Colin Moock - ActionScript 3.0 from the Ground Up
Today I went to Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0 tour here in Sydney. The venue was the SMC Conference and function centre at 66 Goulburn St. It’s just around the corner from the office.
Colin was a great presenter and quite amusing. Even after letting us know that he couldn’t go to sleep after 3am in the morning, he still stayed a bit more after the event to answer more questions.
He gave away some free books and I was lucky enough to get one by debugging some of the code. Some people got free books for answering some Star Trek and infocom related questions, and others for travelling a long distance to the event. There was a girl who came all the way from New Zealand just for the event. I reckon around 200 people attended the event.
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Colin has sworn never to use powerpoint, so he built his own presentation software. Here is a link to the same system he uses during the presentation: http://moock.org/lectures/presentationviewer/
Select AS3.0 from the ground up and then click on open presentation. Then use j,k,l to navigate through the items.
Here is a full html page with all the lecture notes: http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/
And a 2mb pdf with the code used: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/as3_tour/colin_moock_f6.pdf
The colour on the projector screen was more yellowish instead of olive, but it still felt much better than a cheesy powerpoint.
The presentation was a bit too basic for someone who already had read his AS20 Cookbook but I new that beforehand. When registering you receive a confirmation email and here is a quote:
“Remember, this course is for beginner-to-intermediate level programmers and runs for a grueling 9 hours, so get a good night sleep and be ready for a heavy onslaught of ActionScript 3.0 info!”
Though I do a lot of advance work with AS2.0, I decided to go because I had never done anything with AS3 yet. I got to see some details on AS3 like: how the display list works and also a bit on how the ASVM2 does garbage collection.
The application that Colin builds, while explaining key concepts of OOP with AS3 is a Virtual Pet game. Like the Tamagochi game. He uses the MVC design pattern and explains the concept very well.
At the end of the presentation he asks if it’s worth going down that path of OOP for just a simple game like the Virtual Zoo. The answer: It depends.
This app could have been built on the Flash IDE timeline in less than an hour. But when you think about extending it, or implementing any changes, that’s when the timeline will probably fail. In a real life example when a client starts asking you to do updates you would have wanted to opt for the OOP design instead of the procedural way.
Overall: It was a great event and I thank Adobe, O’Reilly and Colin for making this happen. I’m looking forward for more to come.
Add comment May 5th, 2008
