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.

The Fooies rock big time!

Saturday 03 May 2008 – highlights:
They started the show with Let it die.
They played for almost 3 hours.
Pat Smear was invited
A special guest guitarist performed the Ballad of the Beaconsfield miners with Dave Grohl.
Everlong started acoustic and solo by Dave, and the rest of the band joined at the end.
The crowd was full-on! I almost lost my voice cheering
They did all their classic songs, even Big Me.
Dave Grohl was really funny. It looks like he likes playing in Sydney.

My favourites (videos on youtube) :

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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.

Click here to see the Flex 3 new features.

After seeing what AIR is capable of I’m feeling sorry for Multidmedia Zinc.

I got really excited with AIR, though I have been using some apps, like twhirl… I’m actually writing this blog post with an AIR app, it’s an Adobe AIR Sample “Bee” on labs and it includes the source code.

** UPDATE **
I couldn’t manage to publish with BEE, I was getting a malformed XML error from the publish XML-RPC command. Anyway, the BEE App looks a quite good considering it’s a labs sample. I reckon mixing it up with buzzword would be awesome and also adding drag and drop functionality to publish images. I might look into the source code and give it a try.

Here’s a small video that I took with my mobile at the beginning of Danny’s preso (automatically converted from mobile .3gp to flv by flashCMS):

** UPDATE **
Thanks Joshua for pointing out the slides from the tour by Ben Forta.

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:

It was a very fast paced game, they were defending quite well and we weren’t connecting. We had a lucky goal almost near the end of the match, and they managed to score on the last second.

Soundtrack of video is: The Offspring. The kids aren’t alright.
Video edition: I added each of our players names, and did a couple of slow-motions and repeats. And played a bit with the Flashback transition.

We are going to be taking a camera each week so we can get more cools shots.
Thanks Rafa for late night video editing!