It’s less than a month until the AIR gang hops back on the trains for leg 2 of the On AIR Tour. We start out on June 2nd in beautiful Stockholm! There are still seats available in many cities so go on over and register! There is no excuse not to come.
Lee
There is now a new Brimelow blogging about Flash! My older brother Chris has started a new blog devoted to learning ActionScript 3. He has a long track record of traditional web development but he has finally seen the light and has started learning ActionScript 3 ;-).
Chris just posted a video player that mimics the look and feel of the Hulu player which I love. I especially like the timecode hover tooltip that follows your mouse on the scubber bar. Go on over and check out the player and also check out the new blog.
I have to say that one of my favorite Flash blogs is that of Balind Sieber from Red Interactive. I particularly like it because it focus on the design-side of our favorite technology. I’m happy to see that Red is now taking their UFC sites into the 3rd dimension using Papervision3D. John Iacoviello made a guest post on Balind’s blog giving a bunch of great tips for optimization in Papervision3D. Check out John’s excellent portfolio site as well.
Check out the cool 3D transitions on the UFC 84 site. I particularly like the curved fight history panel which is shown in the screenshot below.
Lee
Over the last few days I’ve been checking out TextMate to see how useful it is for Flash development. I can now report that I’ve found the most versatile text editor in existence. There are so many possibilities with this tool simply because it’s so extensible. I plan on eventually doing a tutorial on using it but for now, here are some things that I’ve learned.
The first step is obviously to download the latest version of TextMate. From there you should download the ActionScript 3 bundle which adds a whole host of templates, commands, and snippets that will help you write ActionScript with ease. This blog post has all the details of installing it. After installing the bundle, you can unleash the real power of TextMate by modifying the bundle and adding your own commands and snippets.
I added a command that allows you to hit Cmd-Enter to automatically save your project and switch to Flash to test your movie. This based on a command in the old ActionScript bundle but I have modified it to fit my needs. You can see the details of how to setup it up in the screenshot below.
I highly recommend anyone on OS X to download this editor and check it out as I think I will be doing a lot of my coding in it from now on.
Lee
I just finished uploading part two of the object-oriented scrollbar tutorial to gotoAndLearn(). In this video I show you how to take the timeline code created in part one and abstract it into several reusable ActionScript 3 classes. I also go over the basics of creating and dispatching custom events which is a key skill to learn if you want to take your skills to the next level.
Enjoy the tutorial!
Lee
Lee Brimelow is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe focusing on the Flash, Flex, and AIR developer communities.
