FlashGuru Blog

On the 15th September, Mike Downey - Flash Product Manager will be in London to show us British folk around the soon to be released Macromedia Flash 8 at the London Macromedia User Group. Myself and various others will also be showing off some cool new Flash 8 stuff in 15 minute slots. I will be talking about the new BitmapData API and will deconstruct some of the experiments ive been doing with webcam motion detection. Be sure to attend the event if your in or around town, miss it, miss out!

Tinic Uro, arguably one of the most involved people in the development of the next release of the Flash Player, has his own blog, which at present is regularly updated with very informative posts about all things Flash Player 8. Always a pleasure to read the posts of a very clever man, and find out a little more about what goes on inside the Flash Player aswell as the new capabilities and bug fixes. Now all we need is Gary Grossman, creator of actionscript to set up his own blog, but i guess hes pretty busy, come to think of it, where does Tinic find the time to post?

It’s that time of year again, the Flash Conferences are gearing up for another round of events for 2006. Deamon have confirmed the dates for next years geek gathering in Sydney, Australia. The conference has been renamed webDU to match the current market; no more MX in the Macromedia product names, “hooorrrayyy!”

webDU 2006 will take place in the lavish Star City Casino Complex on the 2nd and 3rd March. If you havent been to this conference before, i seriously recommend you give it a whirl, consider it a holiday.

Australia is definetley a country you should visit, and heres your perfect excuse to fly the distance. Ive been over their for the past two years, and every year i miss the place when i leave. Not only is it hot at that time of year, but Sydney is a great place to visit and the Australian developers are a friendly bunch to say the least. The conference venue and sessions are also top notch, the complimentary food at the venue is delicious and im sure that this years speaker line-up will be as good, if not better than last years.

Check out my photos from last years event to see what fun can be had

XML Objects in Flash Player 8 have an additional property called idMap. This property is an object that contains a reference to each and every xml node in the xml document that has an id attribute defined. The name of each property in the XML.idMap object is the value of the id attribute. So for example if i had an xml node that had an id attribute of 0001:

There would be a property defined in the XML.idMap object called "0001" and its value would be a reference to that particular xml node instance:

You can use this object to quickly locate particular nodes of interest, by simply assigning them a unique id in the xml file.

[update] Turns out it was actually easier to do with actionscript in previous versions of the Flash Player using myXml['0001'] for example. However if you publish your Flash Movie for Flash Player 8, the old way doesnt work anymore, so this is the way to do it instead. [/update]

It's always bugged me that the MovieClip.createEmptyMovieClip() and Movieclip.attachMovie() methods return references to the newly created movie clip's, but Movieclip.createTextField() has always returned undefined. Finally in Flash 8, this is a thing of the past, as this method now also returns a reference to the newly created textfield. It's the small things that count, sometimes and this is one of them. Big-ups to the Macromedia posse.

Tink has put together a clean & comprehensive example of the new File Upload/Download capabilities in Flash 8 and posted it on his new blog. This is one of the many source files that Tink takes you through, step-by-step, in the new book, coming soon called Flash 8 Essentials. Definetley worth a look, check it, fo' shizzle.

Over the past couple of months ive been busy churning out words about Flash 8. Part of my writing duties which are still ongoing (more news soon) include a couple of chapters for a Flash 8 Book conveniently titled "Flash 8 Essentials". The book will be published in November by friendsofed and its aimed at already competent Flash Developers & Designers that want to get up to speed with the generous new feature set that Flash 8 provides.

I have contributed a chapter on the various new Speed Improvements in the Flash Player and another chapter that will bring you up to scratch with the monster that is the new BitmapData api. Matt Voerman, Craig Swann & Glen Rhodes, all veteran authors have also written numerous chapters for the book and my buddy Tink and Todd Yard have also written some great chapters for it. Exciting times!

We have a new Flash 8 Forum up and running on the Flashkit Boards, for... well... discussion about Flash 8 - obviously! Come join us for related discussions.

Mike Downey, Flash Product Manager has posted an article on his blog that outlines some of the lesser-known new features of the new Flash 8 Authoring Environment, complete with screenshots. Check it out for the lowdown from the mothership.

My blogs been awfully quiet for a good while now, but i can finally speak as today Flash 8 was announced. Ive been busy getting up to speed with the new features in the Flash Player. Exciting times, let me tell you! I have 18 Flash 8 Experiments online for public viewing, that showcase the new features of Maelstrom. Check them out here.

Macromedia today announced the release of Studio 8, a whole new range of web development tools, including updates to Dreamweaver, Fireworks and of course our beloved Flash. Flash 8 is the biggest release of Flash to date, its huge and has lots of new features that im sure will spark a new wave of creativity throughout the community, i for one am very excited. To find out what is new in Flash 8, checkout Mike Downey's article on Macromedia Devnet.

So, i recieved the Macromedia Shwag Baton from Eric Dolecki today. Thanks dude. I have quite a bit of Macromedia Shwag, mostly collected at conferences, but some recieved via post and other means.
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