January 2005 Archives

A milestone for the open source command line ActionScript 2.0 compiler has been reached. Nicolas Cannasse of Motion-Twin announced yesterday that that MTASC 1.0 has officially been released. It includes compilation support for Macromedia's V2 Components.

You can find more information and the download link on the project page.

MTASC is a way to compile ActionScript class files to a .swf file without the need for the Flash Authoring Environment. The speed of compilation is amazingly fast, usually around 0 seconds.

It's definitely worth a look. MTASC runs cross platform, so you Linux developers can compile ActionScript 2 to .swf on your native machine.

It's no secret that you can exclude classes from your compiled .swf files. Thinking about the next version of Flash, I thought I'd sum up some of my thoughts about the exclude functionality.

My first off-topic post in awhile, but I couldn't help but share a few pictures of the puppy Jen and I picked up a few weeks ago.

This is Yellowdog - she's a Yellow Labrador Retriever puppy, just over 9 weeks old.

Out for a walk by the river...

The sad puppy-dog-eyes look...

Pretending to be asleep.

She's quite a handful. I'm not sure that I've slept through an entire night in about 2 weeks, but at least she has me up every night on a consistent schedule so I can expect it. It's pretty time consuming taking care of a puppy, but enjoyable as well. She's getting better as she gets older...

Isn't she cute?

Ok, ok.. sorry for the interruption. Back to Flash... I just submitted an article for MXDJ that should be printed sometime soon, after it makes it through the review process. It's on Web Services and Data Binding, so look for that in the upcoming months. I'll mention it when it's officially published.

Alright, so I'm not the first to announce this.. but the Flash in the Can site has been updated for 2005. Check out the speaker list.. you'll find names like Keith, Grant, Jared, Branden, Chafic, Colin, Darron (that's me), and many many others.

What is FITC?

A 3 day festival featuring presentations, workshops, panels, installations, and performances by the leaders in the new media industry. With over a 1000 attendee's anticipated this year from around the Globe, this is an event not to be missed.

New speakers this year include...

Yugo Nakamura, yugop.com
David Carson, davidcarsondesign.com
Evan Roth, ni9e.com
Bradley Grosh, gmunk.com
Jemma Gura, prate.com
Geoff Lillemon, oculart.com
Amy Franceschini, futurefarmers.com
Norma Toraya, crankbunny.com
Margot Knight, margotknight.com
Robert L Peters, icograda.org
Marcos Weskamp, marumushi.com
Dave Shea, csszengarden.com
Keith Peters, bit-101.com
Robert Hodgin, flight404.com
Ben Fry, processing.org
Gary Stasiuk, liquidjourney.com
Casey Reas, groupc.net

Tickets

Until Jan 31 > Regular $450 / Student $125
After Feb 01 > Regular $550 / Student $175
After Mar 01 > Regular $650 / Student $225
(All prices in Canadian Funds)

More info at www.fitc.ca

Go check it out, and order your ticket before the end of the month to save some cash! I hope to see you there...

It's official, ActionScript is finally a "real" programming language.

A very long time ago I was working on my SharpFlash project. When I went to add it to SourceForge I was given the option of categorizing the programming language. Like the name suggests, SharpFlash is a mixture of ActionScript and C#. I added C# as a language just fine, but alas... ActionScript was nowhere to be found.

Dejected, I submitted a request that ActionScript be added to the list of available programming languages. Many many months later, my request has been acted on.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, ActionScript is a "real" programming langauage now. Why? Because you can finally select it as language on SourceForge, that's why. If you own a SourceForge project that uses ActionScript, go ahead and re-classify it to reflect the change.

We're lucky to have our language of choice begin with "ac" - so it even appears at the top of the list.

Yay! Many thanks go out to the SourceForge team for acting on my request.