Want an advanced copy of Flash CS4?
OK I know that is a stupid question. Of course you do. Well I’m very excited to announce that Adobe will hosting a free Flash 10 Camp at the Adobe SF office on the weekend of October 10th. This will be barcamp-style event where you get to see sessions by Adobe employees (myself included) and also get to take part in some actual development using Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10. Not surprisingly we will also be holding some contests for prizes, including fresh-of-press versions of Creative Suite 4.This is a full weekend of Flash 10 training with a price that is hard to beat. Remember people are paying tons of money to go to Flash conferences so this is truly a steal. If you live anywhere in the vicinity of Northern California and don’t come to this event, all I can say is that they are doing wonderful things in mental institutions these days. OK that’s a Seinfeld line but it’s very fitting in this case. I’ll be doing a keynote on Sunday morning (the 12th). We will also be broadcasting certain sections online if you live too far away to attend in person.
Go and register right now before it fills up!
Lee
Damn! I knew I had to be American!
Quentin. Tell me about it
HA, good thing I work across the street!
See you then.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I’m going to be out of town that weekend. I love Adobe camps. *grumbles*
Damm, the stuff here at Brazil is commonly outdated. I will check the videos to see what you guys are doing. Can you show good and long videos? Thanks!
Funny that this would happen the one weekend I’m NOT in Northern California!
I want to be there! Can any one bring up about 800 euro’s, to coverr flight expenses, I already got a place to stay with a good friend, so I don’t have hotel expenses. Tickets are between 660- to 900, where those starting at six hundred with tranfers, and from 750 onward, direct flights. So can some please bring up some money?
ohh man! just registered…hope i get accepted!
I would love to see some event like this in Europe.
cmon ppl…. u doing this only in US… do it in Easter Europe one day… we need your support!!!
p.s. tons of jealousy…
Adobe don’t wanna open a branch in France ? You personnaly don’t wanna to comeback in Paris again ?
How much poor and cute little kitty need i to kill to make you come make this camp in Paris ?
It’s time for Adobe to give equal time to the East Coast. We need a camp in the NYC area, post haste (if not only for the free software…. eh hem, I mean the knowledge.)
What Willem said. Only, more specific. Like, in Germany. Like, in Frankfurt am Main. Like, right now!
Yeah, we need these in Europe too. The video showing the new features is great, thanks for producing that. I’d love to see how we can manipulate the IK within AS3 rather than with the timeline or at runtime as shown. I noticed the names of the IK root etc as you were clicking around, are these what you’d call in your code to start tweening the joint rotations etc?
Enjoy the event.
Just signed up – Hope I get accepted soon because i’ll have to fly into SF the day of…
I hope Adobe will start to share some of the love outside of their back doors. While I know it’s impossible for them to replicate everything outside Adobe’s buildings, but those that attend these camps really get a leg-up in the industry. With the short registration time and limited registration, it’s hard for us to make arrangements to get out there….
The more I simmer with the rumor that CS4 won’t feature custom class/package code-hinting or introspection, the more flustered I get. Why not? Would it really be so difficult for CS4 to compile an XML doc with public members whenever I save my fla? Im already telling my fla which packages to import in the actionscript settings. I’m giving it a document class. Im using access modifiers. Come on, during an fla save, walk my doc class, custom imports, public methods, and save to an XML doc. Now load the XML doc into CS4’s code hinting and search classes. You could code this into the app inside of 1-3 days. Easy peasy.
Lee
I agree with you on the custom code hinting. I am a little reluctant to assume that it is “easy peasy” but I am really disappointed that this wasn’t a priority. It makes me a little worried that Adobe isn’t really listening.
But… having said that, it seems that each version of the software has a “focus” to a large degree. For example, a few versions ago when ActionScript 2 came out, I am thinking that the designers who were not coders thought that it was a version not worth investing in. But once those designers looked a little deeper, they realized that there were features like added smart components that were skinnable and blend modes and video with alpha. Suddenly, it was less about being a version only for developers and more about being ton of new feature rich advancements but not all of their wishlist got addressed.
I think this version is the same. It feels designer-heavy focused to me, but once I look a little deeper, I can see that pretty much all of these new tricks are scriptable. This is going to mean a crazy set of new eyes-candy for our clients and fun in designing and developing for us!
I digress. At this point I still agree that getting the ActionScript editor updated feels like obvious low-hanging “fruit” on the vine of possible enhancements.
Here is a truely raw guessimation of what this conversation probably looks like inside of Adobe on this topic:
========================================
(evangelist)
“Well, they keep talking about wanting to get better code development tools in the IDE. I mean, it seems that the hard core developers are using tools like Eclipse or FlashDevelop or SEPY to do what the Flash should but cannot do. What is up with that? We should be leading not following, right? Why don’t we just get code hinting working?”
(Flash Product Development Manager)
“Here’s the thing. Everybody knows that Flex has the development IDE nailed. And that irritates Flash IDE Code Developers because they want those tools in Flash. At this point, we have to unify this experience, and that isn’t a simple ‘code-hinting’ thing. Look at how we just finally got the Fireworks aesthetic to unify with the rest of the Creative Suite? If we are going to update the Flash development environment then we have to get it up to Flex or we will fall short.”
========================================
That is my best guess. But in the mean time, it would be cool if Adobe would throw a couple days at maybe adding an extension to Flash to do what you are suggesting as a stop-gap.
Hey Steve. I don’t see how it’s wouldn’t be easy, unless their classes handling code-hinting data are poorly written. During a compile Flash is already doing much of the work, checking our classes, functions, modifiers, and even more. Why not output that info to a simple XML doc, which could be as basic as what’s below, and is loaded into Flash’s code-hinting data class. Really shouldn’t be difficult, right? And after every save, or compile have Flash update the code-hinting, or have a command for you to manually update it with the classpath’s specified in your .fla, and Flash Preference settings. It seems like all the hard work is done, and they just need to add it.
<CUSTOM PACKAGES
<PACKAGE COM.SWEETNESS
<CLASS A
<PUBLIC
<FUNCTION A
</CLASS A
<CLASS B
</CLASS B
</PACKAGE COM.SWEETNESS
</CUSTOM PACKAGES
That said, I am a nub, I don’t know the Flash IDE codebase, and am assuming it shouldn’t be very difficult. So I really don’t know.
Hey guys .. did anyone of you showed up there tonight … I will be there tomorrow again …. if any of you guys will be there maybe we can meet up
[...] added. I didn’t see any additions for the motion features, but I had also previously seen Lee’s post on Flash Camp in San Francisco. Fortunately, I live close to San Francisco and I decided to head [...]