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Just like to say FINALLY. Derek Vadneau has his blog up and running with serving up some serious Flash & SWFStudio flavour. Some good stuff up there already - tracethis.com

This week marks a year that I have been at Teknision Inc.. A year ago I was driving across Canada in my little silver bug, laptop in tow, packed full, trying to make the drive in 2.5 days as I was a bit late heading out. Teknision and I had a bit of history I suppose - the connection is simple - when I was in college, Tony MacDonell was my flash instructor. He was more enthusiatic than organized at that point, it being his first teaching endeavour, and his love of Flash was entirely contagious. Mind you I couldn't have cared about Flash - I was mad about Director, spending his class where I was supposed to be working on targeting nested timelines doing Imaging Lingo. I left college to work only with Director for 2 years before rediscovering Flash. I remember thinking-I hope one day I am as good as Tony. Not good as in code per say, alto that would be nice but good as in ingenuity.I still use it as a basis of excellence to attain. Admittedly my main draw to coming to Teknision was to work with the person who was my source of inspiration - but having been here for a year, I can honestly say I am damn fortunate to work with the talented, creative and driven people that I do. I'm constantly wishing there were more hours in the day to execute the ideas that get thrown out there in the course of a day. I've been here a year but I still miss Alberta. Our EFUG was pretty active and there was a tight community there - some of the top developers/designers who are incredibly gracious with their time & knowledge and are generally just solid people ( Devbox, Philter, Chew, gMan ). Ottawa mirrors that in some ways- there are some great developers in the city - and some amazing design talent putting out some really solid work. It makes me proud to be a part of that. A year already. What will next year hold besides posts bashing jDura's Dallas Stars for entertainment?

I've become a fan of MTASC - I'd say its a bit bitchy but blazing fast. I've recently been given the task to modify/adapt a codebase for a recent RIA so that it adheres to the stric rules MTASC follows. This means that I have to go through the 100+ files and makes sure they are properly typed - not vaguely ( as in " lets put object cos that covers most of the bases"), make sure to get rid of variable redefinitions etc. Glamorous job indeed, don't get me wrong- I'm not complaining. It allowed me to become very familiar with the bootstrapping very quickly in a way much more intimately than any other exercise could have possibly afforded. Now that MTASC is running and its liking everything and Flash is liking everything and they are allowed to go out and play together in the sandbox, I cannot believe the compile time savings. Originally the RIA would take close to 3 .5 minutes on my system, with MTASC its down to 21 seconds. Unfricking real. Of course we ran into the bound mc issue- we have mc's bound in the library and attached as needed. So you get the nice little error saying you had to include all these classes. JSFL to the rescue - loop through the library, make a list of classes, pass them in, compile, and serve. I'm loving it. Tony did a write up on the solution implemented on his blog - wwww.teknision.blogspot.com. And here's where I falter a bit - I don't want to leave the Flash IDE. In our shop its not feasible - we don't create strict RIA's nor do we do strict creative pieces. At any one time there might be a variety of projects - so leaving the IDE in its entirety won't happen. Nor do I want to. I don't find it cumbersome. My one wish would be to have the ability like Director to search by handler :) My only real bitch straight up is the compile time. If there was a reduction in compile time, I'd be less likely to leave the flash IDE. And with the solution Tony developed for MTASC, I now have the best of both worlds- I don't have to leave the IDE entirely. It makes the workflow between the various elements seamless and efficient. I now have less oompile time to kill - and more time to surf thing things I shouldn't after compilation. :)

Never use the word final in naming conventions - its either a bad omen or a jinx. Check out this screenshot of a folder that contains "final concepts" for a client. The best part, is that these are held in a final folder - supposed to be one item, not many. Anyone else have anything similiar ? Post da'em up. Never say final:

I'm about to do the damnable - something that could potentially banish me from the glorious ornate gates of supercoderom where all the coding superheroes reside and play bocci and telepathically converse in binary and where transporters move more than just one molecule from destination a to b.I am about to say, well even confess, that I am not a fan of getters and setters. That's right. Your literacy skills haven't failed you, you read that right. Let me back up the train and explain a bit. I'm not a fan of vagueness. So its not entirely getters and setters that I fault. I just prefer bluntness and explicity - those who know me right now are nodding agreement - probably wishing that along with those traits I had acquired more tact and grace. Sorry dudes, gotta have my shortcomings somewhere. But back to explicity. Its not that I don't like a get set property. It's easy and efficient. Its that I really really like seeing "get" or "set" as opposed to just a property view. There is no confusing getItemID - rather than ItemID. You are aware that something is being retrieved and therefore action is explicit and not assumed. So just to pull an example out of my ass: DataModel.getInstance().currentSelection.removeItemAt(0); I would much rather see : DataModel.getInstance().getCurrentSelection().removeItemAt(0); It makes more sense to me. I know that an action is occuring there - so that I had to jump into some foreign code to do changes or determine the bootstrapping its self-evident. Some of you would argue the first example is pretty self-evident and obvious and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you - but really, when is explicity a bad thing? ( Think code... NOT Ron Jeremy playing piano.) Reading an old post Mr.Radio-Announcers-Dream-of-my-Voice Darron Schall about No brain getters and setters made sense to me - just as Peldi in one of his coding cafe's had casually mentioned that he didn't really use -I will refrain from stating why because I can't really remember - i just remember going " hell yah". I'm all about the blunt.