jun :: realeyes

So…sitting here packing my bags and getting ready for an early flight out to Chicago. I should be in bed but, MAX 2007 here I come!

I’m really looking forward to this year’s event, Ted Patrick, Sue Hove, and the rest of the MAX team have been working their butts off for the coolest thing to hit Chicago all year, possibly ever!

I’ll be speaking on Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be executing millions, maybe billions of lines of code through the Flash Player…gwah ha ha:

• Optimizing ActionScript 3.0 Performance
  • Monday, October 1 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
  • Tuesday, October 2 2:45 pm – 3:45 pm

David Hassoun will be speaking on Monday and Tuesday, I’ve already seen what he’s going to be presenting, it’s good stuff – and HD video? bonus! – you should definitely check out his sessions:

• Best Practices for Developing with ActionScript 3.0
  • Monday, October 1 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
  • Tuesday, October 2 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
• Experience Online Video Like Never Before with Adobe Flash, AIR and H.264
  • Tuesday, October 2 2:45 pm – 3:45 pm

There are also some other things that are at the top of my list to check out.

1. David Coletta, the main brains behind Buzzword. I caught the second half of his presentation at 360Flex and it was very impressive, full of good content, and very entertaining. Learning new stuff and being entertained simultaneously is always good for the soul. So anyway, go check out one of his sessions:
   • Inspire Session: Building Buzzword, a New Breed of Word Processor
     • Monday, October 1 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm
   • Optimizing Flex Applications
     • Tuesday, October 2 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
     • Wednesday, October 3 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
2. Doug, Deepa, Tony, Chafic, Adam, and Andy will be BOFing the Adv Component Development mojo on Monday evening. All of the above developers kick it hard and rock the mic, so you should definitely hang out:
   • Flex Custom Component Development
     • Monday October 1 @ 9:30 pm – Room 179 A
3. The AIRPark looks pretty dope, and if the weather is good, then it’ll be the place to be. Hopefully the likes of Ryan Stewart, Mike Chambers, Kevin Hoyt, Mike Potter, and Matt Chotin will be hanging around to say hey to.

Anyway, it’s 12:30am, gotta be up at 5:30am, should probably call it a night…go MAX 2007!

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So part of my job as a technical trainer and active user group member is to review tech books from time to time.  Although I wish I could just spend my time reviewing Flex and ActionScript books, sometimes I’m given books that are outside of my normal scope of technology.  Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML was one of these books. 

Although, it took me a while to get the motivation to pick it up – namely since XHTML, Tables, and Forms are all something that I’m already comfortable with – I finally got around to it.  The other block to my motivation is that I had picked up Head First Design Patterns before and after about 5 pages stopped reading it due to it’s very non-standard tech book format…I hated it.

Needless to say, after I picked this book up with an open mind, I not only enjoyed it, but now I want to go back and read the Head First Design Patterns book. 

The Head First format is very non-standard, and with lack of a better description is pretty non-linear and unstructured at first glance.  It takes a chapter or two to get used to but once I did, I found out that it was well structured for getting the big picture quickly and non missing important details. 

Rather than reading the book from front to back and pages from top to bottom, information is presented to you in several different formats: standard book format, real-world code examples, Q&A, Sharpen your pencil exercises, Markup Magnets, Fireside Chats, Bullet Points, among others.  This was a good format to get through the whole book quickly without having to read every last word.

Looking at this book from the point of view of someone just getting started with the web I would highly recommend it.  One of the nicest concepts in the book is that they started the reader writing HTML and then showed them later on how to convert it to XHTML, all the while teaching the HTML in a format that made the conversion a piece of cake.  In addition, there were lots of diagrams, and many real-world code examples with annotations to help reinforce the concepts covered in the book.

So, since I already knew most of the material, what did I get out of it? 

First off, I have a new found respect for the Head First format…I can’t wait to get my hands on some more of these…especially the Java ones.  Second, there was a decent amount of coverage on CSS.  I’m an old-school HTML layout guy using tables, inline styling, etc.  In other words, CSS is something I’ve never really had a chance to learn too much of.  I enjoyed reading the CSS chapters 8-12.  It was a good ground up approach, covering CSS Stylesheets, Inheritance, the Box Model, and a good amount of columnar page layout with CSS and divs…look ma no tables!

Anyway, I give this book a thumbs up, for the beginner it’s definitely a good read, for the experienced, you may find some things in it that you didn’t already know…if anything it’s a most entertaining read!

-Jun

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So I just got Adobe CS3 Master Collection. I’ve been dying to play around with Premiere Pro. So I install and open the app…low and behold we ain’t in Flex Builder no more. I figure out how to import video from my camera, but then I want to extract clips from the source AVI. Well…doh! I don’t know this program, and to me it’s pretty dang confusing.

This is where the kudos come in. Kudos to Adobe, kudos to Max Smith, and kudos to Lynda.com. There is a really cool reference accessible from devnet for us visual learners. The nice thing is it encompasses Adobe CS3′s Suite of Products!

Here’s a direct link to the resource: http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

So anyway, the kudos were given since I watched Max Smith’s “Setting up a project” Premiere Pro video tutorial and now I’ve got an FLV based on the clips I extracted from my source AVI…training video included, it all took less than a half hour…yay!

For those of you in Denver today, you’ll want to hit up a really cool user group meeting. Kevin Hoyt and David Hassoun will be speaking about a couple of very cool topics:

• AIR – The basics and SQL API
• New Flash Player Update and HD Video (H264/MPEG4)

Not only will you see these cool topic presented by a couple of very good and knowledgeable speakers, there will be PBR beer to drink there too!

Come check it out, details are at –> http://www.rmaug.com/

Yes, I finally poked my head out of Bioshock – which by the way is one of the best games ever – long enough to upload the newest version of REDbug, yay Jun!

I think that the most important feature of this release was opening up the authorization system to allow for one to re-use their registration key, for instance if they needed to re-install the app.

After working with this update, I have to say I really love the autoupdate feature built into the AIR platform. It’s amazing, and once you have all your ducks in a row it’s brainless to make sure that people get the newest versions of your app, good job Adobe AIR team!

One other thing I’ve been realizing with this shift from web development to desktop development is that now more than ever it’s important to plan ahead. In other words no more cowboy coding!

Here’s an example, you have a CFC that’s used for a critical functions in your AIR app and you’d like to move it or modify it. In the past with web development, it was simple, you change the CFC then change the code on your web app server that was pointing to it. Granted, this was not a good practice once a system went live, but it could be done relatively painlessly in a reasonably controlled environment.

Well the problem is now, once someone downloads and installs an AIR application, that’s it, you can’t change the code in their version of the application. In other words, you stick with what you got or support two different implementations simultaneously until you can phase the old versions out. Another kudo to the autoupdate feature in AIR!

Anyway, if you haven’t already, take a look at REDbug. It’s a good app for debugging and profiling your Flash, Flex, and AIR applications outside of the Flex Builder debug mode. In addition, REDbug is a good opportunity to see some of the slick features that ActionScript, Flex, and AIR have to offer in action:

• File I/O: Write and read serialized objects to file
• Auto update: Each time a new version comes out you’ll get prompted to install when you open REDbug
• Advanced DataGrid: It’s awesome to be able to group like items in the grid now with little effort
• Charting Components: Charts are pretty…he he
• Data Binding: Seriously pimp and requires little effort to keep your data fresh
• Windowing API: Coming soon!
• Modules: Coming soon!
• Power of the ByteArray: Coming soon!

Anyway…time to go play a little more Bioshock…