First let me start off by thanking Mike Potter (Program Manager, Developer Relations at Adobe) for sending me this book. According to Mike,

“Every once in a while I’ll go through Amazon and find wishlists with Flex or ActionScript books on them.”

So if you dont have a wishlist set up at Amazon, you should do so now, you never know who may be willing to make your day. Thanks again Mike! Now on to the book…

The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 was a good book. There I’ve said it, I liked the book. As with all Friends Of Ed Books (or at least the ones I have in my library) this book is extremely easy to read cover to cover. I dont know what it is about the books this company puts out, but they are by far the easy programming/technical books to read that I have ever purchased. I am constantly recommending the Foundation series books to people new to Actionscript, and/or Flash because of how easy they are to read.

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For the past, oh 7 years or so, I have been working on redesign my site. Ever since I completed it for the first time, a redesign of it has been on my mind (I’m never happy with my own work). When I finally set out to do it this time, I decided that I’d take the pressure off myself a bit and not have any delusions about an FWA, or feel the need to try and blow everyone away with my design and technical prowess (as if). I wanted something that would be simple and clean with no caffeine. Something that would be easier to maintain and easier to redesign next time (hopefully that wont take another 7 years). What I ended up building accomplishes that I think.

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I’ve gotten a few emails from people asking about getting the Escape Shortcuts to work in CS3, and specifically if they still work in AS3. The answer is absolutely, although they are not enabled by default from what I can tell. Enabling them though is rather easy.

Inside Flash CS3 IDE, open the panel menu (at the upper-right corner of the Actions panel) and make sure “Esc Shortcut Keys” is enabled (e.g. has a check mark next to it.

Also, remember its not a typical keyboard shortcut, where you hold down esc+f+n at the same time, but rather hit those buttons in a sequence. For example, press the esc key, then the f key then the n key and the shortcut will work, you will end up with

function () {

} 

Enjoy!

I mentioned in my previous post that I was having installation issues with the trial downloads of Adobe’s CS3 products (namely Flash CS3 and Photoshop CS3). I assumed that I could install the trials and when my serial number arrived I’d be able to enter it (as I have in the past) before the trial expired and everything would be great. Boy was I wrong. I tried to input the serial number but its a no go. So I say “screw it, I’ll go ahead and install the whole CS3 Web Premium Suite”. I get our software guy to login to the Adobe download center and begin the 1.6 GB download for the whole suite. I burn the software to a DVD and try to install, it unpacks the software to my desktop and I begin the setup process. I select the products to install (basically everything accept Version Cue) and I get presented with an error asking me to “Please insert Adobe CS3 Web Premium to continue installation“. What? The disk is in the drive, the files are on the desktop… what more is there? So again I head to Google, run a search based on the error and find a few things to try from one of the Adobe technotes regarding the CS3 installation problems. I have to admit to being a bit caught off guard by some of the suggestions (albeit in the “advanced troubleshooting” area) that suggested that I actually “Reinstall the operating system, or run a system restore” to get Photoshop to work. Are you f@$king serious?

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Our team has been eagerly awaiting our copies of CS3 to go through corporate purchasing. So when I saw Senocular’s post yesterday morning stating that the trials had finally been posted, I quickly forwarded the link to the rest of the team and we began downloading. Once the files were downloaded we all started installing… and waiting…and waiting …and waiting. The install process took forever, easily longer than it took to install Office and at likely as long as it took to install the OS. At least they got theres to install though, I’m not so lucky. While I have the same machine as everyone else on my team, for some reason my installer disappears after the “initializing…” message.

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Okay so the past few months have been a bit hectic to say the least and the blog has taken a back seat to coaching 6 year olds in soccer; organizing/coaching a basketball league for 9 year olds; finishing up another tattoo; getting the bike ready ride; getting back in shape; getting Travelocity ExperienceFinder^TM into the next stage; finishing up the last bit of freelance work I still have on my plate; and oh yeah, Crucial Limit Chapter Two (coming soon I promise). Even with all of this going on though I still take time to notice the things going on in the industry lately and there has been a bunch going on. I wanted to take a quick minute to offer up my opinion (for what its worth) on a few topics.

First, I have to comment on the death threats directed at Kathy Sierra. This gets a big huge WTF??? Granted, I only just recently came across her work when I read “Don’t ask employees to be passionate about the company!“, which I thought was pure genius, I was an instant fan. What in the hell would possess someone, or drive them to the point of threatening her for what she puts on her blog?? If you don’t like what she has to say or don’t follow her way of thinking, guess what moron you can close your browser?! navigate somewhere else. The people making these threats are faceless cowards who have no business conversing with society.

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2006 was a crappy year to say the least with regard to health issues. I got sick with what I assumed was just food poisoning in August. However things never seemed to get better and over the course of 4 months I’ve lost 40 pounds. The doctors have run every blood test known to man, I’ve had cameras in places I could have gone my whole life happy to have never had filmed, and yet all the doctors can tell me is all the numbers and tests say I’m healthy. I guess nausea, weight loss, headache, and upset stomach is just normal. So I started looking at my lifestyle and decided to make several changes. I haven’t had any alcohol or caffeine, and limited refined sugars since this all started. I’ve also decided to get back into shape and get a bit more cardio back into my routine (guess the 12oz curls, and right clicking drills I was doing just don’t cut it).

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The past 6 months or so, we have been working on a different approach to shopping for Travel. We have created an app (yes its a beta… maybe even closer to an alpha release) that changes the approach to selling a vacation. Rather than say “hey where do you want to go, when do you want to leave, heres some flight options, have a great time…” we decided to instead say “So what do you want to do when you get there? What type of experience do you want to have? What do you need/want to know about your destination?”. Its an app that allows a person planning a vacation to dream, research and plan their trip based on what they want to do as opposed to how they are going to get there. They can view higher resolution photos, videos, 360 views, save items off to a wishlist for later review and much more.

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Just thought I’d pass this along for those of you (like me) just getting your feet wet with AS3. Devon Wolfgang (aka Devonair as he’s known in the the Flash community) of One by One Design (yes the very same guy that brought us the “Flash MX 2004 Undocumented Tween/Easing Classes Documented” tutorial when nobody knew how the hell to use them) has put together a really nice overview tutorial of the new array methods found in ActionScript 3. I really dig the Array.filter() method.

Anyway just wanted to pass the link along.

I think I may have found my new favorite Firefox Extension. Alessandro Crugnola (aka Sephiroth – creator of SE|PY) just released an extension for Firefox to let you switch to another version of your Flash plugin or completely disable it all together. The site will reload and display with the new plugin version with no browser restart necessary.  Its pretty slick! It shows an icon in the footer of your Firefox window with a popup menu to allow you to switch your version on the fly.

Download the Flash Plugin Switcher extension for Firefox