I realized I've never blogged this officially, so I thought I should.

Over the past couple months I have been assembling a new workshop called " Flash 8 Bootcamp", which I will be running in Toronto on Nov 11-12 (this Friday-Saturday) and Los Angeles on Dec 2-3. It is an intensive two day workshop that covers every new feature of Flash 8 in gritty detail. The thing I like about this workshop is that unlike my previous "Enterprise Development" workshop, this workshop is accessible to a much broader range of Flashers (both because of the low pricing, and the lower prerequisites) and the content is much more future-proof. While the course won't specifically look at AS3, I'd say over 80% of the content is directly applicable to it. This is largely due to the fact that most of the Flash 8 features were added with AS3 migration in mind.

UPDATE: The bootcamp will be running in London, UK on February 11-12. Please read the announcement for more information.

I also like this workshop because it should be a lot of fun. While I love teaching hardcore technical content, it's nice to do a course that is much more relaxed and visual.

Here's a look at some of the more interesting bits:

Introductions
Full feature tour
Theory: Matrices
Demo: Skinning a window with 4 lines of code and slice-9
Creating alpha video with After Effects
Using and skinning the FLVPlayback component
Demo: Sequencing video
Using cue points
NetStream enhancements
Bitmap Caching
Blend modes
ExternalInterface
Demo: Integrating a custom Flash control with an HTML field
FileReference
Demo: upload and download
XML additions
FlashType and TextRenderer
Localization improvements
Player enhancements
ActionScript enhancements
Theory: Color by number
BitmapData: Basics
Demo: Custom caching
Demo: Webcam motion detection
BitmapData: Manipulating pixels
Demo: Sample color area
Filters introduction
Demo: Light source demo
Demo: Smoothed webcam motion detection
More Filters
BitmapData: Advanced methods
Demo: Water ripple effect with perlin noise
Demo: Collision detection
Advanced Filters
Demo: Webcam snowstorm
Demo: Dynamic glass text
Demo: Webcam fire
Theory: Optimization and performance

Of course, there is a bunch of smaller demos, time for Q&A, tips & pitfalls, ideas for inspiration and problem solving processes, a preview of some (as yet) unreleased work, a pile of source code, and hopefully a lot of fun.

It's pretty late for the Toronto run, but I'm pretty sure we still have some seats if you want to squeeze in last minute. I know we have seats left in the LA workshop, but they are (hopefully) filling up fast. You can visit the FitC site to sign up or get more info.

I'm also considering running this in London and possibly other locations. I'm also putting serious thought into running it as an online workshop (either live or prerecorded), as I've had a lot of interest expressed in that. If you're interested in any of these options, leave a comment or send me an email.