Hooray! I'll be presenting at this years FlashForward Conference in San Francisco - in August. Looks like I got the prime slot - the sleeper afternoon session on the very last day.... :) The theme of this years conference is Passion - and seeing that I'm passionate about process, its fitting I'll be doing a preso entitled " Project Management from the Developers Perspective". Not sure what to expect? Hopefully some insight,definitely some humor. If you see me there, come say hi, and heh, wish me luck :)

I spent somewhere around 10 days - checking out Lisbon, driving and getting very lost in Paris ( yet I drove and survived and am a bigger person for it.... ),and just hanging out in London. I've never been to Europe - so this was pretty huge for me - I only had one thing I couldn't leave without seeing -and that was checking out Shakespeare's Globe in London.

While grabbing the tube one day, I noticed a poster on the one of the walls beside the escalator going up to the Angel stop exit- it simply read " Its not too late to change your life". Funny how that item, out of the million of amazing things I saw over the period of my vacation, that one resonated.

Coming back to work - I realized how much I love what I do. Of course thats a huge generalization. I don't love all aspects of what I do - which many of my co-workers can probably attest to :). But I love the process of creating something and then sitting back and watching how someone consumes/uses that piece. But I'm at the point where I need to push myself a bit more to become more, and that means inevitably moving out of my comfort zone.

Am I passionate about development? Yep, as much as a sloppy, self taught developer can be I suppose. I'm not the best developer by any means, and its been a great experience to be surrounded by so many talented developers who could kick my ass in the programming arena. I've learned lots, I've shared lots - but ultimately, I don't think my greatest contribution is that as a busy bee developer. It's taken me awhile to get used to the fact that I'm not going to be great - that I'm only going to be good. And I'm okay with that.

What am I passionate about? I'm come to discover that development, for me, is a means to an end - a way to be self sufficient to a degree. I can take an idea and execute it if need be all on my own. Empowerment, for me is huge. But I'm often more passionate about creating a solution that is right as much as I am about executing it. I often find myself to be the user advocate - fighting for all the things that will make the experience, a better one, for the user. And therein lies my passion. Ultimately, I want to create things that not only will people use, but they will enjoy using. Completely vague I know. What am I passionate about? User experience.

Funny how when you reflect on things you typically look at all the building blocks, the pieces that together make the picture, but the picture itself can be overlooked - or maybe for me, it was just a bit blurry.

I was lucky to receive his Joker print as a parting gift... not sure if he was trying to say something with that... :) His work is just vivid and you should check it out if you have a chance.

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

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...

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.

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!

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

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.

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. :)

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.