FlashGuru Blog

Friday evening at the BBQ, Geoff Bowers and his wife Julie put on a scrumtious spread and live in a very lovely home. Beer was flowing and geeks were chatting, the music was provided by a very powerful alarm clock that was outputting rather crisp/loud music, which confused most of us. Didnt look right! Most of us said our farewells at the end as they were heading off home. Me and a few others decided to give the Casino a whirl back at Star City, the venue of the conference.

We all decided $50 was enough to gamble and more than likely lose but sure enough, i managed to gamle away $160 by the end of the night. We had some real luck on the roulette and spent 3 or 4 hours on it. At one point i had $500+ worth of chips on the table but the dealer changed and then my luck disintegrated and soon the chips were wearing thin, by the end of the night… most of the guys had made a healthy profit. I left with $150, $10 down, but i/we had great fun so it was a small price to pay.

At 4:30am we retired, Peter Hall offered the spare room he had in his hotel apartment, to save me taxiing home. We decided not to sleep and chatted bollox all night (Peter is suprisingly silly when deprived of sleep). Peter and i managed to rack up a $150 phone bill calling the UK to organise our trips to San Fransisco for FlashForward (Peter decided to come along at the spur of the moment). We took lots of photos as the night turned to morning and then ate breakfast on his balcony.

The rest of the day we spent walking around like zombies exploring a little of Sydney. We went on a boat over to the Circle Quays and then another boat over to Manly Island, were we went to an Aquariaum and came face to face with Sharks etc… Lots of photos of the Opera House, The Bridge, the bays and big cruise ships as we sailed to shore. A few more games of pool at the Irish bar in the Conference Center (i believe Peter won 3 games and i won 3, he he…. he is alsorather crap at pool when deprived on sleep) then we split and Peter went off to Geoff Bowers home in a taxi, for his bed for the night.

Today is a lovely day in Sydney, myself, Mark and the other guys in the house went down to the beach and had a little swim. Now we are getting ready for a playboy style party in a mansion by the Tuma Tuma beach. I leave tommorow, so i suspect a presurised hangover will be coming my way.

Id like to say thanks to Geoff Bowers, Deamon and all of the speakers/attendees for making MXDU 2004 a wicked conference! You made us foreigners feel very welcome

Wednesday morning i woke late, missed the first few sessions and then arrived at the conference 15 minutes before my presentation thanks to Sydney traffic and Mark’s lack of driving skills. My presentation started 10 minutes late due to technical difficulties, my laptop display would only display on the projector screen or on the laptop screen as opposed to both, so we had to bring in a monitor so i could actually type and see what i was typing. The presentation was slow starting and then eventually picked up and went really well by the end of it. I showed off some funky examples of what can be done with the JSAPI and attempted to give everybody a basic knowledge of it, such that they can go away and code their own and learn the rest. People seemed to love it and a fair few questions for various people came afterwards, it seems i actually inspired people to come up with ideas for their own extensions, which can only be a good thing.

Following that was lunch, again great food! And then into a Mapping with Flash presentation which was really interesting and gave me some good ideas for applications. Then came John Talbot from Macromedia - another very nice bloke with his presentation of Flex, which turned into more of a Q & A session between myself, Branden, Peter, Jesse and John. I left the presentation very excited about Flex and its future.

Speakers roundtable session followed which was basically all the speakers up on stage for an hour and everybody was asking Macromedia questions so we just had to stear into the crowd and smile. Drinks flowed afterwards with all the speakers chatting about geeky Flash stuff and then off to a lovely Thai restuarant by the harbour where all the bloggers drank beer and ate lovely food. Returning from the dinner we went to an Irish pub in the hotel and played pool until the early hours of the morning. Im now in the Deamon offices with the rest of the speakers at a BBQ, more great food and drunken babble.

Monday me and Mark Fennell (with whom im staying) arrived at the Star City Hotel/Conference centre and after finding myself through the maze of floors and corridors i bumped into Matt Voerman, a very nice bloke and so i joined him and two other peeps for a beer. We then joined the pre-conference Macromedia User Group where i met up with a Mr. Jesse Stratford from actionscripts.org, yet another nice bloke whom i was glad to put a face to a name finally and the notorious Peter Hall - another good man. The presentation was about web standards and i found it rather interesting as the other attendees did, however nothing that cant Mr. Zeldman hasnt already said on his website. (more…)

After one heck of a journey i made it to Sydney, managed to catch a fair few winks on the plane… so not feeling that tired yet. We stopped en-route in Japan for 6 or 7 hours so i got to sample lots of people wearing white masks and some weird food. The japanese signs are ace, so are the toilets which detect when you lift your arse of the seat and then flush it for you. Its a little overcast here today but hopefully the weather will pick up tommorow for the start of the MXDU conference.

Busy couple of weeks ahead. Off on my travels tommorow morning, jetting off over to Sydney for my session at the MXDU conference. Ill be there for a week or so and then fly back to the UK for half a day at which point i leave again to San Fransisco for my session at the FlashForward 2004 conference. All of which i will be posting regular updates & piccies from. Still available on email. Hope to see some of you peeps over there!

A minor version of Actionscript Viewer has been released, version 4.04 which now supports the extraction of True Type Fonts (TTF) from flash movies. As always current customers can download the latest version as a free upgrade.

An exercise based book for Flash newbies that will help you learn Flash MX 2004 from scratch and maintain that knowledge for future use. The book is available now and two sample chapters are available for your viewing pleasure.

It has just been confirmed that i will be running a technical workshop at FlashintheCan 2004 in Toronto, Canada. An interactive session, where we will discuss Extending Flash MX 2004. Come along and see some funky examples of the possibilities/capabilities of the new extensibility layer and questions from the audience are encouraged! Tickets for the conference are on sale now.

In the recent past, i was kindly asked to write the Foreword for a new book by FriendsOfEd, Extending Flash MX 2004: Complete Guide and Reference. A great book that will teach you how to make the most of the new Flash authoring tool and its capabilities.

“I applaud the authors, both experienced developers who have managed to cover such an immense subject, very accurately and concisely creating the only book you will ever need at your desk when creating Flash extensions. I for one am very excited at the thought of all the crazy new features that Flash users will be distributing throughout the Flash Community in the not so distant future, after reading this book.

I wish you luck and happy reading!”

How amazing is this game? Absolutley mind blowingly cool!

The Flash Film Festival finalists are live and kicking. If you have an hour or so, give them a good looking over and make sure to vote for your favourite in the Peoples Choice Award category. Some really nice Flash work in their! My favourite? FastRoots - Mario Kart Style game by Andre Michelle and friends.

Gregg Wygonik reveals how to implement a very useful function of Internet Explorer to save HTML documents from Flash by talking to javascript. Give the article a read, not very useful (unless your website viewers are 100% IE on Windows), but still nice to know about.

StarCity Sydney, Australia, 24th & 25th February 2004

The biggest Macromedia Developers Conference in Asia Pacific. Designers,
developers and managers — if you want to know where the web is headed,
what’s cutting edge and what’s just bleeding — make time for MXDU 2004.

This year we’re running three separate tracks. Client for Flash happy
front end coders like me and you, Dreamweaver designers, Central developers and more.
Server for Flash Remoting, ColdFusion, Flash Comms and J2EE hacks.
Experience for business managers, project leaders and those of us who
just want to see it all come together.

Tickets can be bought on the conference website.