If you are planning on attending the Flashforward2007 Boston conference and have not yet bought your ticket check out Thumbplay’s Widget Festival for a chance to win free admission, travel and accommodations.

The contest ends Aug. 31st, 2007 and for complete details see the Thumbplay website at http://partners.thumbplay.com/widget_festival

This summer two new Flash books are coming out that I had the pleasure of getting involved with as a technical reviewer. They are both very good books and will be excellent additions to my bookshelf.

The first book is “Flash Video for Professionals” written by two very good friends of mine Lisa Larson and Renee Constantini. The book is well written and has many examples on all aspects of Flash Video development in both ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0. It’s a great way for developers not yet using AS3 to get started with Flash Video today and yet be able to continue to get more out of the book as they delve into AS3.

The second book is written by a colleague I haven’t yet met in person but have read many things by him before. William Sanders’ “ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques” covers all of the popular Design Patterns and how they can help solve common problems in Flash and Flex applications.

I’m now teaching a “Macromedia Flash: Animation and Introduction to ActionScript” at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The class is a continuing education class with 3 CEUs and meets on eight Saturdays 10:000am to 2:00pm June 9th through July 28th, 2007.

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Alessandro Crugnola posted another sweet Firefox extension on his
blog. The plugin installs a small icon to your browser’s status bar. Clicking the icon opens a menu where you can choose different Flash Player versions. After selecting one, your browser now acts as if it had that player installed. I tested it out with a handful of pages/player choices and it seems to work as expected. It’s a very cool plugin. Alessando also wrote the Flash Tracer extension as well.

In trying to create a read-only property for your class, you declare a private variable with a public getter. By omitting the public setter, you feel confident that you’ve just created a read-only property. However, not all variable types are created equal. In this entry I’ll examine a case where a property mistaken for being read-only is actually modified outside it’s class and how to avoid this gotcha.

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One of the new features included with ActionScript 3.0 is the Timer class. The new Timer class is essentially an encapsulated setInterval command with an intuitive stopwatch-like interface. Creating a new Timer object requires two parameters: delay and repeat count. Once instantiated, you assign one or more listeners to the Timer which listen for events. After assigning listeners, you use the Timer object by calling it’s start(), reset() and stop() methods.

My first thought when I saw the Timer class was “Sweet, I wish this was available in AS2.” Well, it didn’t take long for me to start thinking about how I could recreate this class in AS2. A short while later I had something similiar.

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With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This is part three of the tutorial about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

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With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This is part two of the tutorial about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

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With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This tutorial is about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

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I just got back from Pearson VUE where I took the Certified Flash Professional 8 Exam (9A0-311). To take the test I was placed at a private workstation in an empty room after having my cell phone confiscated. The same room coincidentally, that I took the Macromedia Certified Web Developer Exam in just a few years back.

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