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.
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.
1. Open Cydia > Manage > Sources 2. Edit source and add http://repo.benm.at 3. Search Frash and install it.
I am being very hard headed and determined that I am going to give Textmate a solid try for my actionscript and flex projects. Work on the bundle has been a little lacking but what has been developed so far is pretty great.
I have run into some slight issues but able to figure them out and get things set up pretty well and I have already dug in and started customizing the snippets to suit my needs.
One thing that I have not been able to fix, figure out or find a straight answer for is regarding working with MXML files. AutoComplete for Actionscript files seems to work great but I don’t seem to get the same result when I am editing Actionscript inside the script block in a MXML file.
I am hoping that someone that uses Textmate all the time could through some suggestions my way to help track down the issue. If I am in the actionscript code block and hit (option + esc) I get “no completion available” message.
Posted via email from Matthew Sloan Wallace
———————————-update————————————–
So I posted this “issue” on the textmate mailing list and I heard back from the creator of the flex bundle. Simon basically told me that he had not enabled autocomplete feature to the flex mxml script blocks yet. This is good to know that my shit wasn’t broke and he offered the following solution so that auto complete will work in mxml script blocks.
There’s no issues, I just haven’t got around to supporting autocompletion from within script blocks embedded in mxml. Although it seems to be pretty stable if you just go ahead and add the right scope (text.xml.mxml source.actionscript.3.embedded.mxml) to the command, as I have done in my dev branch:
http://github.com/simongregory/actionscript3-tmbundle/blob/sg/Commands/Auto%20Complete.tmCommand
You can do the same thing with the auto import command and it’ll add the import to the script block.
Cheers, Simon
If you have not given SourceMate at try you should. It add that extra kick to your FlashBuilder IDE that you need. Just today I was wondering if there was a way to generate an ant build file for the Flex projects that I have. I googled for about 5 min, then asked on twitter. Not 20 sec after I twittered I thought OH! I bet SourceMate has a feature like this. Sure enough it does. Not to mention some other really cool and useful features to speed up your workflow.
Here is a link to the SourceMate site. They have a free trial so you should check it out.
RSVP NOW, BE AT THE MEETING AND WIN ADOBE MASTER COLLECTION
At the next Flash Platform UG meeting in Nashville I will be speaking about Flex and PHP. This is a joint meeting with the Nashville PHP UG.
Well you don’t want to miss this meeting now ….. Adobe Evangelist Ryan Stewart sent me an email the other day and we where talking about the next meeting (thanks to Cal Evans for introducing Ryan to the Nashville UG community), anyway long story short Ryan offered to allow me to give away of MASTER COLLECTION! This is a $2600 value.
Someone is going to walk away with it. It might as well be you so, be there or you will kick yourself. I will also be giving out a few t-shirts and stickers from our friends at influxis
Groovymag