8 Mar 13:28 Now that Adobe's new desktop runtime AIR has been released, the Flash industry is eagerly waiting for the first real killer AIR app. At least one potential contender comes from a company in New York called Aviary. Aviary is making a suite of graphics tools with some very interesting interactions for generating designs. German mad scientist Mario Klingeman is producing one of the tools, known as Peacock. Peacock dynamically produces... 7 Mar 18:39 I recently met with Flash authoring product-manager, Richard Galvan, to talk about Diesel, the next version of Flash (i.e., Flash CS4, or version 10 for those counting). Adobe has already demonstrated a bunch of high-impact features for Diesel, including inverse kinematics, a new tweening model, 3D "postcards in space", and advanced text components (see MAX 07 keynote, FOTB 07 keynote, and FITC Amsterdam 08 keynote). But Richard was keen to... 17 Feb 10:45 Last fall, the working group responsible for designing the next version of ECMAScript released an overview of proposed features for ECMAScript 4. ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, so the hypothetical ActionScript 4.0 will undoubtedly support some, if not all, of the proposed features. In February and April (in Amsterdam and Toronto, respectively), I'll be doing a lecture at FITC covering the ECMAScript 4 features that will theoretically be added to... 10 Feb 12:02 i'll be in munich, germany on february 20 doing a free all-day seminar on object-oriented programming with ActionScript 3.0. apparently there are lots of spots still available, so if you're anywhere near munich and want to learn ActionScript 3.0, drop on by! >> register for ActionScript 3.0 training in munich (i'll also be doing the seminar in amsterdam on feb 27, and london on march 3, but those venues are... 9 Feb 17:34 Adobe engineer-turned-technical writer, Francis Cheng, recently started a blog about ECMAScript 4 and ActionScript. Francis was one of my main contacts during the writing of Essential ActionScript 3.0 (he responded to 334 of my emails during the book's writing!). Francis sits on the ECMAScript 4 committee, and was one of the authors of the ActionScript 3.0 language specification. His new blog already has some great posts about proposed ECMAScript 4... 24 Jan 14:54 In parts of the Flash community, ActionScript 3.0 seems to have gained a reputation for being "hard"—particularly among those who have not yet tried the new language. Is the reputation warranted? To find out, read my article at O'Reilly's new InsideRIA.com... (there's a good discussion happening in the comments after the article too. contributions welcome!)... 28 Nov 14:24 [UPDATE: The spots filled up. Registration is now closed. Next stops: Munich, Amsterdam, and London...] i've just learned that registration for the chicago stop on my actionscript 3.0 training tour has been re-opened. apparently some new spots have opened up. the event is on december 3rd, 2007. >> get details and register at www.adobeas3tour.com hope to see you there!... 11 Nov 07:48 if you just can't wait for ECMAScript 4 (aka the next version of ActionScript and JavaScript) to be implemented in Flash Player and Web browsers, you can already experiment with it today using the ECMAScript 4 Reference Implementation. the Reference Implementation is actually very easy to set up and use. to get started with it, watch John Resig's short video explaining basics of installation, and compiling and running programs. >>... 10 Nov 09:44 is the future of ECMAScript 4 (i.e., javascript and actionscript) based on technical or political considerations? judging by the recent exchange on the es4-discuss mailing list, there's a good helping of both. if you have some (well, a lot of) time on your hands, and you're curious to see some not-so-internal debate on the future of ECMAScript 4 between Microsoft, Yahoo!, Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, "and others," start here: >> read... 24 Oct 08:27 The ECMAScript working group (TC39-TG1) has recently released a great document describing what they hope to include in ECMAScript 4. ECMAScript is the standard upon which ActionScript and JavaScript are based. The theoretical next version of ActionScript (ActionScript 4.0) would be based on ECMAScript 4. The working group is aiming to complete the ECMAScript 4 specification by October 2008. >> read the ECMAScript 4 overview (pdf) more info on ECMAScript... |
