my fave comment is listed under greatest achievements :)

FITC Preso online

My preso - Project Management from the Developer's Perspective, is online. You can grab it at
http://www.bitchwhocodes.com/fitc2008/preso.pdf. I decided to just post a pdf generated from the Keynote - but if someone wants the keynote, post a comment and let me know.

FITC Over and Out

Just got back from FITC - really impressed with the organization and some of presos. I think mine went over pretty good, can't complain from the audience response. I will be posting my preso as a keynote doc and a pdf sometime tonight - and will blog the link.

Just wanted to thank everyone for their great feedback, and thank the crew at FITC for having me!

All Girl Arcade

Big shout out to my peeps at Fuel Industries we just released All Girl Arcade - a gaming and media portal targeted at girls ages 8-12. The sushi game is slightly addictive.. check it out if you get a chance!

Random Things I've Learned

Just a random dump of things I've learned the past couple of months, not all Flash related.I'm going to try to do this more often because its good to go back and remember the stuff that stumped you or you didn't know.

So just a few:

1. Don't try to snapshot a NetStream. Long gone are the days of creating a bitmap, and doing a transition with it. Release 115 of the player plugged what they considered a security hole. People had a shitload of pretty hackilious workarounds but from what I've seen the only way you can do it now is to pony up the $$$ for FMS and set a flag that allows you to do it. You get a nice little Bitmap related security sandbox error. I know this is old news for many people. It was new to me :(. Decent discussion on it - on Justin's blog

2. Namespaces in xml. I recently worked on a project where I thought I'd be all professional and shit, and extend the RSS format with custom namespaces. Then i realized, how the hell do I access these? So here you go:
var nameSpace:Namespace = yourXML.namespace("customNameSpace");
var tag:String = yourXML.nameSpace::customDescription.text();
//--------------
Where the tag would look much like Description here

3. Best workaround ever.... trying to get focus on a stage to capture a keydown event. I had some screens that had input fields, therefore the focus was put on the field and the key event was captured. As soon as I had a screen without a textfield, no event would be captured. Solved it by putting a textfield in a MC offstage and putting focus on that. I'm sure there is something a bit more classy, elegant, what you will but that did the trick for me. Ummm... lame.

4. Here's a heartache one. Mac OSX - run apps from the trash. Basically if you create an app and test it on the mac and then drag it to the trash - and bring the app over again, if there is an instance in the trash, it will run that one. I definitely added an array of new curse words to my vocabulary after learning that one.

4. Um using the list component in flash - i had an array of value objects and then did the whole list_mc.dataProvider = new DataProvider(myArray). I then set the labelField to a prop on the value object. I got a nice little " where the F is your iconField" error. Perhaps it wasn't as colourful as that... I'm sure I'm doing something retarded, cos I rarely use the components, but something as easy as that shouldn't really bitch at me that way. Or maybe it should, I likely deserve it for the most part.

5. Make sure you have your project bookends firmly in place - planning and qa.

6. Omniture released a new version of their actionsource component for AS3 - looks super easy to use. No more clicky clicky sound in the browser.

Growing up is hard to do

I've spent the better part of two days trying to get Visual Studio properly installed. Most of you, right after that sentence, are all WTF - Visual Studio. Yep, thats right. I'm installing Visual Studio. Yes, I'm installing it to start playing/digging around with Silverlight.

That's right. I said what appears to be the forbidden phrase in Flashdom. And I'm still here - there are no signs of being struck by lightening or an implosion with the only trace of me left being the smoking chair where I once sat.

Maybe I am just growing up, but the whole I use Flash therefore I am Flash bit is getting a bit tired. I think Tony MacDonnell said it best over a beer the other day - his focus is experience, not software. Coming from Director land - that has been my sentiment as well - for I often saw people chose incorrect solutions to problems, because it was what they knew, not what they knew was best.

I'm looking forward to doing some Silverlight. At least, long enough to get enough experience and insight to be able to commend or trash it, and have value to those opinions.

Now admittedly - having to install / uninstall Visual Studio multiple times, just to start working with it , hasn't exactly made this experience thus far, peach keen. Slight barrier to entry, but those who know me, know I'm computer retarded and no doubt, user error must be a factor. :)

GOASAP

I got to check out GOASAP - Moses' lightweight framework for building custom as3 animation tools. I didn't rip the description word for word - it goes more like :
"The Go ActionScript Animation Platform ("GOASAP") is a lightweight, portable set of generic base classes for building AS3 animation tools. Go provides structure & core functionality, but leaves the specifics to you."

I've played with FuseKit before, and the other various tweening engines out there. Chances are, if it tweens, I've used it. Does that make me a tweening-animation-package whore - undeniably so. Its just one thing I don't and haven't had the time to invest in trying to create a custom solution.

Using the base classes, I had a couple of common tweens going in next to no time - your simplistic alpha and scale tween. And then shortly after that, I had sequences running. I just subclassed the LinearGo class, and boom, I had the most standard of all animation tweens - good ole AlphaTween.

The super nice thing about the set up here is that it avoids bloat. I am not adding tons of crap to a file that I will never, ever use. I just import what I need and use that. Its full featured as well - but built in such a way that if you're not going to use that feature, you don't need to fatten up your swf with its presence.

Admittedly, I spent an hour this morning. I haven't delved deep into the framework - or used/misused all the features/capabilities. But so far, I'm super impressed by how easy it is to get up and going. Two enthusiatic thumbs up.

Dominos BFD Builder

I was just passed this link to the Dominos Big Fantastic Deal Builder by my good friend Mathew Ray over at CP+B. Nice configurator style site where you can build yer own pizza.

Bitchless Year

I'm somewhat mortified that this is my first post of the year - but here goes my re-cap of the previous year - which admittedly I'm relieved is over. It was a pretty rough year in some aspects - but workwise, I have to admit, it was pretty rewarding all in all.

Highlights & Events that my year what it was.

1. Help create/deploy huge site for a major corporation that had an incredible media buy/push.
2. Went to Apollo Camp ( now AIR) in San Francisco in March with my co-worker at the time and good friend Mathew Ray. Definitely a highlight.
3. Interviewed about AIR by Adobe and was on the Adobe site. Woot.
4. Spoke at FITC in TO, in April. All in all it went well and my reviews were fairly generous. I had a small room, but I'm kinda proud to say it was packed.
5. Accepted a job with Fuel Industries and moved back to Ottawa, and left the good folk at IQ Interactive

6. Drove from ATL to Ottawa by myself. Actually quite enjoyed it.

7. Got dumped 2 days after I returned to Ottawa. Feel free to give me a virtual high five. 3 years down the drain - and a 2.5 day drive to find that out. This is important not because I am bitter, but because it explains why there are so few points after this....
8. Drama continues as my grandma passed away in October. She made the best ginger cookies.
9. Chicago MAX - I went to represent Fuel as the Passenger was nominated for an award. I spent much time harassing duders at the next booth over - Josh and Jamie from the mother of all interactive agencies - Big Spaceship. Me making friends. Sadly I didn't get to see too much of the conference.
10. October found me in LA at FITC Hollywood, presenting again. I got to visit my buddy Mark who now works for Yahoo.
11. Off to work I went. I've been able to work on some really cool stuff - with a kickass team of developers. I don't have much to say outside of this - I've been working non-stop since I started and haven't really even had time to step outside myself and read blogs. Its definitely been a heads down and get-er done kinda ride, but the opportunity to work with such talented people on great projects really made the hard work worth the effort.

I even bought Halo3 and have yet to have any time to get online and play. I did just get Rock Band and truly believe I may be addicted.

I'm looking forward to 2008. Hopefully things will calm down a bit and I can go back to contributing more to the community - something I admittedly haven't been doing. Sigh.

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Flash 9 components failing in 3rd party wrappers

A co-worker came across a weird one today - where it seems that certain components in the Flash 9 set don't play nicely with 3rd party wrappers. I say wrappers, because it wasn't just limited to one- but with Zinc, mProjector and even his own C# swf wrapper. Looks like anything with the scrollbar causes it to render some awesome seizure flickering action - as if there is a compile error that isn't being caught. Happens to components that look like they are composites - the simple slider, scrollPane, List etc. Some of the components work fine ( Button, text input ) but the more complex one makes all the 3rd party wrappers crap and the components flicker. Code in unrelated classes executes fine.

Anyone else see this ? Ideas?

AIR Spotlight Videos

I was really happy to see Finetune as part of of the AIR Spotlight Videos . So many people have asked exactly what is Finetune, and I think they do a great job of explaining what it is, and why it deserves to be an AIR case study.

The Finetune case study is something that shouldn't just be looked at from the entire AIR perspective - this isn't the first platform/deployment venue where Finetune has been smart enough to be one of the first people in/adopt ( the Wii player version immediately comes to mind). Its the execution of the branding strategy vision - to create more access points to this experience without diluting that said experience, that makes Finetune the case study to watch and reference. Finetune is definitely a product with a road map and that is what excites me about the evolution of that product/service - to me, the various deployment platforms are types of pitstops along the way and merely just parts of the bigger picture. All us techno-dweebs can be gushing over what a tight AIR application it is - but the strategy/marketing folk should be paying just as much attention.

No more metaphors. I promise!