Anyway, I designed and developed an AIR App for those of you attending the conference this year. The App will allow you to view the schedule (which will update should there be changes), allow you to email session information to a friend and allow you to schedule a reminder for sessions of your choice. In addition to the schedule, the App will load Flashpitt related Tweets from Twitter into the Banter tab as well as allowing users to view pictures taken at Flashpitt 2008 and 2009 on the Flickr tab.

We are currently in private beta 2 for the App, if you are interested and are attending the conference you can shoot me an email at ben at pixelfumes.com to apply as a beta tester. Hope you like the App and find it useful!

Schedule View

Session Detail and Reminder

Banter

Flickr

Quite some time ago I posted that Flashpitt was running again this year. Time has really flown because now Flashpitt 2009 is only a month away. It’s coming up on October 15th and 16th.

It’s looking like it’s going to be a great event again this year. They’ll have a full day of sessions again this year and they’ve added a full day of workshops right before the conference as well. So there’s a chance to get some more indepth knowledge before jumping in to the full day of session. The speakers list is pretty impressive, too!

This year I’ll be an attendee instead of a speaker which means I’ll get to check out a lot more sessions than last year. I’m especially looking forward to checking out Jer Thorp’s and Seb Lee-Delisle’s sessions. Both of them do does some amazing, yet totally different, work. On the more technical side Scott Janousek’s mobile session is also one I want to catch.

Check out Flashpitt.com for all the sessions and speakers.

This variation takes in to account varying heights for the items in each row. You can configure the number of columns to display as well. This code can easily be modified to change these parameters or to set number of rows as the primary setting instead of columns. You will notice in this example I use little boxes, you would swap out the “item” (sprite, movie clip, etc.) that you would want in the grid in place of this. Hope this proves useful for some of you.

/************************************/
//Pixelfumes 2009 - Ben Pritchard
//AS3 Quick Grid Layout - Fluid Row Height
/************************************/
//items in the grid
var nItems:uint = 10;
//number of columns desired
var nCols:uint = 4;
//col and row padding
var padding:uint = 3;
//loop vars
var nCreated:uint = 0;
var tallestItem:Number = 0;
var lastItem:Object;

for(var i:uint=0;i<nItems;i++){
	//swap this block for whatever item is
	//being used in the grid
	var item:Sprite = new Sprite();
		item.graphics.beginFill(0xCCCCCC);
		item.graphics.drawRect(0,0,30,30);
		item.graphics.endFill();

	//add the item to the grid
	addChild(item);

	//keep track of the tallest item in this row
	if(item.height > tallestItem){
		tallestItem = item.height;
	}

	//if we are not on the very first item
	if(nCreated != 0){
		//have we reached the max col for this row
		if(nCreated % nCols == 0){
			item.x = 0;
			item.y = lastItem.y + tallestItem + padding;
			tallestItem = 0;
		}else{
			item.x = lastItem.x + lastItem.width + padding;
			item.y = lastItem.y;
		}
	}

	nCreated++;
	//update last item
	lastItem = item;
}

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch odds are you have seen or even played Pocket God. Pocket God is a neat little game that let’s you do whatever you like to a little group of pygmies. Most of the time this consists of tossing them to sharks or volcanoes though.

I was interested today by a great article over at Macenstein that talked a little bit about the Flash roots of the art. Apparently event the initial concept of the game was created in flash (albeit 1’s and 0’s for learning binary instead of pygmies).

Dave had the initial idea of pygmies on an island. It was loosely based on an educational flash project we had done a a few years ago. The objective was to pick up cute little ones and zeroes with googly eyes and put them in order to create a binary number. If you dropped them in the wrong place, they looked panicked and yelled “whoa” and dropped off the screen.

Head on over to Macenstein to read more about the process Allan Dye uses within Flash and the processes that lead to the release of the game.

I had a great time traveling out to Ohio for this year’s Spring <br /> Conference. Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions as well! My slides from my presentations are available for download here:

Intro to Flash CS4:
Presentation slides (swf – use left and right arrow keys to change slides)

Intro to Adobe AIR 1.5:
Presentation slides (swf – use left and right arrow keys to change slides)
ThemeSong AIR Application

Great Information Gleaned From Sessions I Attended
My favorite session of the day was Eric Meyer’s “JavaScript Will Save Us All”. He had some really great links in the presentation to a lot of different frameworks and I thought I would share them with you all:

JQueryUI and JSBin I also attended Richard Worth’s JQueryUI: Hands On session. I didn’t even know that JQueryUI existed – I am very excited to try it out! Here are some related links that I found beneficial from his session:

Thanks again to OU for having me at Spring <br /> this year! Hope some of these links benefit you as well.

Have no clue as to what I am talking about? Check out Lee’s post on the subject and then head over to labs to see what Adobe cooked up for us this time.

You can visit the tutorials section for Flash Builder 4 and watch an introductory video over at Labs as well.  If you want more details you can visit the Developer Center.  Adobe recently posted in depth articles on some of the new features in the Flex Developer Center.  I’m still slightly confused as this version of Flash Builder still has MXML options in it and I thought they were making the product previously know as Flex the MXML editor and FlashBuilder the ActionScript 3 editor.  Also, we know there will be another version of the Flash Professional IDE, according to Lee Brimelow, containing an updated ActionsPanel as well.  Anyway…  Let me know what you guys think!

This update for Flash CS4 Professional (10.0.2) addresses issues related to compiling large projects. Specifically, it addresses stability and performance issues related to large animation files, such as timeline scrubbing and looping and nested movie clips, as well as text handling. For more details, read the technote. For more about this update from Richard Galvan, product manager for Adobe Flash Professional, visit Richard Galvan’s blog.

As mentioned above, Richard Galvan’s blog lists a huge number of fixes at the bottom of this blog post.

You can download the latest update over at the Adobe Flash Support Center page at Adobe.com.  Go get your update!  Let us know if it helps you out.

Are you going to be in or around Ohio June 9th?  If so, make sure you head out to the 2009 Spring <br /> Conference in Athens Ohio.  I will be speaking in two sessions this year, “An Introduction to Adobe AIR 1.5″ and “Introduction to Flash CS4″. The session descriptions are below:

An Introduction to Adobe AIR 1.5

Join us for an overview of the capabilities that the AIR (Adobe Runtime Environment) offers developers. We will cover the means by which AIR applications can be created, the capabilities provided to developers in the latest release of AIR (1.5) and examples of successful AIR applications that people use everyday. This session will also include an overview and demo of ThemeSong, an AIR application that leverages an open source Bluetooth server and AIR. Make sure to come to this session with your phone or device’s Bluetooth on and discoverable!

Introduction to Flash CS4

Though Flash CS4 has been out for sometime there are still a lot of designers and developers who have not made the jump yet. In this session we will cover what Flash CS4 has to offer, why ActionScript 3 is king, the new type rendering engine, new native classes, improvements to the compiler and timeline and the benefits of Flash Player 10.

I look forward to meeting lots of folks and geeking out on Flash. You can learn more about the 2009 Spring <br /> Conference by visiting the official site.

I just finished a another article called Saving User Generated Imagery from an AIR Application Using the JPG and PNG Encoder Classes and Flash CS4. The article is posted on The Tech Labs website. If you have ever wanted to create a PNG or JPG on the fly using the JPGEncoder or PNGEncoder classes (provided by Adobe) then this will help you out! Also, if you still get confused about saving files using AIR (as I sometimes do) then head on over to The Tech Labs site to brush up on AIR and to read more about how you can build the AirEncoder application yourself.