Over the years, Ali and I have spent quite a lot of time trying to sort out when to use static classes, when to use the Singleton pattern and when to do the work required to avoid them.

There has been a long and ongoing discussion in the OOP and patterns community on this subject by people far more intelligent and experienced than I am. It is really their knowledge and experience that will be essentially repackaged for ActionScript development here.

Following are the primary arguments that compel me to look for a better way.

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…

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.