Thanks so much to the Nashville 2.0 group for having me last night to talk about Flash. I enjoyed meeting all of you and hope that I peeked your interest enough to consider become a Flash Content Creator / Developer.
Here are some “action” shots from last night.
A university professor explains what his finding where when he tracked how much he needed Flash during his day, and how not having it would impact his daily productivity at work. Check out the full article by following a link to his blog below.
Personally, I was rather surprised at the results. The darker green slice (above) means that Flash Player was required to experience all the content of the site. A full 69% of the all sites I visited yesterday required Flash Player to fully experience the site. Some would have been incredibly difficult to navigate without Flash Player (for example, Total Training). Others have alternatives to using Flash Player (such as Lynda.com), but I would have had to change my established player preferences at that site (which I chose not to do).
At Flash Camp St. Louis on Sept. 3 2010 I will be speaking on PureMVC and how to us it with in your workflow. Speaking for me is all about helping the community grow and learn. Part of that process is supplying a few people with software that the need to be the best at what they do.
I will be supplying a give away of Adobe CS5 Web Premium ( curtsy of Adobe and Adobe Evagilist Ryan Stewart.
I will Also be giving away an Enterprise Licence to FDT 4 curtsy of PowerFlasher. 
This is going to be an awesome event so Register today! There is something for everyone at this event.
Seems like everyone these days are switching from SVN to git. I think it’s an awesome choose and I really like learning as much about git as I can. Something that is not quite clear when you are using github is how do you update a project that you have forked from someone else’s repo? Well if you are like me I don’t use git on a daily bases yet so I was not quite sure how this was done. After spending 10 min or so reading some blog posts this is what I found.
The following will only work if you have checked out a repo that you have forked and you have things setup correct. I am assuming that you have at least gotten as far as the basics of setting up git on your machine and you have forked someone else’s code on github
First you need to add a remote branch to your repository that points to the original repo you forked from.
git remote add --track master benstucki git://github.com/benstucki/reflex.gitYou will want to replace ‘master’ with the branch you want to track in the remote repo. In most cases this will be master, although you could replace it with edge or any other branch. You should also replace ‘benstucki’ is what you the remote will be called.
To verify the remote repository was added run
git remoteYou should see the new remote repo, in this case named ‘benstucki’, along with any other remote repositories you may have previously added.
Now we can fetch all the changes from benstucki’s code base.
git fetch benstuckiThis will create a new remote branch called ‘benstucki/master’. Now we are ready to merge the code from the remote repository.
git merge benstucki/masterThat’s it. Remember, this process isn’t limited only to the original repository. Feel free to add remote branches for other user’s forks or even from repositories outside Github.
After you have followed the steps above all that is left to do is merge like so
git merge benstucki/master
Update post: Just after this post on August 16th 2010 FDT released Milestone 4 and added a lot of new options to the code formatting AS3 section of the preferences in FDT. You can get a lot of the formatting that you want out of changing the settings rather than importing my templets. Something you still don’t get as of yet is MXML formatting so some of you may still find my templates useful. Also…….. Over the next few weeks I will be including some custom templates if you are a PureMVC user. I also encourage you guys to fork the templates and share your own shortcuts with the community.
If you like using FDT and you make use of the templates that come with it, Great! If you are new to FDT templates are a great way to speed up your work by writing a lot of code for you. Things that we use everyday like for loops, getters and setters, mxml components and more. The one thing that may bother some of you is the way the code in the templates are formatted.
If you like your code formatted like this.
public function something():void {
}
Your in luck, because all of the templates that come with FDT are formatted in this way
I tend to like my code formatted like this.
public function something():void
{
}
I took some time over the weekend to reformat all the templates just the way I like them. Over the next few weeks I plan on adding my own templates for PureMVC. If you tend to use other frameworks like Robot Legs or Parsley I encourage you to do the same and please share. Below I have a github repo you can contribute too if you like.
There are also MXML templates too. I reformatted them as well, so that they don’t take up as much room across the screen horizontally. I tend to add more returns so that each property is on it’s on line when defining MXML code.
If you like the formatting that I like and you also would like PureMVC templates when I start adding them then you can feel free to download my templet file and import it into your templates with in FDT. I started a github repo and I would also encourage you guys to fork the project and add your personal templates to this as well.
If you want to import my templates then open FDT and go to Preferences>FDT>Editor>templates . Select all the current templates and then click Remove. Then click the import button and import the file that you download from my github repo.
I am very excited to be speaking at Flash Camp St. Louis. This will be my first year and it looks like a great camp. There are tracks for both Flash Designer and Flash Developers. I will be offering a talk in the developer track. Here is what I will be covering.
Practical PureMVC … it isn’t that scary
In this talk I will explain the basics of using PureMVC with in your projects to help you get on the road to better OO coding practices and make your code more flexible and less prone to being tightly coupled to a specific project. Included in the talk I will also be offering some helpful tips for setting up some code templets to help you cut down on the amount of code you actually have to write and ways to speed up the process of setting up your projects with in FDT and Flash Builder.
I also will be offering some Free SWAG and software giveaways.
Check out the following links for more info.
I would also like to thank Powerflasher for suggesting and finding camps and events for me to speak at. You guys rock.
Google Chrome comes withe Flash Player installed and enabled. For most users this is great. For developers that want to use the debugger it is not. If you install the debugger on your system it does not replace or over ride the player in Chrome. This is due to the way Chrome manages plugins.
The fix used to be to go into your eclipse settings and choose to use Firefox or Safari for debugging. Like many developers I have grown to really like Chrome and would like to use it and not have to open another browser just to test my projects.
The solution is to do the following. In Chrome you need to put the following URL in chrome://plugins/. You will see the list of plugins your browser is using. Find the Shockwave Flash Plugin and click disable. After that close all browsers including Chrome. Run the installer for the latest Flash Player Debugger plugin. Launch Chrome and navigate to a page that has Flash to make sure the install went as planned. After that open Flash Builder / FDT and change your browser settings and you should be good to go.
1. Open Cydia > Manage > Sources 2. Edit source and add http://repo.benm.at 3. Search Frash and install it.
Groovymag