assertTrue is the professional blog of Luke Bayes and Ali Mills

Going Apollo Camping!

Posted by: Ali Mills Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:29:00 GMT

Luke and I will be heading to Adobe later today for Apollo Camp. We’re excited! Long ago, we gave up working on SwfRunner because of Apollo rumors. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like the Apollo team has pulled it off. Nice work!

If you’re there tonight and see either of us, say ‘hello’. We’ll chat up AsUnit, Flash Lite, Flash, Flex, AS3, AS2, HaXe, Ruby, XULRunner, Google Data (GData), Chumby and of course Apollo. If you buy Luke a drink at Mars, he may even fill you in on his latest super-secret project. :)

See you there.

Ali

Tags ,  | 2 comments

Max 2006

Posted by: Luke Bayes Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:46:00 GMT

We just got back in town from Vegas for the Max conference last night and I wanted to blog a little bit about a few different things…

First off, we promised to post our presentation materials, so here they are:
  1. Source code from the project we demoed (6 KB)
  2. Powerpoint doc (5 MB)

Secondly, I feel like our presentation on Thursday went exceptionally well, but the one on Wednesday could have been better. I’m not going to lament it too much – or try to make excuses – but suffice to say that neither of us feels our performance on Wednesday met our expectations.

If you agree with us about Wednesday, you have our apologies, if you disagree, well, we both appreciate the support!

Finally, I wanted to express some real gratitude for some of the other presentations that I was able to attend. I have to say that I was absolutely blown away by both the quantity and quality of the presentations that I attended, following are some highlights from my somewhat blurry memory:

  • Roger Gonazales gave an awesome presentation highlighting some low-level details in the MXMLC compiler and how they pertain to building modular swf applications. I’ve known that he was a smart guy for quite awhile now, man, I really had no idea. He managed to jam about a years’ worth of information into an hour, and still make it comprehensible!
  • Ely Greenfield gave a really good talk on component development in Flex2. He answered a lot of the questions that I’ve been pondering over the past month or so. But the most amazing thing he did, was present a swf file of a project with snapshots of it at each stage of development. So he was able to step through the development of a Flex2 component, one step at a time, without actually making us sit there and watch him type… It was also nice to see him present a really nice-looking Flex component. It was a Flash version of the new album browser from iTunes and it looked great.

There were quite a few other presos that I really liked, but I’m out of time for now, maybe Mills will talk about some of those…

Tags , ,  | 1 comment

MAX :: Design Patterns in ActionScript 3

Posted by: Ali Mills Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:39:00 GMT

In two weeks, Luke and I will be at MAX where we’ll be giving two sessions on Design Patterns in ActionScript 3. The first session is on Wednesday, October 25 from 1:45pm – 2:45pm in rooms 4201 – 4202 of the Lando space. The second is on Thursday, October 26 from 3:00pm – 4:00pm in rooms 4105 – 4106 of the Delfino space. Both Lando and Delfino are on the fourth floor. If you have a Google Calendar account, you can add our session to it by clicking the following buttons:


for Wednesday for Thursday

If you’re registered for MAX, use the MAX Session Scheduler to add our session to your schedule. Lists of all Wednesday and Thursday sessions are posted here and here. If you want something more portable than the MAX Session Scheduler, Bill Perry is soliciting MAX conference guides in Flash Lite that he’ll be uploading to his site as he gets them.

If you haven’t already registered for MAX, you still can! Go to https://www.adobemax06.com/ and do it.

Finally, if you can’t register but are planning to be in Vegas and want to attend something Adobe related, consider attending Ted Patrick’s unconference MAXUP. I’ll be there demonstrating a mobile iCalendar reader project I’m working on. Many other people will be there, too. To sign up for MAXUP, just follow Ted’s instructions.

Tags , , ,  | 3 comments

MAXUP :: Mobile iCalendar Reader is Going to MAX

Posted by: Ali Mills Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:07:00 GMT

MAXUP is an unconference that will be running parallel to the MAX conference from October 24rd – October 26th at the The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve been hearing about these unconference Foo Camp style spin-offs for a little while and like the idea. Since I’ll already be in Vegas presenting at MAX on design patterns in ActionScript 3, I’m going to join all these attendees and participate in MAXUP, too.

At MAXUP I’m going to give a demo of a mobile calendar project I’m working on that reads and presents remote calendar files (specifically iCalendar formatted files) on Flash Lite devices. Like most projects, this one has both a server and client component. The server is written in Ruby and the client in Flash Lite 1.1. I’ll be demonstrating the project running on my Nokia 6600 and Nokia N70 phones, and discuss how it was built. I’ll do my best to follow Scott Berkin’s advice on how to run a great unconference session.

Here are some recent pictures of the calendar running on my N70:

Read more...

Tags , , , , , ,  | 1 comment

HaXe Sample Application :: Simple Slide Show

Posted by: Ali Mills Tue, 22 Aug 2006 05:15:00 GMT

If you’ve been reading this blog then it should be clear to you that I’m pretty interested in the haXe programming language (if it’s not clear see: Invest Regulary in Your Knowledge Portfolio, Where’s haXe?, HaXe Found!, and HaXe 1.05 Supports Flash Player 9!). My interest in haXe is rooted in my desire to build universally available applications with a code-base that I can grow.

To learn the haXe syntax and language APIs, I wrote a Simple Slide Show application that I call Mediator. Here it is:

You can download the source here.

Some interesting parts of Mediator follow:
  • the EventDispatcher class demonstrates many elements of the haXe syntax
  • background art is externalized in the FLA art/MediatorAssets.fla
  • slide data is externalized in the XML document xml/Mediator.xml
  • the MediatorModel class demonstrates XML parsing in haXe
  • the entire application has a flexible layout (which you won’t be able to notice unless you download Mediator.zip, run the Mediator.swf on your desktop, and resize it)
  • Events in the application bubble, this is handled by the Component class’s dispatchEvent() method; that method looks like:
    public function dispatchEvent(event:Event):Bool {
        var dispatched:Bool = dispatcher.dispatchEvent(event);
        if(event.bubbles && dispatched && getParent() != null) {
            getParent().dispatchEvent(event);
        }
        return dispatched;
    }

To compile the simple slide show, first download and install haXe, then download Mediator.zip, and after unpacking it double-click build.hxml.

To run the application locally without compiling, just double-click Mediator.swf.

Tags ,  | no comments

Focus on the Future

Posted by: Ali Mills Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:33:00 GMT

A friend just sent me the YouTube link Chris Hall, Ali Mills – Useless Wooden Toys 1990 New Deal. Wow, I’m on YouTube. Check it out:



The second skateboarder in that clip is me! That was seventeen years ago when I was a skateboarder (OK, I’m still a skateboarder, but now I happen to run, surf, boulder, spearfish, and code much more than I skateboard). I get a lot of credit (Ali Mills, first documented nollie kickflip) for one of the tricks I did in that video part, and that credit is one of my proudest accomplishments. Like all worthwhile things in life, that accomplishment came from a lot of preparation combined with a little luck. I was lucky enough to have been skateboarding at a time when invention and innovation were still pretty easy to do in the sport, and I was prepared enough to make the best of that time. Back then, I was skateboarding so much that I could make my skateboard do almost anything with a day of practice.

These days, I spend so much time writing code that I almost feel the same way about it…

To the point – I have a strong feeling that we’re at a time in application development history that’s comparable to skateboarding in the ‘90s. Right now, it’s still pretty easy to invent new ways of doing things and innovate on the old. There’s a lot of it going on (Web 2.0). As SWF developers, we’re at an advantage because the platform we’ve practiced with is optimized for this future.

Focus on the future, and accomplish something you’re proud of. Now’s a great time.

Tags  | 10 comments

Twosday, May 9, 2006 :: Keynotes

Posted by: Ali Mills Wed, 10 May 2006 05:00:00 GMT

A fair amount of things have been happening in twos lately that seem interesting enough to share. On this first of several Twosdays (Twosdays happen on Tuesday; isn’t that clever?) posts to come, I’m posting two photos taken from the keynotes of two conferences over the past year – MAX and Flashforward – where Luke and I ended up on the big screen.

Here we are on big screen at the MAX keynote:

This shot of us was taken at Macromedia’s Ultimate Party at the Fillmore in San Francisco. The party was Macromedia’s last official company party.

And, here’s the picture of us that the Yahoo! gang used while demonstrating the fickr web service during the Flashforward keynote:

With Yahoo!’s recent investments in their developer network, Flash (check their maps), and all things Web 2.0 it’ll be exciting to see how they grow. Justin’s blog is a good one to watch if you’re interested in keeping tabs.

It seems that we’re not the only ones hip to the days of the week. So are the Pragmatic Programmers, but they seem to prefer Fridays. Check out their Pragmatic Fridays. The PDF idea is interesting, and Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby could be a good title.

Tags ,  | no comments