Posts filed under 'Adobe'
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.
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.
May 5th, 2008
When your browser connects to the internet through a proxy and you try to upload using FileRefence you might get an IOError or a 406 http not acceptable error. I say ‘might’ because not all OS browser combinations trigger this error. On Windows/Firefox you will probably get an authentication popup to enter the proxy username and password, but on Mac/Firefox you will get the 406 error.
Anyways if you try searching the net, there are several threads that ask about this proxy error but no answers. I finally found a blog post that had a solution in one of the comments. From Coding Cowboys.
Add to your .htaccess file:
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
or:
<IfModule mod_php4.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>
Beware that this will disable the Apache ModSecurity module for that folder.
I just saw that the Adobe livedocs upload reference also has a comment by: log2e, regarding the 403 and 406 errors.
May 1st, 2008
uCertify contacted me to do a review on one of their prepKits. It’s a simulator of various certification tests. I’ve asked for the Adobe Certified Expert on Flash. I downloaded the A9A0-311 Macromedia Flash Professional 8 kit.
To begin you need to download the uCertify PrepEngine. It’s ‘kind of’ like a framework that you install once, and then can simply download different prepKits to use with. You can also download a free evaluation version with 30 practice questions.
Once you install the engine and run the program the main window appears:
The look and feel is quite nice and modern. I started by taking the first Diagnostic test. The questions are like a quiz, and are multiple choice. Some are select the correct answer, some are drag and drop. The questions are a range of simple actionscript questions as well as Flash IDE questions. Eg: Name the tools from the toolbar. I failed the first time, and I was amused to get a score of 666.
In addition of having a quiz style test simulator. You also have a set of tools to help you study and prepare for the test.
There is a lot of content to go through and help you out on your certification quest. The flash cards is good way to memorise and practice the different type of questions. There are several basic flash tutorials in the “how to” section.
Overall
If you want to get a certification I would definitely recommend you try this out. uCertify has a money-back guarantee policy, that will return your money back if you fail the exam the first time.
April 30th, 2008
Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Sydney Adobe User Group. Note that it is now a joint group between the Flash User Group and the Coldfusion User Group.
Geoff Bowers did a presentation about “Setting Fire To Your Community”
The presentation was really good and I left the user group meeting with a nice feeling to try and help the opensource communities I daily use.
He gave really good (and a bit funny and disturbing) analogies comparing opensource communities with japanese mummies. Geoff also got into explaining some details about different opensource licensing schemes, and made us aware of the great difference between gpl and lgpl.
Even though most of us might just click next, next, next when downloading most of the software we use… If you are going to use that code in your commercial projects, you should really know what you are getting into and learn about the implications you will have when you distribute your project.
We also learnt that the extjs framework is changing its licensing from lgpl to gpl. This means that if you include that library in your code, you will have to opensource your project.
It was a great meeting and I’m looking forward to the next one. Chris informed us that the meetings will be held on every last Monday of the month, so the next meeting will be on May 26.
April 29th, 2008
When: Mon 28th April (Meet at 6pm for 6:30 start)
Where: Rocketboots.
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With the advent of a number of open source initiatives from Adobe, Geoff Bowers of Daemon will speak on:
A tale of Japanese mummies, karmic balance and benevolent dictators.
Your guide to putting a torch to your open source community. Learn how to set up a flourishing developer community or just help to ignite your favourite.
Please RSVP on http://apugs2008april.eventbrite.com
Note: This is the inaugural meeting of the new Adobe Platform Users Group, Sydney which combines the Sydney Flash Platform Developers Group and the NSW Coldfusion Users Group.
April 23rd, 2008
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