FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DENVER, Colo. June 11th 2007 –

The Actionscript Society is pleased to announce its inaugural gathering, taking place tomorrow, June 12th, at 6 PM. The Actionscript Society is a VIP Flash and Flex developers’ group, meeting every second Tuesday. The best and brightest Actionscript developers from the Denver/Boulder area will be getting together to discuss development techniques, best practices, gossip about the latest news, and show off their work.

Developer groups in this community come and go, but the Actionscript Society has two special characteristics that will make it extraordinarily popular and relevant. The first is how it fits into a new developer Supergroup called Web2.0sday. At the same time, in the same building, developer groups from other disciplines will also be meeting. Tomorrow, The Actionscript Society will meet alongside a Ruby/Rails group, Ruby Tuesday. In the coming months, a mobile technology group and an AJAX group will also meet. The ultimate goal is to have an unsurpassed, information rich, cross-pollinating über group for Denver’s interactive/Web 2.0 developers and enthusiasts.

The second special characteristic is booze. Free. Booze. At every meeting.

Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Actionscript Society and Web2.0sday June 12th, 6 PM. These group(s) will meet at id345 headquarters, located at 2930 Larimer St. Denver, CO.

In an earlier post about Actionscript development on the Mac. It was mentioned that one of the big holes in the Mac development suite was a SVN client as good as Tortoise SVN.

Tortoise is my favorite SVN client and, as far as I can tell, the best one out. It integrates directly into Windows Explorer, so you don’t have to navigate your repository through some weird one-off file navigator. But alas, there’s no version for the Mac.

I’ve recently found something pretty close: scplugin. It integrates with the finder, so you can execute repository commands from the right-click menu. There are a couple downsides, though.

For one thing, it’s still a young software product. Right now, the latest version is 0.6, so not all of the functionality is in place. It also requires the command-line version of subversion to be installed. Still, it gets the basics right. Update, Commit, and Revert seem to work just fine.

It’s definitely shows a lot of promise.

I’ve been working on a music podcast (which I am releasing shortly), using GarageBand, the music/podcast creation software that came with my mac. GarageBand is fantastic for podcasts, by the way. It has some really clever features, like the ability to make background tracks and foreground tracks. So when a foreground track, like the narrator’s voice, is playing, the background tracks are automatically turned down. Is that cool or what?!

So enter the lameness: In GarageBand, you can pull in any audio files you want, EXCEPT music purchased from the iTunes music store. This is obviously to prevent people from copying a song onto a track and then exporting the new song, making a perfect DRM-free copy of the original song. But it’s LAME. And the irony! Music legitimately purchased from Apple’s store can’t be added to an Apple podcast, while stolen music would work perfectly.

I did find a workaround and it’s the most obvious one. Just plug your ipod into your computer’s microphone port, pick your purchased song, and record the track in GarageBand. It doesn’t sound too bad, although there is a generation loss technically. It does record in stereo though, in case you were wondering.

Until Steve wins his crusade against DRM, I’ll be doing this on a regular basis.

Now every new Mac with a built-in display (meaning iMac, MacBook, and MacBook Pro) comes with an iSight. That’s great news for Flash and Flex developers that love integrating webcams into their work. Not only does it grow webcam-enbled Flash as a platform of sorts, but it also puts the best webcam on the market in front thousands of new computer owners.

I’ve got proof that it’s the best, too. Early in my career, I did some research for an Architekture.com whitepaper called “Optimizing Video Conferences with Macromedia Flash Technologies.” Through the course of our research, we discovered that the iSight was the least taxing to CPU performance than any other camera we could find. And more than that, the video quality was worlds better than any other camera we tested. That’s also true of the new, built-in iSights.

Interestingly, we wanted to test everything on the same Pentium 4 machine, but couldn’t find a PC driver for the iSight, so we rigged this weird quasi-driver with The Carnegie Mellon IEEE 1394 driver and a utility called SplitCam. Good Times…

Anyway, I tried to play with a webcam-enabled swf (probably Grant Skinner’s Webcam Fire or something) when I got my new mac and I couldn’t get the built in iSight to talk to FlashPlayer. WTF?

I opened the settings menu, selected “IIDC FireWire Video” from the camera menu and… nothing. I opened up PhotoBooth to test the web cam and then hopped back to Flash. Nothing.

After about thirty minutes of fiddling with this, I decided to try all of the cameras on the menu, just for yuks. I selected “USB Video Class Video [sic]” and presto! My iSight came to life.

So it turns out the new iSight is a USB device now, instead of a FireWire device. You can see for yourself in the System Profiler. Who would have thought?

Moral of the story: When all else fails, try all of the options.

P.S. Still looking for a kick-ass Flash developer.

So this link has already been passed around the blogosphere more than a joint at Woodstock, but it’s too amazing to miss. When people started experimenting with 3D in the powerful, JIT-ery new Actionscript 3 Flash Player, my initial impression was, “Great, now we can make Wing Commander 3 run in the flash player. Big deal.” This new test makes Flash’s 3D potential look much better than I thought. It has bump mapping, reflections, and a rhinoceros.

Check it out for yourself.

P.S. I’m still hard at work on a killer FDT install guide. Look out for it soon!

My rad new company, Xylem Interactive, is looking for flash developers. Quick!

We’re based in Denver (LoDo), so it’d be nice if you were too, but it’s not a requirement. Having solid AS2 practices is important. We’re looking to hire a full time developer, but freelance inquiries are definitely welcome.

Personally, I love working for Xylem. I’ve worked on code bases from more than a few interactive agencies and most range from a little messy to downright scary. As a coder/geek, I’ve been really impressed with their balance of development and design talent. I think that no matter where you might fit on the brainiac/artiste spectrum of Flash production, you’d enjoy doing it here.

Give me a buzz if you’re interested in the job. bob@xyleminteractive.com

Actionscript development, namely object-oriented Flash and Flex, has been dominated by Windows PCs for as long as I can remember. Even with Flash overlapping the Mac-heavy design world, the overwhelming majority of the Flash developers — and even designers — that I’ve come across have been using Windows.

I think that’s going to change.

I know many developers who have starting working on a Mac and are raving about it. Since I was due for a new machine recently, I decided to make the switch myself and start developing on an Intel-powered MacBook Pro. While there are a few drawbacks, overall I think it’s a great choice and I highly recommend it.

The Pros

Everyone’s already heard the reasons why people prefer OS X to Windows so let me just skim through them. So there are no mac viruses, it’s super stable, easy to use, etc… But here are my favorite features:

• Any time you enter a password on your mac — in any program — it stores it in a special repository called Keychain. If you forget a password or need to share one with somebody, you can look it up. Genius!
• Speaking of passwords, when you connect to a wifi network, you don’t have to enter the network key FRIGGIN’ TWICE, BLIND! On a 128 bit WEP, that’s absolutely maddening! On a mac, you enter it once (duh) and you can even look at the key as you’re entering it, if you’d like.
• You can drag anything into almost anything else and it will do something intelligent. You can alt-tab into different applications while dragging. In an open document, you can drag the document icon, shown on the title bar, to some place in the file system and it will move the document to that location. In short, dragging, like almost everything else, is unbelievably intuitive.
• For some reason, you can do so much more with the same amount of screen real estate on a Mac. My new Mac has a max resolution of 1440×900, down from the 1680×1050 res of the HP laptop I was using previously. Strangely, it feels like I have twice as much now as I did then. That’s partially because Mac apps tend to have less chrome than their PC counterparts. But more importantly, Macs treat the concept of “maximizing” a window totally differently. When you maximize a window, it only grows to the size it needs, rather than taking up the whole screen. That means you can see several apps at once and easily navigate between them.

All of that said, it was the hardware — not the operating system — that turned the people I know over to the mac.

Earlier this year, I was working with Jesse Warden when he got his Mac, a black MacBook laptop. His other laptop was an enormous, specced-out Alienware that felt like it was made out of cement. The MacBook was brought into his fleet as an “email machine,” allowing him to check his email and surf the web while traveling, leaving all of his development to onsite desktop machines.

I checked back with him recently and he’s using his Mac much more. He had this to say:

“Onsite with a client, I was starting to use my Mac 100% of the time… It doesn’t weigh 14.5 pounds like my Alienware, only 4.  It fits in my Flash MX 2004 Timbuk bag nicely; the Alienware didn’t really fit well… at all.  It has built in wireless that just… works, unlike the Alienware which was clunky to get working and the card stuck out of the already behmoth machine.  It looks good, and therefore, gives me a professional look to my clients.”

My friends at effectiveUI have been even more aggressive with their Mac migration. They’ve moved nearly their entire development team — dozens of engineers — over to the Mac. The new intel-based laptops allow their team to move easily around the office and around the country, while working on the same ultra-portable machine. And I’ve heard nothing but great reports from them about FlexBuilder’s performance on the Mac. It seems to be every bit as stable as the PC version.

The Cons

There are a few pain points with working on the Mac. First among these: compiling is slower. This is experienced mainly in flash, where the compiler uses the old PowerPC instructions that have to be translated for the new intel Macs. When I mentioned this to Jesse, he wasn’t terribly concerned. He keeps his larger projects in Flex, so his Flash projects contain much less work for the compiler. “The Flash IDE as a compiling solution works fine for a lot of the smaller scoped tasks I use it for, where the heavy lifting is done in Flex.” He continued, “A lot of my software just doesn’t run as fast.  I’ve been SERIOUSLY impressed with Adobe’s efforts, though, so know it’ll work eventually.”

Jesse noticed some other problems that I didn’t. His favorite SVN client, Tortoise, and his favorite diff tool, Beyond Compare, are not available for Mac. Though Subclipse works just fine on OS X, it seems to be a lot more buggy and obscure than rock-solid tortoise. And as a diff tool, Subclipse is not able to do the same local folder comparisons that Jesse relies on with Beyond Compare. We’re both on the hunt for better tools.

I must also say that the Flash IDE is a lot clunkier on a Mac. The panels don’t nest quite as well, so it feels like you’d need two displays to get a highly functional AS1 workflow going. That and the “Home” and “End” keys don’t jump to the beginning and end of a line like you’d want them to. Ugh!

Conclusion

If you’re willing to overlook a few minor quirks and annoyances. The Macintosh environment seems to make a great development platform. You get to use largely the same development tools on hardware and software that’s far superior to any Windows box.

And heck, if there’s that one Windows program that you have to have, you can even run it on your Apple via Parallels or Boot Camp, something I didn’t have time to get into.

Coming Up Next…

I’ll walk through setting up FDT on a mac and explain how to tame its out-of-control core libraries.

So, I got back from Hawaii… two months ago. A lot has happened since then. New job, new computer, and a whole lot of Flash and Flex knowledge to drop on y’all. Stay tuned for these messages:

• Flash/Flex + Mac = <3
• Flash + Built-in iSight = <3
• Flash + Printer != <3
• The Ultimate Flash Development Environment Part II

Still in Hawaii. I love it.

I have tons of interesting and insightful things to share about my experience here, as well as amazing, gorgeous, and often hilarious photos.

…but I’m not going to — that sounds boring.

I’m going back to the beach. Thanks again for reading my blog.

After a grueling 18 hour trip from Denver and a 5 hour layover in lovely Las Vegas airport, I have arrived in Oahu. For the next two weeks, I’ll be living on the north shore, which is very rural. My house is sandwiched between the ocean and a farm.

Once I get a USB cable for my camera, I’ll upload some pretty pictures. Till then…