This may be a bit personal for a blog entry but I guess that’s the point of doing a personal blog right? In any case I had a hernia this January and I’ve been living with it for the last 9 months during my relocation, starting a new company and traveling to NYC on business frequently. I had surgery last week and the hernia had gotten much worse over the course of the year so it was a good thing I got it taken care of.I’ve never had surgery of any kind but it’s really painful in my opinion because of the location of it and the fact it’s on the right side where my leg connects. Being that it’s my core I feel it all the time… yelling at the kids, picking up the trash or coughing. It has totally effected my spirits but I know it will be over with before I know it. I should be 100% over the next 6 weeks I hear but so far it’s been a rough 5 days. See you at the skate park then!
Author Archive for mr.b
Recovering From Surgery
Top Of The Charts
I’ve been freelancing for about 6 months now full time. Last summer I switched over to a 1 pager portfolio in the interest of getting spidered come the following year when I had planned to go freelance. It only took a few months for me to get into the top 10. Last fall I started getting emails daily for help with Flash. Whether it be a large company looking to help fight a fire on a tight deadline or a small studio looking to expand their capabilities, I was being found.The traffic to my site has continued to grow over this year and I decided to look into some keywords today. I’m number 1 on a bunch of Freelance + Actionscript mixes. I’m really not the best AS guy out there but I’ve been fortunate with all my choices to date. Having that extra organic traffic is a good thing to have as a freelancer. So for all you 1 page haters out there, here is another example of why they work.
AssetLoader.as
This is my first code release in about 5 or 6 years. Warning: It comes without warranty and the only person to debug and use it has been me. Also note that it has grown over the last 2 years and is written in AS2. For all I know it’s totally useless or already built in with AS3.I wrote this class out of frustration. It seemed like every time I started a new project I had to write freakin’ preloader logic. I HATE PRELOADING STUFF. I hate reinventing the wheel even more. There seems to be a ton of preloaders out there but projects seem to have this component loading that and this clip handling an event for loading that etc. So it has seemed to be an endless cycle of writing XML onLoad events and MovieClipLoader error handlers over and over. This class was an attempt to stop doing all that over and over.The basic jist of the class is that you can declare an instance of it, added a list of things you want to preload to it and assign a callback for when they are all done. It will take the core move (self), XML, CSS and images/SWFs and handle all the need events internally for you. As I write this I’ve never used it with sound or video which I usually do within a video player or sound player class. If you want, you can also set up listeners for the broadcasting of events within the class. Start, complete and updates with a percentage are all broadcast from within.If you take the time to download the file PLEASE take a second to post a comment or email me your thoughts of the class. Let me know if it’s junk, deprecated or the best thing you’ve grabbed in a few weeks.Download AssetLoader-1.0.zip
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a self taught Flash veteran of 10 years now. I have a BFA in traditional Commercial Art and when I graduated from VCU in 1997, interactive wasn’t a discipline, I had no interest in writing code and Flash was wearing diapers. Over the years I’ve been introduced to Flash and have been fortunate enough to grow with it. From a blank canvas, Flash CS3 seems daunting to me but when I started it was all about tweening and simple commands like play(). It was easier to learn programming over time as features were added.It was also easier to learn Flash when the people around me were just learning it as well. Back in the late 90s people like Josh Davis were trying to figure out this whole Flash thing as well. They were posting regularly on early Flash message boards and releasing .fla files with their discoveries. In my opinion, this is why Flash was so quickly adopted by designers and programmers. Because the community was open and honest and everyone was just learning. There were no books or tutorials so forums and sharing source files were the only way to grow.This was my learning process and board members were my teachers. I’ve never had the opportunity to work at a studio that used Flash and had a well established methodology in place. In addition to that, I had never worked a studio with people that knew more about Flash than me until I worked at EA Sports. While I was there, Flash was being used for the first time in their games so while I worked with programmers who knew how to calculate football trajectories in C++ blindfolded, it was up to me to help train them and translate that into Flash with its limitations. So basically I’ve always set the ground work for how something would be put together… always. And I’m still doing it to my surprise.I’ve written dozens of tutorials over the last 10 years, a book and uploaded lots of source when time allowed. Over the summer I’ve decided to try and release some source files again. The reasons are 2 fold. 1) I want to continue that sharing of knowledge that got me to where I am today and 2) Since going freelance and once again setting my own groundwork, I want some feedback to see how my process compares to others.So let the sharing being. I’ll be posting my first batch of code shortly here.
