Flash on the Beach 2009

So it’s that time of the year again when all of the Flash geeks from around the world descend on Brighton to “educate” themselves. Four days of Flash geekiness in it’s purest form. Education, inspiration and quite a lot of dissipation.

I can say without any doubt that FOTB 2008 was the most inspirational event that I’ve ever been lucky enough to attend. I picked up more skills and creative ideas in 4 days than I had done in the entire previous year. It was exhilarating to say the least.

Flash on the Beach is a wonderfully constructed event that encourages free thinking and debate and is an excellent opportunity to mix with other Flash designers and developers from around the world. I met some amazing people last year and I am sure that this year will be the same.

However last year I was so overwhelmed by the whole thing, I missed at least two lectures that I really wanted to see through to disorganisation (and at least two more due to hangovers). So although there’s not a great deal I can do about the hangovers, I have decided to at least try to plan in advance a lecture schedule this year of the speakers that I want to see. I’ve listed it below so you can stalk/avoid* me (*delete as appropriate) if you’re going to be there.

Seriously though if any of you are attending FOTB this year, please do get in touch. It’s always great to meet like-minded people.

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Tweeter v1.0 – simplifying Twitter and Actionscript

If you want to add a Twitter feed to your flash website, currently the best way to do it is to pay a visit to Matt Pearson’s (Zenbullets) Twitter API explanation and buckle down to the code. However if like me you are finding your clients increasingly requesting Twitter feeds in their sites, perhaps you’ll appreciate my new Tweeter class for ease of re-use.

Try it out:

It’s based around Matt’s explanations and centres on drawing a single tweet from a single user (using the API’s “status” call). All I’ve done in my clumsy ham-fisted way is to simplify it for anyone who either doesn’t have the time to learn it or simply can’t be bothered. Now all you have to do is use something like the following code for it be up and running in seconds…

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The CSSLoader Class (v1.0)

AS3 is a wonderful thing, but it can be really long-winded sometimes when you’re trying to achieve something simple – the perfect example being the replacement of AS2′s getURL() class with a series of listeners. I know why it has been set up this way, I understand why it’s better that everything follows a uniform methodology and I do wholeheartedly agree with it, but there is no getting around the fact that you can get bogged down writing the same long-winded code over and over again. Frankly, it can be a pain in the ass and can sap the fun out of simple tasks.

Sometimes I get around these chunks of code using snippets (see Lee Brimelow’s tutorial on how to set up snippets in Flex Builder), but sometimes the code is crying out for a simple class to be made – in my opinion, loading external stylesheets is one of these times.

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Updated: FindURL (v1.1)

The FindURL class has been updated and the new version can be found here.

This new version corrects a rather embarrassing issue – the class was returning no text at all if no URL was present in the text. I was so wrapped up with trying to get it to look for URLs in a text block, it didn’t cross my mind to test it without any at all! Problem solved now though, simply overwrite the previous version and everything should work as before.

The FindURL class (v1.0)

Whilst I was playing around with the Twitter API I was beginning to get wound up by the fact that the XML feed from Twitter only sends out text versions of tweets and not HTML versions. For example, lets say a tweet says “Check out this cool link: http://www.plagro.com”, the xml feed from twitter would send out:

Check out this cool link: http://www.plagro.com"

as oppose to the html version containing the “a” link tag:

Check out this cool link: <a href="http://www.plagro.com">http://www.plagro.com</a>

So after trawling the forums looking for alternative feeds and/or HTML convertors, I came to the conclusion that it would be easier to write a small class that simply finds links within blocks of text and adds in the html tags so it can be displayed as HTML text. The result is the FindURL class.

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