Aral Balkan

I held a day-long workshop -– an ever-so-slightly modified version of my Hot Shots: Foundations of Object-Oriented ActionScript 2 course -- on Day 0 of FlashForward Seattle 2006 and it was a real blast. The room was overflowing – I believe we had over 200 attendees (apparently I'll be getting a bigger room next time!)

The response to the course has been great and it was definitely very exciting to be teaching it in the excellent venue we have this year at the Washington Convention Center.

Yesterday, I gave a talk titled the Open Source Flash Revolution – in which I spoke about OSFlash and gave both an overview of the various open source Flash projects that are available as well as demonstrations of some of the most popular ones.

Specifically, I showed the audience how to setup and use MTASC and Swfmill, initially starting with the command line and then moving on to a simple AME system (ASDT + Ant + MTASC + Eclipse.) From there I demonstrated a fully open-source AMES suite (ASDT + Ant, MTASC, Eclipse and Swfmill) as well as a FAME system (FlashIDE + ASDT + Ant + MTASC + Eclipse -- yes, I'm changing the definition here as Flashout is so yesteryear and quite irrelevant -- don't shoot me Jesse!)

After the full-day workshop, my Open Source talk appeared to breeze by in a heartbeat!

Comments

• I never imagined that I'd hear the word "peeing dog" soooo many times in one day. lol
  
  Seriously... You where one of the beter presenters so far. I learned a lot about the core struture of .as The logic has been a challenge for me to put my hands around, especially when I come from a design background and am quite comfortable with html and javascript... I've recently been working with cgi and Perl... I'm just getting dangerous enough to cause real damage... but anyway.... this was good...And I needed this time most of all, someone like you to really explain the guts of it all...it really set me up for the rest of the conf.(in such a sweet spot) Thank you!!!
  
  Also, your a very through and comfortable speaker and the time you've spent with this shows. I'll be sure to advertise you and your information well to my friends in future conversations.
  
  Hope to meet you soon...
  
  m<
  ~ The girl up front.

  by Emilyf18 on 2006-03-02 00:18:20

• I was sitting in your OSFlash session yesterday in Seattle when I heard you say "flashout is so yesterday or dead", or something similar, and I had some contrary thoughts on that...let me preface, I've leveraged every variation of (F)AME(S) and they're all great -- i mean seriously, anything that gets me out of the Flash IDE and into an entriprise level IDE is promising...but, I don't think it's fair to say Flashout is completely useless -- I like the ability to test my SWF in a browser; this allows me to pass NVPs via the query string, use FlashVars, and even create a framed html container for history mgmt (very similar to the Flex vr that uses 2 frames: one with a main swf and other with a history swf and passes flags to and fro via LocalConnection...but that's a whole other post). And I can now do this all inside eclipse -- plus, I can hit the old Flash standby CTRL + Enter to test my app.
  
  But don't get me wrong, I love ant, so maybe the better solution is to create an ant task that opens my html frameset in the eclipse default browser or in firefox, or whatever browser you want to target...let me take it a step further and also suggest changing the CTRL + Enter shortcut (Window->Preference->General->Keys) to kick off an ant build when in the scope of ActionScript2 ...yeah, that might do it...my 2 cents.
  
  -riley

  by riley on 2006-03-02 01:59:30

• Hi Riley,
  
  I've actually never been a very big fan of Flashout but there was a time when it was the only solution available. My issues with it stem mostly from it not adhering to the Eclipse design guidelines -- I find the interface quite unusable. I do agree, however, with your points regarding the utility of testing from within an HTML page versus directly in the standalone player. You're right when you mention that this is also possible through an Ant task. In fact, I'll add such a task to my session for Flash In The Can.
  
  It's funny that you mention using Ctrl-Enter to run your apps -- that's exactly what I do in Flex Builder on a daily basis. Again, I'll incorporate this into the talk as I find the default shortcut key combinations ridiculously longwinded.
  
  Thanks so much for your invaluable feedback.

  by Aral Balkan on 2006-03-02 16:24:50

• Hi Emily,
  
  Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm so happy that you enjoyed the workshop. Looking forward to meeting you at the conference -- please feel free to come up and say hello.

  by Aral Balkan on 2006-03-02 16:27:23

• Thanks so much for your sessions, you really catalyzed some stuff for me.
  I can't wait to try some things with ARP- I've been using a proprietary framework I developed: SSS (Spaghetti Salad Sandwich), it has some limitations. You've got me considering a trip to London for some Hot Shots. Rock on.

  by mgates on 2006-03-03 23:22:09