So every year I like to double my excitement for Flash on the Beach by preparing my lecture schedule in advance. It’s also really useful to use as reference at the conference itself – to remind me which of the three tracks I preferred when I actually had the time to sit down and read the overviews, and also if you need to find me you’ll know where I’m most likely to be.

So here’s my preferred schedule so far – there’s still a couple of unknowns but it’s looking pretty well rounded already…

DAY ONE

9.30 (Main Hall) Keynote

10.45 (Corn Exchange) Greg Rewis “From zero to app in 60 seconds”
jQuery Mobile & PhoneGap frameworks – building native phone apps with html5/css3

12.00 (Corn Exchange) Jon Howard “Playability: Making games for kids”
Analysis of game building from one of the CBeebies team

14.00 (Main Hall) GMunk “Tron GFX”
Deconstruction of Cinema4D development on Tron Legacy

15.15 (Corn Exchange) Rich Shupe “Multi-platform web video delivery”
Coding video to reach the widest possible audience

16.30 (Main Hall) Han Hoogerbrugge “ProStress or the graphic universe of Han Hoogerbrugge”

20.00 (Main Hall) Jon Burgerman “A short talk about working and not working and how to waste your time proficiently”

DAY TWO

9.30 (Main Hall) Philipp Moeser “Scaling & Organisation: Massive Flash Projects – how to build a top 10 game on facebook”

10.45 (Corn Exchange) Seb Lee-Delisle “Pixels for the people”
Was going to choose Richard Galvan’s “easy cross platform mobile development”, however Seb’s lecture includes both mobile development and potential inspiration for new projects

12.00 (Main Hall) Dr Woohoo! “Paper.js:Vector graphics scripting on top of HTML5″
Fascinated by being able to export directly from illustrator to js

14.00 - unsure yet – not inspired

15.15 (Corn Exchange) Remy Sharp “HTML5: where flash isn’t needed anymore”
Potentially contraversial. I want to see if I can be convinced that I need to abandon flash for all but larger projects.

16.30 (Main Hall) Cyriak Harris “Destroying my laptop with After Effects”

20.00 (Main Hall) James Victore “Who died and made me boss?”

DAY THREE

9.30 (Main Hall) The Elevator Pitch

10.45 (Main Hall) Keith Peters “Making Tools”
Always inspiring. I’ve learnt more code from Keith’s books and lectures than every other source combined.

12.00 (Main Hall) Jam
Its a shame that both Lee Brimelow and a very useful mobile dev lecture are up against this. The Jam is always a winner.

14.00 - unsure yet – not inspired

15.15 (Corn Exchange) Jared Ficklin “Visions from the man cave”
Potentially the only lecture to feature Kinect Hacks

16.30 (Main Hall) Joshua Davis “The Unknown Voyage”
Always a pleasure.

17.30 (Main Hall) conference wrap up

Hopefully see you all there – mine’s a Stowford Press!

I’ve known about Vizzy for a while, but I’ve previously had no real need for it and when I’ve tried to install it in the past it didn’t seem to work with Chrome (my current browser of choice) so it was uninstalled pretty quickly. But this time I had no choice but to get it working – and as it turns out, the solution was pretty simple…Step 1 – Install Flash Debug Player

First off you need to make sure that you have the flash debugger installed. You can download it here and you can test if it’s installed by clicking here. Don’t worry if you’re using Chrome and the test site is saying that you don’t have the debugger installed, if you view the link in any of your other browsers you will see it has worked.

NOTE: if you use FlashDevelop like myself then you’ve probably already got the debug player installed, but it won’t hurt to reinstall it anyway (and it will update you to the latest version).

Step 2 – Install Vizzy

You can download Vizzy here. To test, open a swf that you know contains traces in your browser and make sure Vizzy is open at the same time. Vizzy will act like your Flash IDE Output window. But again, don’t worry if you’re using Chrome and it’s not working at this point.

Step 3 – Disable Chrome’s pre-installed Flash player

Steps one and two should be enough for you to view flash tracing in most browsers – Firefox was working straight away for me. However if like me you want to use Chrome instead, you will need to disable Chrome’s internal pre-installed Flash Player. Don’t worry it’s very easy…

a) Open a new Chrome window (CTRL-N if you’re reading this in Chrome)

b) type

chrome://plugins

into the address bar.

c) You should see a list of plugins – Flash is most likely to be the one at the top. Click “Details” in the top right hand corner and you will notice that there are 2 versions of flash installed. One of these is the pre-installed Flash player and the other is the Flash Debug Player you installed earlier. Find the one that ends with gcswf32.dll (ie. Chrome’s version of the player) and click “Disable”.

That’s it, you’re done. Clicking here should now tell you that you have the Debug Player installed and Vizzy should now work for you.

Enjoy!

yourString = yourString.replace(/\s+/g, '-');

So for example, if yourString=”blah blah blah”, it will now become “blah-blah-blah”. This is especially useful for amending URLs.

Happy new year!

So here’s the solution to your woes. It’s one that’s worth saving to one side as a “copy and paste solution”. Increase the height of the image (or movieclip) to the size that you want it to be and then apply the following line of script…

(AS3)

mc.scaleX > mc.scaleY ? mc.scaleY = mc.scaleX : mc.scaleX = mc.scaleY;

(AS2)

mc._xscale > mc._yscale ? mc._yscale = mc._xscale : mc._xscale = mc._yscale;

(“mc” of course should be replaced with the target of your image or movieclip)

Hope that helps!

escape()

If you’re receiving a text input and needing to send it out to a URL, for example in a search box, you need to convert any special characters into character codes before you request the URL. For example, a space should be sent as %20.

The escape() command allows you to do this with one command rather than having to search through character by character and reference it to a character codes array.

Here’s a simple function that utilises it:

public function processSearchTerm(s:String):void
{
var URLString:String = escape(s);
_rModel.searchTerm = URLString;
}

Calling this function, eg:

var oldString:String = "a test string";
var newString:String = processSearchTerm(testString);
trace(newString);

Should return:

a%20test%20string

Hopefully if you weren’t aware of it already, it will save you as much time as it did me!

But yesterday I was introduced to something in FlashDevelop that I’d never seen before. The king of all shortcuts:

CTRL - SHIFT - 1

How I’ve lived without this shortcut before I don’t know. I feel like a fool for not discovering it earlier. It does absolutely everything…

• Place your cursor next to a class variable, hit the king and you get a little pop-up menu offering to create you getters and setters.
• Written a variable inside a function and now want to make it into a class variable? Place your cursor, hit the king and you’ll be offered to “Promote to class member”. It will then declare the variable at the top and correct your function accordingly.
• Need a new function? Type the function name, press the king, “Generate function”. Done.
• Need a new class? Type the name, king, “create class”, done.

This shortcut literally does absolutely everything from declaring variables to generating functions. I keep discovering even more things all the time. It’s such a timesaver. Truly the ultimate multi-purpose shortcut.

However if you want to target a new browser window you can now do so by adding an additional parameter…”_blank”. See the example below:

var input:String = "blah blah blah http://www.burnedouthippy.com blah blah blah";
var fU:FindURL = new FindURL(input, "_blank");
var output:String = fU.Process();

If you run a trace on output, you’ll see that the new string has HTML a tags inside it and it also now targets a new browser. You can change “_blank” for any other HTML target and it should work just fine…alternatively, completely leave out the second parameter and it will automatically target “_self”.

Download the FindURL v1.2

Tickets for Flash on the Beach 2010 were released this morning and are selling like hotcakes. For those of you that don’t know, Flash on the Beach is the definitive conference for all things Flash/Flex/Design/Actionscript Development/General Web sexiness.

If you’re in the industry and have never been:

1. Shame on you;
2. Buy a ticket NOW;
3. Shame on you!

I can’t stress enough how much of a great time you’ll have. To give you a taster of what to expect, check out my review of Flash on the Beach 2009.

Hope to see you there!

Warning: 1090: Migration issue: The onMouseDown event handler is not triggered automatically by Flash Player at run time in ActionScript 3.0

This warning occurs if you try to use Actionscript 2 event handler names in your Actionscript 3 code, eg onMouseDown, onMouseOver, onRelease etc etc. Simply change the name and it will go away! Apparently it was added as a way of warning you not to mix up AS2 with AS3, but personally I find it a bit irritating as I used those names so that I would easily remember them (having coded in AS2 for quite a long time).

So as an example, if you’ve coded something like…

this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, onMouseOver);
public function onMouseOver(e:MouseEvent)
{
trace("over");
}

…simply change it to something that wasn’t previously reserved in AS2, like…

this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, onBtnOver);
public function onBtnOver(e:MouseEvent)
{
trace("over");
}

One other thing about Warning 1090 – apparently it won’t appear if you don’t use the Flash IDE to compile. But if you’re like me and you code in FlashDevelop and compile in the IDE (because you like to mess around with detailed graphic designs), it will unfortunately continue to plague you. Fingers crossed they’ll ditch it in CS5.

I’ve been tearing my hair out for the last 24 hours trying to work out how the hell to get my precisely drawn design to scale correctly in Papervision. Anyone who’s tried this will know that it’s a frustrating blend of messing around with camera zoom, focus and field of view. But try as I might, I found it absolutely impossible to solve. I had come to the end of my patience and was ready to give up with PV3D and change the design completely…

…and then I came across this.

The thing that crossed my mind first when seeing this demo was “not only is it possible to reproduce a good pixel perfect 2D design in Papervision, but potentially it could be really great”.

After a bit of mooching around I came across the fantastic article that it was produced as a demo for. Rather depressingly, the article explains in very few words that all you need do is apply the following formula to the z axis of your 3D object:

3dobj.z = (camera.zoom * camera.focus) - Math.abs(camera.z)

I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank the author of the post for collating that information and producing such a simple yet thoroughly inspiring demo. You’ve saved me an enormous amount of time and taught me one clear lesson…when in doubt, stop getting frustrated and google it.