Flash Coder

The London Flash Developers and Designers user group meets at 7pm on the 26th this month (that’s this Thursday) at the South Bank University. It’s just round the corner from the Elephant and Castle tube station.

This month I will be giving a talk on Moving to OOP. So if you’re a beginner or intermediate developer, or a Designer with an interest in the code that controls and enhances much of your designs and you want to know how to move to Object Oriented Development and Design then come along.

You need to register to come along so get to the site and click on the big red “Join us” button. or go direct to the membership page. You can connect with over 350 fellow developers and designers.

It’s in the Keyworth Center on the 1st floor. On the map, that’s building no. 10. (Keyworth Street, SE1)

It doesn’t normally meet so late in the month but unfortunately there were extenuating circumstances. See you all there

The Logic Bureau just posted on this user group. It’s not a new user group and though it has more than 350 members it is still relatively under the radar. I know I didn’t know about this group until a couple of months ago. They are an excellent group for beginners and intermediates, with incredible on site facilities like fully equipped developer/designer labs and lecture rooms available for the members, enabling them to not only hear great speakers but also to get their hands dirty in a work lab environment. There’s lots more but I won’t repeat what’s on the Logic Bureau site. Have a read and get along.

Roll up, roll up. No not you sir. The excellent Flash and Flex Developer magazine that I semi regularly bang on about is now releasing back issues free on line. Their content is truly great, covering less for the beginner and instead catering for the more experienced developers amongst us. Take a look at the content synopsis on the cover or any issue and you’ll definitely find something more advanced that you wanted to learn.

June issue Free for Download now
http://www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/back-issues/issue/1015.html

A colleague and good friend of mine, Rob Bateman, whom many of you will either know by reputation (the reputation of being a Flash platform 3D guru) or will have seen him speak at variouse high profile conferences, is running another of the very popular Essential Away3D Techniques courses in conjunction with the London Flash Platform Users Group (LFPUG).

It will take place on the 26th and 27th November in Clerkenwell Road, EC1 for the paltry sum of £235 which includes all taxes, lunch and tea/coffee all day. This is the first course to focus purely on the Away3d engine, and should offer the opportunity to delve a bit further into the tricks and techniques at your disposal for producing 3d content in Flash. Full details of the the two days can be found here. Places will go fast so sign up quickly.
Overview
Two days of practical tips and tricks for producing Flash 3D content using the Away3D engine.

Learn how to maximise the potential of Away3D with the co-founder and chief architect Rob Bateman. Old and new features will be covered in detail, including the latest updates available in the recently announced 2.2 release. Topics range from generic 3d concepts to detailed walk-throughs of real-world techniques designed to aid 3D design and development in Flash. Full source code is provided for all explanatory demos.

This course is aimed at developers and code-oriented designers interested in using real-time 3D in their flash work with the Away3D engine. Minimum requirements: Introductory or Intermediate level knowledge of Actionscript 3.0 and Flex Builder/FDT/Flash CS3.

I was writing some control classes in AS 3 the other day and I realised I needed to create a custom event. I hadn’t done this in quite a while as my new duties don’t give me as much time to code as I’d like . I had forgoten just how different it is from AS2. So, for my own sake (as the old memory isn’t what it used to be) and for those of you who don’t already know, here’s how to create and dispatch a custom event in ActionScript 3.0. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people have been asking me recently about Singletons so I thought I’d post on it. A number of developers have written on the Singleton class/pattern. Recently Grant Skinner wrote on the problems of using them in AS3, but I’ll get to that. I personally learnt my Singleton implementation methods from old skool Java developers and so far it’s been bullit proof, easily repeated, quick and reliable. But I thought I’d touch on not just what it is and how to make a Singleton work, but also some of the logic behind why a Singleton is built the way it is (so let’s hope I do a good job). Read the rest of this entry »

So they said “we need a ComboBox and we need it to have ‘these’ graphics and ‘these’ event colours and we need to be able to set the dropdown width from the component Property inspector. And we might think of other stuff to, so be quick about it”.

Read the rest of this entry »