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.

Well I’m back from Flash on the Beach 2009 in Brighton and yet again I wasn’t disappointed. There were a couple of sessions that weren’t as good as expected and a couple more that unexpectedly blew me away, all-in-all I had a blinding time. Needless to say I’d thrown out my previously organised schedule by Monday lunchtime though

This year was so enjoyable I’m still buzzing a week later, hence this post. I’m not going to go massively into detail about it all, but there are a few highlights and lowlights that I think are worth talking about…

First off, Sunday. I attended Seb Lee-Delisle’s Papervision 3D workshop for the entire day. It began a little bit over my head because it appeared that everybody else in the room (bar one) were pure developers, so it was a little unsympathetic to us lowly designers. However as the day progressed I seemed to get into the flow of it and by the end of the day I felt as though I could go away and work with it myself. If Seb ever does a follow up course I’ll be on it in a flash (pardon the pun) – he’s a great speaker and I really felt as though I learned a lot from him. As for Papervision…I’m playing already, so when anything significant occurs I’ll post it on this blog.

During the course I met one or two guys that seemed to be on the same wavelength as me and at the end of the day we set off to the Waggon and Horses near the FOTB venue to have a swift half. A half soon turned into a pint, a pint into six (ish) and before we knew it we were heading down to the beach to mindlessly throw pebbles into the sea. The perfect end to what was a completely exhausting day.

Monday morning, 9am, the conference began for real. Before the keynote, 3 Mariachi took the stage (see photo above) and performed a hilarious ode to designers. I loved it, but as it was never publicly revealed who the Mariachi were, I did get the feeling that I was witnessing some bizarre little in-joke between the speakers and the organisers. It was good fun though and the accompanying graphics were spot on.

The keynote was by Richard & Mark from Adobe. It was interesting and showed a few new features in the latest Flash player update, but they were obviously saving the best stuff for the upcoming Adobe Max conference. Roll on October so we can find out what they were actually holding back.

Monday’s highlights for me were Keith Peters‘ developer inspiring session about game coding and Carlos Ulloa (above) taking us through how he developed four of his Papervision projects. Both were excellent as usual and I thought were the perfect start to the conference. Unfortunately I wasn’t as impressed by Hillman Curtis’ end of the day session – I was expecting something interactive and inspiring from the ex-Art Director for Macromedia, but instead we watched a few of his “video portraits”. Artistic it was, but without being too harsh, a little dull.

The day concluded with Joel Gethin Lewis’ evening inspiration session. It was a good and fitting end to a pretty good day, but the best was obviously yet to come. The party that night was at Audio. Last year I left early because it was so crammed, but this year I was with a great group of people and we found a pretty spacious corner to spread out in. Another great night.

Tuesday began at 9am with the new “Elevator Pitch” session – 20 new speakers each with the chance to make their mark in 3 minutes. Some were good, some not so good…all enthusiastic and inspiring the audience to get up next year and show off their own stuff. I think my favourite out of them had to be Jon Howard who demonstrated how to make 3 games in 3 minutes – funny and impressive. I think we may see more of him in the future. Also, a congrats to Erin from Plus Two (a company I’ve worked with in the past) for managing to explain their extremely impressive product in under 3 minutes. It was a pleasant surprise to see her up on stage.

Tuesday afternoon and evening brought some of my favourite sessions from the conference starting with a fascinating insight into the mind of Jennifer Shiman, creator of 30 Second Bunny Theatre. The afternoon continued with two surprisingly inspiring sessions – “Numbers in Art” by Joel Baumann and “Unconventional Web Applications” by the Contrast team. The first was much more art based than I had expected, being literally about how numbers feature in great works of art – I entered the session expecting to be mind-numbed about typographical positioning and layout standards. A truly pleasant surprise. The later was a truly thought provoking session encouraging the audience to reconsider “web standards” and push the boundaries of interactive design a little further. I had no idea what to expect from the session and I came away ready to completely reassess my approach to design.

Similarly that evening’s inspired session from Craig Swann hammered home that as designers we need to remember our roots and keep a firm hold on what truly inspires us. A great talk from a very charismatic man. After the final session we all moved onto a local club and Tuesday came to an end at about 4am on Wednesday morning…enough said I think.

Wednesday was sponsored by Resolve Extra. By the time I had checked out of my hotel and my life and come back into focus, it was 11.30 and time to listen to the genius that is Colin Moock. Having taught myself AS from a combination of his books over the years, I was hanging on the guy’s every word. Great session.

Next up was the moment I’d been waiting for all week – “The Jam Throwdown”. This came about for the first time at FOTB08 when a speaker was unavoidably detained and unable to turn up. John Davey (the organiser of FOTB) gathered together 6 of the best speakers from the conference and asked them if they would show off some of their latest work for 10 minutes each to fill the gap in the schedule. The result was astounding and by far the best session of the 2008 conference…and it rocketed Joa Ebert to notoriety with his demonstration of speed coding (I’ll get to that a minute). So needless to say, hangover or no hangover, this was a session I did not want to miss.

The standard of course was ridiculously high, a belittling experience in many ways. All of the work shown was outstanding, my personal favourite being Grant playing with his balls (see video above). And that’s a sentence you won’t hear me say very often. But even the speakers took a step back when Joa walked onto the stage for speed coding round 2. For those that don’t know what speed coding is, it is literally as it sounds…he codes as much as he can in the 10 minutes that he’s allotted. Sounds boring right? It really isn’t. The man types code faster than I can think about what I had for breakfast, he’s truly one of the world’s best (if not the best) programmers. The buzz in the air when he gets going is astounding, everyone trying to guess what the hell he’s doing…Joa just keeps his head down and keeps on typing. This year he’d obviously prepared himself beforehand (in 2008, he had no preparation and was making it up as he went along), but it still doesn’t take anything away from what he was able to produce in the 9 minutes and 40 seconds he spent at the keyboard. He produced an almost exact recreation of “Da Funk” by Daft Punk (including drum samples from scratch) with a 3D audio-visualiser that bounces along with it. A poor quality video of the end result can be found here, but to be honest it doesn’t do it justice. Truly astounding…

…and if we weren’t all feeling small already after Joa’s performance, John revealed the keyboard that Joa had been using whilst speed coding. Completely black, no keys. Talk about kicking us while we were down

After a very relaxed and enjoyable session with artist James Jarvis, it was time for the last session of the conference – Joshua Davis. I’ve been a huge fan of Davis for years and I was really looking forward to seeing him in person. The man is a rock star. A funny, inspiring and slightly cuddly rock star. The video above doesn’t really do justice to how he makes you feel, but it should give you an idea of the pure energy he puts into his presentations. More than any other time over the last couple of FOTB conferences, I truly felt as though I was in the presence of greatness – and that really is saying something considering the artists and genii that speak at these things. He oozes charisma and like no other speaker I’ve ever seen reaches out to the audience and says “look guys, this is easy, you can do this”. It was a fitting end to an almost perfect conference.

Finally before I sign off this ridiculously long blog post, I’d just like to the thank everyone I met at FOTB09 for making it one of the best yet for me. I met up with a great bunch of people this year, all of which I hope will make it back next year. Most notably Kevin and Mike from Twisted, Sean and Marie from The Inspiration Engine and Pedro from Zig Zig Za. I hope you guys had as good a time as I did. Roll on FOTB2010!

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.

Sunday 20th September

9.30am – 5.15pm
Papervision3D 2.0 Workshop
Seb Lee-Delisle
Really looking forward to this workshop. I’ve wanted to get into PV3D for ages but didn’t know where to start (the first book only came out this month). Also I’m a big fan of Seb’s work so to be taught by someone as good as him is a real privilege.

Monday 21st September

9am – 10am
Keynote
Richard Galvan

10.15am – 11.15am
Casual Game Architecture: How to finish coding a game without despising it
Keith Peters
I’ve learned an enormous amount from Keith’s books over the years so it’s always a treat to hear him speak. This particular subject is something I am very interested in though.

11.30am – 12.30pm
Lead the hand and the arm will follow: Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4
Rich Shupe
I attended Rich’s AS3 workshop last year so I know how good a speaker he is. However the main reason I chose this is because I don’t feel I’m getting enough out of CS4 so I want to relight my interest in its features.

1.30pm – 2.30pm
Fear/Love
Rob Chiu
Creatively Rob Chiu’s lecture last year was one of the most inspiring, so I really want to see what he’s been doing for 12 months.

2.45pm – 3.45pm
Big Spaceship: Fun begets quality
Joshua Hirsch
I’m looking for a creative kickstart from this lecture. Hope it delivers.

4pm – 5pm
Telling Stories
Hillman Curtis
I don’t know what to expect from this, but I think it will be a good way to end the day.

8pm – 9pm
Epiphany
Joel Gethin Lewis
I love the inspiration sessions…they’re like watching a fun channel 4 documentary that’s directed right at you. Definitely the most memorable part of last year.

{ P A R T Y }

Tuesday 22nd September

9am – 10am
3 Minute Wonders
Elevator Pitch
A new addition to FOTB, this promises to bring something new and should allow new ‘stars’ to make a little dent in the industry. I don’t know what to expect but I’ll be there with bells on, no matter how big my hangover is. I’m particularly looking forward to Desuade‘s 3 minutes – good luck fella!

10.15am – 11.15am
Quick as Flash
Grant Skinner
Another giant in the industry, this time showing us how to make the most out of our code…how could I resist?

11.30am – 12.30am
An Interaction Designer’s Guide to Play
Andy Polaine
This was a tough call because it’s up against 2 other great sessions, but Play is something that fascinates me and I’m intregued to know more about how I can bring it into my applications.

1.30pm – 2.30pm
Hacking the Newsroom
Jeremy Thorp
I’ve had lots of fun playing with Twitter recently, so I want to walk away from this session with lots of new ideas of how I can extend my Flash apps to bring in other useful data.

2.45pm – 3.45pm
More than Bending Pixels
Paul Burnett
I know absolutely nothing about Pixel Bender, so hopefully this will give me the boost that I need.

4pm – 5pm
Unconventional Web Applications
Contrast
Again I’m not sure what to expect, but ‘unconventional’ is a word that I love, so hopefully I’ll walk away from this with lots of ideas.

8pm – 9pm
Choose Your Own Adventure
Craig Swann
Inspiration session – enough said.

{ P A R T Y }

Wednesday 23rd September

9am – 10am
The Flash Platform in a Multi-Screen World
Serge Jespers
I need to look to the future and there is no doubt that the future of Flash lies on many different platforms. After 3 nights of drinking it will be hard to make this session, but worthwhile I’m sure.

10.15am – 11.15am
Preparing for the Flash Catalyst’s Era
Marco Casario
I’ve only heard of Flash Catalyst in passing and as it’s Adobe’s next big product I see it as essential to learn more about it.

11.30am – 12pm
Union and Megaphone
Colin Moock
Do I need to say anything other than it’s Colin Moock?!!

1.30pm – 2.30pm
Jam Throwdown
6 Speakers – 10 mins each
My favourite daytime session last year was the impromptu Flash Jam that occurred when a speaker was unable to turn up. It was truly amazing. 6 ten minute mind blowing sessions. Joa‘s ten minutes of silent coding will go down in history as one of the coolest things the industry has ever witnessed.

2.45pm – 3.45pm
Live Drawing with James Jarvis
James Jarvis
I love hearing about other people’s creative processes, so being able to watch someone create something live will be a real treat.

4pm – 5pm
Space
Joshua Davis
Last year’s closing session caused ripples throughout the industry, will Joshua Davis do the same? Either way, he’s possibly the most recognisable name in web design – it’s an essential session.

Wow it was really difficult to choose the line up. It’s like a who’s who in the industry, there isn’t a dud lecture on any of the days. I really can’t wait now.

See you there I hope….

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…

var t:Tweeter = new Tweeter();
t.proxy = "http://www.yourdomain.com";
t.user = "bbcbreaking";
t.getTweet();
addChild(t);

I’ve added a few other customisable options (which I will explain in a moment), but something like the above will have it working for you in seconds. Here’s a quick explanation of the above before I show you what else you can do with it…

t.proxy
As Zenbullets explains in his blog post, Flash and Twitter have cross-domain issues. So in order to bypass this you need to run a simple PHP file. I’ve included this file with the rest of the example files. All you have to do is upload it to your server and point t.proxy at the file’s location, as in the example above. Please ensure that you add “http://” at the beginning and you DON’T put a “/” at the end – Tweeter will do the rest. Please note: Tweeter will not work without this file.

t.user
This is simply the user name of the Twitter feed you want to pull. eg. if your Twitter page is “http://www.twitter.com/flashguru20″, the user name is “flashguru20″. If you forget to add this line it will default to The Burned Out Hippy’s Twitter feed.

t.getTweet()
When you’ve finished mucking around with the style (I’ll get to that in a minute), use this line to trigger Tweeter into action.

There are also a couple of other bits and bobs that you should know about that will allow you to style the tweet to your heart’s content. These are as follows (and should be added before the getTweet trigger):

t.picture = false
This will turn off the user’s profile picture. Currently the picture aligns to the left of the tweet. In the future I may adapt this so as to allow it’s location to be top, bottom, left and right – but as I don’t need to yet, I haven’t. So if the user pic isn’t fitting in with your styling of the text or simply isn’t to your liking, use the above line to turn it off.

t.loader
I imagine this is a bit naughty, but as I’m not fully AS3 conversant yet this is the only way I could achieve what I wanted to achieve. “loader” is quite simply the main URLRequest that calls the proxy PHP file to get the tweet. I’ve left it public in order for you to be able to add your own event listeners to it – so if you want to add a loading animation you can. I may close this back to private at a later date if my knowledge catches up and I find myself horrified at my own code (likely).

t.tweetField
This is the tweet’s textfield. Again, a bit naughty methinks, but it’s a means to an end. I’ve purposefully left it public in order for you to be able style the text to your heart’s content.

For example, to give the tweet a background colour and change it’s width you should do something like the following:

t.tweetField.background = true;
t.tweetField.backgroundColor = 0xeeeeee;
t.tweetField.width = 280;

You can also style the text field using a style sheet. The time and date are wrapped in a h1 tag and the main text is wrapped in a p. If you decide to use my CSSLoader class, all you would have to do is create a simple stylesheet and then type something like the following:

var cssLoader:CSSLoader = new CSSLoader(t.tweetField, t.tweetField.text, "http://www.yourdomain.com/tweetStyles.css");

I’ve included as much as I can in the example files so that you can get up and running as quickly as possible. Please make sure that you preserve the folder names of my classes or else nothing will work for you. Please also note that Tweeter uses my FindURL class, so don’t delete it by accident!

**************************************************************

You can download Tweeter and the other classes here
You can download the examples here

**************************************************************

I hope it’s useful to someone out there. I’ll be working on a multi-tweet version next (for multiple tweets from a single user) and possibly a keyword search version after that. If you’d like to see something particular changed or added to this version, please do let me know by leaving a comment below.

Cheerio!

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.

If you google “actionscript 3 external stylesheets” you are very likely to come across this explanation by Adobe.

Now don’t get me wrong, after studying it for a couple of minutes you’ll see that the code is pretty straightforward. Firstly it sets up a textfield, then an external file loader. Then it uses the file loader to load the stylesheet and when the stylesheet has been successfully loaded it applies the stylesheet to the textfield and adds the appropriate HTML text. Fine. Long-winded, but fine.

But this is exactly the kind of situation that frustrates me. If I wanted to load several stylesheets for several different textfields, I’d be backed up in a pile of repeating code setting up loaders and success/error functions. It makes much more sense to me to have a CSSLoader class that I can simply send the instance name of the textfield, the text that I want to put into the textfield and the name/path of the stylesheet file – and then let the class set up a loader and check that the file has loaded correctly. As I currently can’t think of a situation where this wouldn’t apply, that is exactly what I’ve done.

You can find the class here.
You can find example files here.

Now all you have to do is create a textfield and then type something similar to the following:

var cssLoader:CSSLoader = new CSSLoader(tfield, someText, "example.css");

Isn’t that easier? In this case, “tfield” is the instance name of the textfield, “someText” is a String containing the HTML text you want to format (eg taken from an XML node) and “example.css” is the name/path of the external stylesheet. The class does the rest for you – it takes the text, throws it into the textfield and styles it. Much easier I’m sure you’ll agree and a lot less confusing when it comes to dealing with large numbers of textfields.

Please remember to set the textfield property “Multiline” to “true”, or else your HTML paragraph tags won’t work. Check out my basic example to see that in action.

If you can think of any situation where this class may need extending, please let me know. I am open to friendly suggestion of expanding its usefulness.

However if you’re a hardcore developer and don’t agree with me simplifying something that is essentially pretty simple to start with – I apologise if I have offended your sensibility, but this works better for me. Please don’t spam me, I won’t reply. I’m here to help like-minded designer/developers, not to get into an argument. Cheers!

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.

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.

You can find the FindURL class here and example files here.

Using the FindURL class is very simple. Firstly unzip it into the place where you store all of your actionscript classes and then use the following two lines of AS code whenever it’s needed. Feed it the text you want converting and then receive the String it returns.

//create a new FindURL and send it the text to process
var linkFinder:FindURL = new FindURL(testString);
//return the new processed text
var newString:String = linkFinder.Process();

Finally, please note that I found the Regular Expression used in my FindURL class online. It IS borrowed, it may not be perfect and I can’t offer you any support on it. I will also happily credit the line’s author when I eventually work out who that is – but that particular piece of code has been used seemingly dozens of times by different developers so the author is still ambiguous.

Hope it’s of use to you! Let me know how you get on and if there’s any way you’d like to see it expanded – I’m always open to suggestion.