Ah The Memories…Dev Abuse is Forever

My good friend Stacey Mulcahy just posted the first in a series about project management from a developer’s perspective in InsideRIA.  The theme being, Bend Over Here It Comes Again.  Surely much of this opinion was formed during our days at a certain interactive agency in Atlanta.

I’ve left the agency world and moved into RIA development.  It’s a lot different so far here at EUI, but I’m sure that there are agencies all over the world whose developers are considered to be in the IT department rather than integrated with creative.  In my opinion if you want to be efficient and create stellar work on the Flash Platform devs and creatives must work together!

To the Mile High City!

My goal of moving toward more app-centric development has come true! I’m moving to Denver for at least six months to take on a contract to hire opportunity. The adventure for me and new partner in crime Donnie begins tomorrow!

Things have been super stressful with me trying to get ready to move while working marathon hours but the time is here. I’m soooo ready to start this next step in my life! Thanks to all of my family and friends who have helped me out during the last few months of enormous change – you know who you are!

ActionScript Coder for Hire!

As of February, I am on the market for work coding Flash. I am well versed in AS2 and currently working on picking up AS3. I am looking for full time work but I will be glad to take contract as well. I have worked on sites such as:

whiteboard.ups.com
www.vwfeatures.com (GTI Joyride)
www.gptimemachine.com
onehundred.genworth.com
www.freedomoftheseas.com

I currently live in the Atlanta area.

If you are interested, contact me: brentpub [at] darbymedia {dot} com.

IE, Local Playback, FLVs and Querystrings

I had a problem today with a Flash site converted to playback on CD-ROM where it would work fine in Firefox but FLV content would not playback in IE.

It turns out that for the web version if bandwidth had not been detected and tracked that I was appending a ?nocache=[random number] to the filename in order to make sure that the file would load even if cached. On the CD-ROM (or running directly from the hard drive) this would cause a “stream not found” error. Disabling this so that a querystring was not used solved my problem.

The Elusive drawFocus Property

Yesterday I was dealing with problem where a TextField with no border on a white background was showing a faint green or blue border, not when clicked, but when tabbed to.

I searched and searched for the issue and came up empty, but of course my colleague Mathew “RayRay” Ray found a solution in seconds.

Best as I can tell, between Halo styling and FocusManager this problem is occurring. It can be solved by using:

_myTextField.drawFocus = false

Once I had drawFocus, a search on it led to _myTextField.drawFocus = “” as well.

I can’t find any official documentation on drawFocus anywhere and searches like: actionscript focusmanager blue rectangle were not turning anything up. Hopefully once this page is indexed it will help someone!

What Was FITC?

Well I just got back from my very first Flash conference, FITC, and it was a pretty good milestone for me.

It was great to finally meet my online friend Stacey who has given me tons of advice over the last year or two. I also met many new people, Kristin, Lord Alex, Eric, Steve, Paolo, Tony, Julian, James, Randy, Michael, Lanny. I’m sure I’ve left some out. I’ve got some pictures here, but Stacey’s are much more entertaining. Of course it was awesome having my fellow work peeps Mathew Ray and Adam Boozer there too!

Aside from the fun, I got some pretty serious inspiration and motivation to further my knowledge of what is now known as the Flash Platform. There were several sessions that were busts, one in particular in my opinion was the keynote. I don’t think that anything groundbreaking was announced and I thought that much of it was just filler. Can you say “exciting?”

The most inspiring session was Joshua Davis’ Mutation themed talk. I was strangely freaked when Adam dropped the F-Bomb but Joshua put everyone to shame in that department. The guy just does amazing work in the punk aesthetic (inspirational to me) which is also creative, and technical. Other sessions that I especially enjoyed were by Colin Moock, Darron Schall, Mario Klingemann, Keith Peters, Adam Boozer, the Next Generation panel, and the Freelancing panel. Some others were interesting and others I found fairly bland.

On Sunday the combination of Colin Moock’s and Darron Schall’s talks made me realize the potential of what Adobe is trying to do with the Flash Platform and Apollo. Not that I’m well read in the Flash/Flex blogosphere, but I haven’t seen anyone state this yet: Adobe is aiming directly at the .NET market. With the free dev framework, the lightweight runtime platform (much smaller than MS .NET), the cross-platform (I hope) compatibility, and the promise of desktop apps with Apollo, I’m definitely buying in. From what I can see from the sessions by Collin, Darron, and Keith, the entirely rewritten version 9 player will open up a whole new range of possibilities, AND respect for the Flash Platform.

Joyce came up and we stayed a couple of extra days after the conference to enjoy Toronto. The extra time brought up feelings I’ve had about Canada, Toronto and Hockey which will be upcoming posts.