I have been busy re-writing our AS2 libraries to AS3 this week and encountered something that will easily trip up most people. And of course I didn’t see it in any documentation anywhere. Basically the issue is that in AS2 when you navigated to a frame using mc.gotoAndStop() you would have access to all the elements on that frame. But now in AS3 they aren’t available right away. I found a great post by Senocular that explains this and shows the solution. Check out the post here.

Wow what a night. We where nominated for 4 awards and won them all. A site we did for Discovery Channel’s Worst Handyman show won best convergence. Lifesavers Mini Putt won Best Game which is up on Candystand.com This is one of my favorite jobs that we worked on last year and I didn’t even work on it. The 3D work and textures are amazing. It was built in Virtools, which delivers XBox quality online. We also won Best Canadian Studio. This one was the most important of the night. We have been nominated the last 4 years and haven’t won. Joel said it best during our acceptance speech that we where the Martin Scorsese of the design industry. I also won a personal award for Best Canadian Developer. But I really share that award with everyone I work with at Fuel. It’s really a team effort on every job at Fuel and we are all important pieces to creating the great work that we do.

The host of the night was Amber MacArthur from City TV and I think she had a great time. She did a quick interview with me near the end of the night which really shows how much fun we had. You can watch the video here.

I had every intention on posing everyday but as Keith mentioned internet was a tad sketchy, but really it was ok because it made me stay off my laptop. I have to say though that this was maybe the best FiTC so far. The new venue at the Hilton was great. The layout was better and everyone had more room to move about the conference even though it had the highest attendance.

Here is a break down of presentations.

Day 1

John Grden & Chris Allen’s Red5 presentation was pretty good. But man John really loves the Rush, and he can really play guitar. They showed some of the midi and recording capabilities of Red5 which are pretty cool.

Then I went and saw Hoss Gifford’s Based on a True Story. Hoss is a great speaker and a lot of fun. He’s always been hilarious when he hosts the FiTC awards and it carries over into his sessions. He talked about creating narratives for your content, and did a pretty good job of illustrating his point by creating stories for videos that where just your every day viral video. And by the end of it he had you thinking that it was true. And Hoss’s rants are always a treat. If you ever run into him ask him about his thoughts on Flashturbation.

Evan Roth’s Graffiti 9 to 5 presentation was one of my favorite sessions at the conference. I would talk more about what he showed but it’s really better to just go and experience it for yourself. Pretty much everything he showed is on his site http://graffitiresearchlab.com/

Then came the Keynote. They didn’t really show or say anything new, so if you read the blogs and have read about Apollo or CS3 then nothing was really that new. The one thing that they mentioned though is that for Flash Player 10 they are working on a profiler so you will be able to see what’s in memory, what objects are still being used, etc.

Day 2

I wasn’t feeling too hot in the morning so I missed the first couple of sessions. But I did make it to Robert Penner’s Session where he showed his new Motion features in CS3. They may not be some of the most sought after feature upgrades but I have to say they are great. I really love the copy as motion feature.

In the next set of sessions I jumped in between 2 of them.

Grant Skinner’s session on the new AS3 components was great. It was really great, as Aral put it, to hear about them from the horses mouth. I have to say creating the components is a pretty big undertaking. The biggest thing is trying to make them work for a majority of the people, which, I can only imagine, is really hard because everyone has different needs and wants different features. But I have to say I have they did a great job on them. I think they meet all of their objectives, which where, easily skinnable, extendable, and light weight.

I also jumped in on Danny Stillion from IDEO’s session. He talked about their process and showed how they prototype and wireframe their ideas so they can get to the best possible project.

Then I went to Andreas Muller’s presentation and really enjoyed it. He talked about interactive design and showed us the projects that he has been working on. He also had some of his interactive installations set up in a room at the conference. If you are interested in interactive design or installations I recomend checking out his work at http://www.nanikawa.com/

Kenny Bunch’s presentation Time Shifting Entertainment was great as well. He works with a lot of entertainment companies and showed what he is working on for them and also talked about where the industry is going. He also showed a little application that he built for the PS3.

I skipped out on John Maeda’s presentation because I was completely exhausted and he is presenting at OFFF in Barcelona in a couple of weeks, so I am planning on catching him there. But everyone who I talked to about it said it was great.

Day 3

Keith Peter’s Apollo presentation was good as well. One cool thing he said was that you can turn any Apollo app into a screensaver by renaming the file with a .scr extension.

Then I checked out the Chumby presentation. It’s going to be shipping in late June when Flash Lite 3 comes out and I am really looking forward to getting my hands on one. They talked a lot about the specs and how the system is going to work. If you don’t know what Chumby is I suggest you check out their site. I think most of what they talked about is up there.

One of my other favorite presentations was Marcos Weskamp’s session. Marcos creates some of the best data visualization pieces. His most recent work is the Wieden and Kennedy site, which is the coolest agency site out there. I had a chance to talk to him later that night which was pretty cool. If you aren’t familiar with his work you can see some of it at http://www.marumushi.com/

I got stuck out at lunch and missed Carlos Ulloa’s Papervision3D session. It was one that I was really looking forward to and kind of disappointed that I missed it.

And to wrap up the conference I sat in on Stacey Mulcahy’s AS2 to AS3 session. It was a must for any developer looking to make the switch to AS3. She hit on all the important points and had some great videos that helped lighten up the room.

Awards show

Ok this needs to be a separate post.

Well I have had a couple of days to play with Flash CS3 and I have to say it’s awesome. Just the UI is worth the upgrade in my opinion. But I found it pretty funny that the first file I ever opened or compiled with it was for FP6 and AS1. I had to laugh a little. Trying to go back and find code and classes in those files was an absolute nightmare. It’s really amazing we ever coded like that. The one thing I wish it had though was the Flex Builder script editor, with code hinting on custom classes and real-time error checking.

One thing to take note of is the target .fla dropdown in the script editor. I have had it default to the wrong file a couple of times without me knowing and having a bunch of errors happen that I couldn’t figure out. The other thing that I have forgotten to do is put “public” in front of “class” when creating classes. If you don’t declare what type of class it is, the compiler will throw an error saying it can’t find it.

I am really looking forward to doing some client projects with it and working with our designers once they get their upgrades.  It’s a great update and kudos to everyone at Adobe.

I finally got my first Apollo App to a point where I want to share it. It was also my first Flex project as well so the code might not be all that great or sloppy. There is a link at the end of the post to download the source as well. If you see that I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, by all means let me know. I know there are a couple of hacks in there to fix some weird things that I encountered. Overall my experience developing for Apollo was pretty good. I am looking forward to Apollo growing up and becoming a full release.

Fuel To Do Apollo App
Source

If you are running Vista and have the Flash 8 IDE installed on your machine it takes forever when you click on a movieclip to edit it. Here is how to fix it.

Right click on the shortcut to Flash (or the Flash exe file itself should do the same), click Properties, go to the Compatibility tab, and check the box next to “Disable desktop composition” — this helped a lot for me.

It took me a while to find that online so I hope it helps.

Over the Easter weekend I upgraded from XP Pro to Vista Business edition and I am really liking it so far. At first I wasn’t sure what to think, but the more I use it the more I like it. I find it’s somewhere in between XP and OSX. There are a few quirks but once you get used to them you really don’t notice them. And the only reason you notice them in the first place is because it’s acts differently then you are used to in XP.

But  below are some things I ran into while installing it and the solutions.

FlexBuilder
When I first  ran  Flex Builder it gave me an error and wouldn’t start up.  I thought something might be up so I re-installed it and the same thing happened. After some searching I found that you have to right click on the .exe and select “Run As Administrator”. You only have to do that the first time you run it though. And then when I got it working it decided to use the French Canadian Keyboard layout instead of the English one. I didn’t even have that layout selected but it was still using it. So I actually went in a deleted the entry from the Keyboard utility app in the Control Panel. It was really weird because every other app used the right layout.

Annoying Permission Popups
When you are installing a lot of apps at once you get these stupid permission popups asking you to allow the install. Think of that Mac and PC commercial by Apple where the security guard is standing behind PC. It’s pretty much like that. So to turn it off check out this link to turn it off.

Firefox
While I was customizing Firefox I deleted all of the bookmarks in the bookmark tab. If it’s empty the page while keep jumping on you. So just make sure you always have 1 bookmark in the tab.

Acrobat Reader
If you have turned off the annoying permissions popups you will get a “Temp Drive Full” when trying to install Acrobat Reader. The only way to fix this as far as I know is to temporarily turn on the permissions.

Now the only thing I still haven’t figured out is how to uninstall the Vista apps like Windows Calendar, MovieMaker, Mail etc… Really it’s not that big of a deal but it would be nice to get ride of them.

I hope this helps make installing Vista a little easier. And if you aren’t sure on whether you should upgrade I would recommend it.