If you missed out on any or all of the Build an app in a week web seminars that the EMEA Platform Evangelism team held last week, worry not. Below are all of the recordings for you to watch as many times as you wish. You don’t need any special software or app installed to view these beyond Flash Player.

The sessions are based around an application called EVA that the EMEA team are developing so you can get a real feel for how the Flash Platform designer to developer workflow can be leveraged to make creating rich engaging content easier.

• Erasing the designer-to-developer gap: Adding interactions to your design
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p90445619/
• Connecting your design to PHP services:
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p66013176/
• Connecting a web application to a J2EE back end using Flash Builder 4
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p20174257/
• Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p49752948/
• Going multiuser with P2P in Flash Player 10.1
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p93914495/
• Developing multiuser applications with LiveCycle services
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p53039407/
• Bringing web applications to the desktop with AIR 2
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p97751544/
• Code once and run on multiple mobile devices
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p24983267/
• Rapidly build, deploy, and maintain Internet apps with ColdFusion
  http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p57074073/

If you enjoy these then head over to the Adobe Flash Platform Events page and have a look at all of the other recordings.

I’m going to keep this short and sweet as the title pretty much sums it all up. Today I start a new chapter in my career as a Flash Platform Evangelist at Adobe. I’m super stoked about this and I’m both excited and honoured to be working with such a high calibre of individuals both on a professional and personal level.

I’ll be doing a follow up post about my first week as an Evangelist (well in a week obviously :p), but I wanted to celebrate this great opportunity by letting all my friends and peers know. I’d have done this announcement sooner but I’ve been sworn to secrecy for a rather long time – feels good to be able to shout it from the rafters at last :D

Go Team! :D

Yesterday at MAX 2009 in Los Angeles Adobe announced that the next version of Flash Professional (CS5) will include the ability to export content created by it for deployment on the iPhone.

What it does mean is that if you’re a Flash / ActionScript developer you can develop applications, games etc for the iPhone and iPod Touch without the need to learn Objective-C. Before we get ahead of ourselves this doesn’t mean that the iPhone supports Flash content – that “issue” hasn’t be resolved at this point.

Adobe Labs has a section on developing applications for the iPhone – you can even sign up for a future public beta. Below are links to the current apps built with Flash CS5 prerelease – including a person favourite of mine “Just Letters” by my good Friend Stefan Richter

Who knows, this could be the dawn of even greater games and applications on the App Store now that the Flashers are coming to the party :p

Tomorrow is the day. For those of you who have been in a coma for a few weeks Saturday sees Flash Brighton’s inaugural “Big Day Out”. Unfortunately if you have only just heard about it you’ll have to wait until the next one as it is completely sold out. That said, I’m really stoked to be involved and I’m sure this will be the first of many (and perhaps inspire other community driven groups to go and organize their own).

The whole thing kicks off at 12:30 with coffee and registration, then the keynote with Andrew Shorten (fingers crossed he’ll do it in his “Holmes” costume). I have the luxury of going on quite early (14:45 – 15:45) after Andrew. I’ve decided to present an overview of Flex Builder, the Flex framework and provide some productivity and development tips on bending Flex Builder to your will. Below is a synopsis of my talk.

The Flex framework can appear slightly at odds for those approaching it from a more creative background. While it shares the same lineage as Flash the process by which you create and develop within Flex may initially appear difficult to grasp. In this session Mike will gently ease you into what the Flex framework actually is as well as giving an overview of the Flex Builder IDE, warts and all.

If you want to know what’s happening when here is the whole schedule

With only 3 weeks to go until Flash on the Beach I just received some great news. The conference is almost sold out! They only have 80 tickets left, so if you haven’t bought yours yet, you better hurry as they are going fast.

It looks like this years Flash on the Beach is going to be awesome. I can’t wait to be honest, plus with MAX in Barcelona next week. Autumn is shaping up to be very cool indeed.

Congrats to John and the team over at Flash on the Beach – keep up the great work m8 :)

Hot off the press. Adobe UK are heading out onto the road to do their countrywide Creative License Tour. The tour consists of 6 tracks over the day in 9 locations (London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, Dublin and Belfast).

So all in all a pretty comprehensive line-up of products. To find out more and register head over to the Creative License Tour site.

…of particular interest may be the Web Development track where we’ll cover Flex, Flash, ColdFusion and AIR. We also have a number of other tracks around Web Design, Video, Photoshop and Print.

So what are you waiting for get over to the Creative License Tour site and get registered :D. I’ll probably pop along to the London one on the 17th September. So if anyone is about and wants to meet up let me know :). This could be the perfect excuse to get into the MAX Europe conference vibe.

I’ve been playing around with the Item Renderers in Flex 2 recently (more than usual as it goes). So I thought I’d put my findings and “insights” down in a series of articles.

This isn’t a definitive guide, but might prove useful for some :D

The first part can be found here.

Just came across this. Really cool Goolge Earth-esque Twitter mashup. It pulls the public feed so if the narcissist in you wants a bit of a boost tweet to your hearts content and you’ll likely see your message :p

So in the previous article on component resizing in the IDE I looked at how to create the framework of a component so it resizes correctly via the Free Transform tool (FTT). In this article we’ll look at how to get certain assets to resize while constraining additional assets in width, height or both.

I’ve included an examples just to illustrate what I mean if you are still a bit uncertain. Anyway you can access the second part below.

Sizing in the IDE pt.2

I saw Tony MacDonell over at Teknision was talking about some of the foibles of creating components in Flash. Then John laPlante commented about the same thing in response to my articles on component development and I have to say I know where they are both coming from. I’ve been developing components for Flash MX2004, Flash 8 and a few for Flex for the majority of my daily coding for nearly 2 years now. I’d have to agree it does seem weird to developers wishing to produce components how it all hangs together the first time you look at one.

The points they both hit upon were:

• Documentation or lack of it
• Having to add the class to both the linkage identifier as well as the component definition
• Placing the assets inside the component clip
• Uncompiled or compiled components inside your component clip

So I thought I’d add my experiences…

Documentation or lack of it
Documentation is a million times better than it was when MX2004 was first released but it is still lacking in a lot of places and some of the help files are just plain confusing for the budding component developer – Then again I shouldn’t carp on too much otherwise I’d have nothing to write about if it was better 8). The examples are far better now though so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Having to add the class to both the linkage identifier as well as the component definition
As far as I can tell, the class binding issue is symptomatic of the fact that the linkage identifier and the component definitions are reference by different processes – Linkage is for the actual compile to test the SWF or SWC whereas the component definition is for the actual component itself to operate. I personally think the fact that you have to compile the SWF / SWC via the library to be a bigger oversight though :P

Placing the assets inside the component clip
This again appears to be down to the issue of ‘compiling for distribution’, by this I mean the compiler doesn’t form any association with the linked items beyond adding a pointer to them inside the component SWF / SWC – if you use or have used a shared library you’ll know what I mean. So when you drag the file into a clean file it looks for the linked items in that files symbol library on export, and if it doesn’t find them it just silently fails. A hack is to add these linked symbols to the new file’s library and set the linkages, then they are accessible when that particular file is exported, not really a helpful solution in either case, but most hacks aren’t.

I have to say I don’t really see this as a real problem, after all it stops the distribution of component SWC missing linked assets – if you always test your SWF / SWC in a new FLA. I can assure you you’ll only do it once :P and then it sticks. Again this is more a symptom of a poorly implemented system for creating components overall as opposed to an awkward process for coding and testing them.

Uncompiled or compiled components inside your component clip
You may also want to watch out for the recompile issue – if you haven’t hit it already. If you have a load of SWC’s that share the same class(es) and you update said class(es) it is not automatically reflected in components compiled prior to this, (obvious I know but this becomes a real headache if you’re using shared libraries as well). This is due to the fact that Flash only initializes a class once at run time – so if two components have the same base class it initializes the first one and the second component just uses the one that is already there. Hence the recompile issue if you inadvertantly add in an old component that contains an old copy of a class that hasn’t been updated and it initializes first.

This can be alleviated in your component development files by only using the uncompiled versions of any components you extending from or as part of a composition component this way when you compile it to an SWC it pulls in the latest classes for all the components included on that enigmatic frame 2 of the component clip. This doesn’t, however, solve the shared library SWC problem. This can also stop erratic behave in compiled components that for the basis of a component extended from them.

If we are lucky Blaze will address these issues. I certainly hope so as the current component system is laboured compared to the rest of the Flash IDE – I would expect an entry in the New Document dialog for component development, (I’ve actually got a set of component templates I use that I’ve been meaning to post up – I just need to comment them up as they are still ‘in the rough’ so to speak :P