Last week just blew my mind: Four intense days at the FlashForum Conference in Cologne with tons of input from workshops, lectures and discussions just maxed out my brain capacities.
It all came in a bundle with some partying, of course, and to top it off, I gave a presentation on multi user application development with Flash. Incredibly exiting days! I put up the slides for the lecture as PDFs and they are waiting for you to download them.

Thanks again to Marc Thiele and Sascha Wolter, the two brains behind the FlashForum, for organizing this terrific event. Already looking forward to seeing you all again next year!

Since from June 1st, I’ll - once again - be working as a Freelance Flash and Flex developer, I created the page to promote my services and skills.

It’s all just plain (but validated) XHTML and CSS and I might create a Flash version in the future, but for now I’m quite happy with a search engine friendly and barrier-free page. I’d rather invest my time and more challenging projects… by the way, did I mention I am looking for jobs for July and August? :)

Right now, the public programm hasn’t really been updated but for anyone wondering: my lecture will be held right after lunch on day two (29th). Members of the Swiss Flash User Group (SFUG) will get a discount on registration fees. Just contact me, if you want to know how.

Hope to see you around!

Thibault is currently working on a book on ActionScript development, so, he didn’t have time to publish neither the component nor the class it is based on, so far. So, I started pondering on a concept of my own, experimented a little and finally got totally caught up in the challenge of creating a component that highly improves vector based animations by rasterizing them. So far, I was able to make some tests that affirm my basic concepts but there still is a lot to be done. Plus, I have several approaches in mind that can be derived from this concept. I want to evaluate which of them make most sense in the different use cases before publishing any details.

Thibault, thanks for this fruity inspiration! I’m so excited about this :)

At least, after a few days on the couch trying to recover from the camp, I was able to write a few lines on the Liip blog expressing a critical view on AIR’s potential.

And since I assume, winning is overrated anyway, I’ll just finish up that game in the next months and simply pretend I won that ultra smooth, super light and shiny MacBook Air … oh, crud, that’s not the same!

Since the workshop is being followed by a 24h contest in building the coolest Air application, we’ve been racking our brains to find ideas for suiting programs we could enter with. While my buddy Sandro still seems unsatisfied with his options, I’ve given up thinking and decided for a small desktop game thing. Don’t wanna go into detail too much, right now, but it seems I’m gonna be using Milgra to implement multiuser interaction.

Milgra is a small lightweight open source java server that I recently stumbled upon. So far it has only reached version 0.5 but that one already comes with a good bunch of needfull features and handy examples on how to use it right away. It seems quite easy to setup and use for as little as I’m gonna be needing. Red5, on the contrary, seems way to heavy for my needs.

Can’t wait to dig into this and develop my first multiplayer game *shiny eyes*

But my own game, that I decided to call “BubbleMath”, advanced pretty well during the last weeks and I put some extra attention to the engine that’s behind the game: I added a ScreenController and AbstractScreens, which allow building static menus easily. I hope to be able to post a first screenshot soon. Right now, I’ll have to work on a quick slideshow player for my parents big birthday this weekend. Pew!

In other news… I got an invitation to the Adobe AIRcamp, Switzerland, which takes place in Zurich on 28th and 29th of February, and signed up right away. Besides a six hour AIR workshop the free event includes a 24 hour contest in developing an AIR application. The best program does not only win a Macbook but will also be promoted at this year’s best of swiss web awards in March. Only one thing left to say: Wheeee! :)

So, time to practice my Flex skills, which reminds me: my Liip colleague Sandro and I will be giving speeches about two ActionScript 3 workflow approaches at the Swiss Flash user group meeting in Zurich next Monday. One will consider the basic workflow setup with FDT and one will be about our recently evolved Flex template approach. So if you’re around and interested, sign up today! :)

FDT lets you define templates for frequently used code snippets that you can call via a key word you define.

For example: when you type “fori” and hit CTRL+Space FDT will suggest to write a regular for-loop for you and guide you from one crucial element of the loop to the other e.g. to change the suggested index or array the loop is performed on. Isn’t that great?
And it gets even better: you can create new templates and call them via the keyword you choose. Never want to write a singleton from scratch again? Here is how it goes:

Open Eclipse and choose Window -> Preferences -> FDT -> Editor -> Templates . Here you can define new templates or reconfigure the existing ones. Or you just import other peoples templates. Like mine :)

I recently created a resources page and placed a zip package of XMLs with my most frequently used code templates on it. Among an improved for-loop the package contains a complete singleton template in AS3 (using the enforcer class approach), a getter/setter combo and a for loop backwards as this (according to Colin Moock) seems to perform better than the regular forward loop. I use it whenever sequence doesn’t matter. Don’t be surprised that the loops might look a little strange since I modified them under performance aspects.

Note: the template definitions are - as much else with Eclipse plugins - workspace dependent, meaning, that you will have to set them up for each of your workspaces. You can use the export/import function to distribute the templates among your existing workspaces. However, I’d advise you to always keep a clean, fully set up workspace as a backup in case one crashes (every once in a while Eclipse gets bored with life). This will save you from setting up all of your FDT and view details over and over again. It’s enough work to set up the projects again.