I’d like to open up the site so that other flashers can submit tutorials. It would be especially great to get some big name Flash experts to contribute. All you would get in return is the satisfaction of providing free learning and helping out up and coming Flash users. I’m putting together some author guidelines that I’ll post soon.

But just email me or leave a comment if you would be interested.

Thanks
Lee

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gotoAndLearn() now has a forum where we can discuss the tutorials and just Flash in general. There will also be contests and giveaways occasionally. Come over at http://www.gotoandlearn.com/forum.

Hope to see you there
Lee

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Many people who have watched the Sending Mail with PHP tutorial at gotoAndLearn() have emailed me saying that the resulting email content is empty. This was my mistake. The version of PHP that my server is running allows you to just reference your posted information directly. So I just used $email to retrieve that value.

The correct way to do it is to use the $_POST[] syntax to get those values. So for the email you would say $_POST['email'].

If you do that for all of the sent data it should then work.

Sorry about that
Lee

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As mentioned in an earlier post, I was interviewed by the good folks at Techsmith, the company who makes Camtasia. You can check out the screencast here or just click the image below.

Lee

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On March 9th I’ll be giving my first live Breeze presentation on the topic Flash 8 filters. This will be my first experience with using Breeze and I’m curious how it’ll be. Most of the Breeze presentations I’ve seen have been somewhat buggy with lots of technical glitches. I’ll be giving the presentation to the Macromedia, woops I mean Adobe user group at flashusersgroup.org. Anybody can see it so go to their site and RSVP if you’re interested. It starts at 5:00PM Pacific Time / 8:00 PM Eastern Time.

Lee

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Got a good night’s sleep finally and managed to get some breakfast at the hotel. Plain bagel, yogurt, and OJ. Dieting sucks but I have to get my weight down if I want to last longer than 5 minutes in BJJ. Took the shuttle bus to the convention center and the driver mentioned that he wanted to get into design and was learning Photoshop. After talking with Michael Ninness, he agreed to give him a free 3 month subscription to Lynda.com. They really are the coolest company I’ve ever worked with. I can relate to the driver’s situation because I was a security guard learning HTML when I landed my first gig.

The first session I went to was with Hillman Curtis, who is has been called the master of web video. Well I’m sorry to say that I found his session really boring and wasn’t that impressed with his work. Typical New York artsy fartsy stuff. Just not my thing.

Next up I checked out the Techsmith presentation which was good but I basically know Camtasia inside and out already so I basically just checked email. Then they gave us free lunch in the expo hall and most importantly, coffee. I basically just found an empty room and chilled out for a while.

Up next I wandered into the Deconstructing Nitendogs site session. They have a very nice site, but to be honest, by that point I was daydreaming and getting sleepy. You wouldn’t think so, but going to a conference is VERY tiring. Just trying to absorb so much material in so little time is tough.

I sat through Beau Amber’s GIS mapping thingy but it was some pretty technical shit. All I took away from the session was that I don’t want to work with maps. His work was really impressive though.

Last but not least, I sat through Steve Kilisky’s After Effects session. It showed some cool AE features but didn’t really go into how it can be integrated with Flash.

Then there was the raffle and giveaway. No I didn’t win anything. That’s fine for me because I have most books and software anyway. If the tone of this posting sounds down it’s becasue I’m literally falling asleep as I write this. But just wanted to get it out tonight.

Got to talk to Lynda for a few minutes after the conference about future projects and there’s some really exciting stuff coming up.

All in all, Lynda.com did an amazing job at revamping the conference. It felt like a totally different conference. The venue was great, the sessions were good, And I met a lot of nice people.

It’s bed time. But I’m friggin’ starving. I barely ate all day. Should I just got to bed or make some food? Why am I asking you this?

Night,
Lee

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Finally got some good sleep. I think I slept right through my wakeup call so I had to take a later shuttle to the convention center. After getting some Starbucks I headed up to see Chris Orwig’s presentation on portfolios. He is such an amazing teacher and really knows how to captivate the audience. I’ve met Chris before down in Ojai when we were both recording Lynda.com titles. I thought it was a great session.

Next up was a session on sound design that was pretty good but I was hoping for more actual techniques oh how to create sounds, rather than when you should use them.

My favorite session at every Flash Forward is the Big Spaceship session with Garrett Nantz. He showed off some really cool stuff from the upcoming DaVinci Code movie website. The session basically focused on how they do most of their cool stuff in After Effects and then export to Flash video. But I just love his presentations and he seems like a really nice guy.

During the the first session of the day I met up with Dru Kepple, who has used gotoAndLearn() before, works in Hood River, Oregon at a company named Summit. Small world as that’s the name of the group I work in at Stanford. I went out for lunch with Dru and a bunch of his coworkers and reminisced about some old snowboarding videos. Nice meeting you Dru!

After that I ventured into the expo hall and met with the folks from Techsmith, the company that makes Camtasia. I showed them my site and they were thilled with it and are going to use it as a case example. They also interviewed me for a screencast which should be online tomorrow. I post the link when I get it. They also asked me to be on their advisory board which of course I accepted since I use Camtasia nearly everyday. I’m looking forward to working with them in the future!

Then I checked out the JSAPI session which was very informative and showed some cool ways to speed up productivity. But I doubt I will ever mess with it. Too many other things to learn

I had a meeting with Michael Ninness, who’s the executive director at Lynda.com, and came up with some cool projects for the future. You’ll have to wait to see though as I obviously can’t blog about them. But Michael is probably the most down-to-earth person I’ve ever met and I’m sure I’ll be working with him in some form for quite a long time.

Next up was the film festival. It was really well done but I was a little too tired to enjoy it that much. I think most of the winners deserved to win which is always nice to see. Lynda pulled off an amazing conference this year and really raised the bar. Thanks Lynda!

I’m now in the internet lounge blogging this while everyone is at the after party. One thing I learned about myself years ago, is that I’m not a party person. To some that might sound anti-social but it’s really just a personality type of thing. If I know you well, I’ll act like a maniac. But forced socialization is something I refuse to do. Plus I don’t drink. I prefer prescription medication. Why pay all kinds of money and load on all those calories when I can just pop a xanax?

But seriously, congratulations to all the winners and I hope everyone is having a blast at the party. Hey, to me, doing this is a blast. Different strokes for different folks.

Gotta go catch the shuttle bus so see you tommorow!
Lee

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