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.

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.

You might find some funny results like an Euro symbol appearing throughout your text. Uncomment this line in your amfphp gateway:

$gateway->setCharsetHandler("utf8_decode", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-1");

Here are some examples of text you might find:
‘ = This is the open double quote
’ = This is the close double quote

Here is a good resource if you’re having issues with strange characters and PHP / MySQL: ByteFlex – Fun with utf8, PHP and mysql

Thursday, 24th January. 6pm

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, each event will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability) and a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium!

Details and RSVP on http://sydneyflashdev2008prelaunchtour.eventbrite.com

You can also joing the Google Group: FlashAussie

Update: WebDU dates are: 12-13 June 2008. (Thanks Geoff)

Register here: http://www.adobeas3tour.com/

Advanced programmers please note:
This course does not cover expert-level topics. You are unlikely to encounter new concepts in this course, but are welcome to attend for a refresher on ActionScript programming fundamentals.

For a complete list of topics covered, see the Course Outline below and the course lecture notes, available at: http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/

According to the program we were going to view: Cairngorm 2.2 framework with Flex 3 and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime – formerly known as Apollo). We’ll be building a small/simple application to demonstrate the use of the Cairngorm 2.2 framework with Flex 3 beta and AIR Beta.

Due to time constraints, we didn’t finish the AIR integration and we all managed to debug Chris’ cairngorm timer.
We also talked a little about Singletons. Here is the link I mentioned about Grant Skinners AS3 implementation.

After that we had a “conference/presentation” by Grant Straker, that showed how to build quick applications using Zoom Flex
It was interesting to see the admin interface actually be targeted to developers, and how you generate your objects and classes by using regular forms. It also spits out all the source code of the flex app. I will definitely give it a try.

Then the lucky winner of the Adobe Software package was Robert. Congratulations mate!

Looking forward to having more meetings. Looks like then next one will be in February and the guys from infomedia might be showing us some of their flex stuff.

Here is a 16 second video that I took while Grant was presenting ShadoCMS:

I’ve created my mobile video blog here (you can see the link at the top of my blog), using the free widget from the DDX Website.

What is a Mobile Video Blog Widget?
It’s a Flash Component that you can put on any web page.When you create the widget a unique email is generated for you and you can send videos with your mobile phone to that email. The server will automatically convert the videos to FLV and publish them on your server. It’s pretty cool! Give it a try here: http://www.ddx.com.au/#/widgets/mobile-video-blog/

Then came SEPY and I got hooked straight-away. Just last year I transitioned to FlashDevelop and have been using that since. I convinced my fellow workmates and now we are all using it.

I knew there were other tools put there, but one that I really wanted to try was FDT. Check out there cool site and view the demos they have.
A couple of months back I won a license at Sydney’s Flash User Group (thanks Chris!) and I have started using it for tests. I currently haven’t fully switched yet, because I find FlashDevelop quite fast and very easy to use compared to FDT. Though FDT has on the fly syntax checking. It means I don’t have to press F7 each time before compiling.

Then talking about my PHP development environment. It was trusty old Textpad through-out all these years. Adding different syntax libraries, macros and all kind of clip extensions. But it was never an IDE. It was missing syntax checking and the famous “intellisense”

Now I have started to move towards Eclipse, and I’ve tried PHPEclipse and PDT. I had troubles with PDT but I didn’t have much time on my hands to see why it wasn’t working as expected. I will try to consolidate my both main languages (Flash and PHP) under one IDE.

My next step is to use them both on a production project. Then I will be able to assess if it’s worth switching from FlashDevelop.

It would be great to here what others are using for their own PHP and Flash development.
Please add a comment below.

Some extra resources:
http://www.blog.lessrain.com/?p=381

I had an Input Text and applied some formatting to it, using target.setTextFormat(format). But the format would only work if the textfield had some text in it.

I tried to “hack” around it and leave some text in it, then apply the textformat then remove the text. But when doing: target.text = “”; The formatting was also removed.

I’ve noticed that for “new text” that the user might input, you need to use: target.setNewTextFormat(format)

That worked like a charm, and all my input texts look like they’re supposed to.
I hope someone finds this useful.

But this time, I got a crash when pressing on the little lock icon (in the properties pane) used when resizing the selected asset.

Don’t you hate when this happens:

My system is Windows XP. Does this happen also on the Mac version?

I’m about to buy a new laptop and I would possibly convert to Mac (not just because of this issue). I would like to hear about anyone experiencing several crashes on Mac OSX.

But if you type this in your firefox address bar:

about:cache?device=memory

…you get a list of files, and can right-click them and download them

Another better way to manage this is with this add-on is: Firefox Cache viewer

Updated: Here’s an image of the add-on:
You don’t get a preview of the SWF files, but you do get a preview of images.

You can also search and you get a bit more info of each file.

Testing in the browser gives you no feedback at all, and it just doesn’t work. But if you use the Firefox extension: Flash Tracer, then you get this message:

*** Security Sandbox Violation ***

Here are the livedocs with all the parameters you can use.