http://www.gskinner.com/blog/ News, views and source code from Grant Skinner & Company. Including information on OOP / OOAD, user experience and RIA development. 2008-08-18T11:07:04-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/gtween_a_new_tw.html gTween is a new programmatic tweening engine built for ActionScript 3 developers from the ground up: instance-oriented, standard event model, multiple timing modes, proxy interface, interruptible, sequencing, resource managed, global and per instance pausing, and a whole lot more. Flash Grant 2008-08-18T11:07:04-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/javascript_stal.html the ECMAScript 4 standard, the standard on which AS3 is based, and the the draft proposal for future versions of javascript has been rejected in favour of ECMAScript 3.1. This leaves Adobe in a somewhat awkward position. It's also very disappointing for the web at large... to me, it looks like a power play by Microsoft. Internet Technology Grant 2008-08-14T15:08:03-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/coolest_video_i.html Holy crap this is cool! Ultra slow motion video of a lightning strike. It's amazing to watch the traces following the path of lowest resistance, trailing paths of ionized air, until one touches the ground and WHAM the surge of electricity blasts down through the path. It looks a lot like the lightning experiments I did awhile ago, but the logic is a bit different.... Grant 2008-08-08T15:09:11-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/more_conference.html Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been neck deep in client work, and prepping for a plethora (as in, too many of a good thing) of conferences. In addition to Flash on the Beach, FlashForward, and MAX San Francisco, I'll also be speaking at Austin Game Developers Conference, Flash On Tap, San Flashcisco... Events Grant 2008-08-05T13:21:53-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/actionscript_he.html A short interview I did with Peter Elst for ActionScriptHero.org has just gone live, as part of the aSH redesign/relaunch. You can check out the interview here. Events Grant 2008-07-31T09:55:31-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/actionscript_3.html About a month ago I posted the monster deck of 165 slides from my ActionScript 3 workshop. The one thing that was holding it back from being a really useful reference was the need to click through every slide to find what you were looking for. I added the ability to search for keywords using the TextSnapshot object. Flash Grant 2008-07-17T14:45:09-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/upcoming_confer_1.html I will be speaking at a number of conferences over the next few months - FlashForward, Flash On The Beach, and Adobe MAX. Events Grant 2008-07-07T09:50:25-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/additional_info.html I chatted with one of the Adobe engineers that worked on the unloadAndStop API, and I thought it would be helpful to post a summary of what I know about it, and disseminate some of the information he provided. I'll also try to answer some of the more common questions about it. Flash Grant 2008-07-04T12:12:59-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/unloadandstop_i.html Adobe has announced the addition of the new Loader.unloadAndStop() method for Flash Player 10. This API makes it much simpler to free a loaded SWF for collection. It's still possible to prevent a SWF from being unloaded, but it's much more difficult to do by accident. Kudos to the player team for putting this in. Flash Grant 2008-07-02T15:24:55-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/07/source_code_lic_1.html There is a critical lack of understanding about the implications of different source code licenses in the Flash and Flex world. I've devoted quite a lot of time and energy to research and synthesize information on some of the most popular source code licenses being used in the Flash community today Flash Grant 2008-07-01T14:31:52-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/06/programatically.html I get asked a lot of questions about my tree experiments, so I thought I would write up a simple explanation to point people in the right direction. Trees are beautiful examples of recursion in the natural world. Recursion is a deep topic, but for our purposes can be simplified... Flash Grant 2008-06-26T10:10:42-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/06/back_from_the_g.html I just got back from an amazing trip to the Galapagos islands. The islands are gorgeous, varied, and bursting with life. In places, you literally have to tiptoe through the local fauna. Snorkeling in the surrounding waters was equally enthralling, swimming within reach of sea turtles, penguins, sea lions, and an abundance of fish. Here's a few of my favourite photos. Personal Grant 2008-06-19T12:21:00-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/06/spl_12_released.html I'm happy to announce that we just released version 1.2 of our client-side, check-as-you-type, spell checking library for ActionScript 3 projects in Flash, Flex, or AIR. SPL 1.2 is a free upgrade for current users. You can find more information on the Spelling Plus Library, and see demos of it in action at the SPL product page Flash Lanny 2008-06-17T12:04:23-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/06/as3_workshop_no.html Last year I ran an intensive, one day workshop on ActionScript 3 covering a wide range of topics including AS3 / AVM2, migrating from AS2, runtime errors, the event model, the display list, regular expressions, E4X (XML), loading data and assets, optimization, and more. Today I released all 167 slides from the workshop... Flash Grant 2008-06-04T11:34:02-07:00 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/05/drawing_curved.html I'm bad at drawing curved lines in Flash. I decided to bite the bullet and figure out an easy way to work with curves. The result is a couple of "spikes" or isolated test cases that demonstrate the logic behind converting a series of straight lines into a nice looking curve. I also extended this logic to work with fills, which is handy for drawing for drawing things like grass, seaweed, and tentacle monsters. Flash Grant 2008-05-30T09:24:28-07:00