Cnet has posted an article on today’s FlashForward keynote.

You can view the entire article here.

Yesterday Lawrence Lessig gave a talk at the FlashForward conference titled The Cost of Copyright. In it, he stressed the importance and necessity of a culture of sharing. Of course, the Flash community has grown up on this culture (i.e. FlashKit, layer 51). However, all of the sharing usually goes on on a developer to developer level, as you cannot easily get the source from Flash content.

So, during the FlashForward keynote this morning, I put together a simple library that allows you to add a view source Menu item to your Flash content. This makes it easy to allow other developers and designers to view the source for your content (if you want them to be able to).

As you probably know, both FlashForward (San Francisco) and FlashInTheCan (Toronto) are this week. I’ll be at both, but for those who can’t attend, I have created a temporary Flash Conferences Smart Category at MXNA, that allows you to keep up to all of the latests news and information from the conferences.

Flash Conferences Smart Category

If you don’t feel like visiting MXNA all of the time, then you can use the Flash Conferences Smart category RSS feed to keep up to date on everything.

One of the biggest problems we have had with MXNA (or any aggregator) over the past year or so is that they are primarily category based, and not content / conversation based. So, if a weblog is in the Flash category, and someone posts about what they had for breakfast, then that will appear in the Flash category.

While, this is not always a bad thing, as it allows you to get a feel for the people in in a particular community, it can lead to problems. One, it can make it harder to find the latest information being posted about Flash (or whatever category), as the category may contain a lot of off topic posts. Two, and as we saw during the past year, when the posts are about controversial or incendiary topics, then it can just annoy people trying to find info about the category. Finally, it omits relevant posts that are made by feeds in other categories (i.e. someone in the ColdFusion category makes a post about Flash).

As Christian Cantrell posted earlier, we have just released a public beta of the next version of the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA 2).

This version was re-written from the group up with performance and extensibility in mind. While there are already a ton of cool new features, the thing I am most excited about is that we now have a solid platform that we can quickly build on top of and add new features.

Yesterday I posted some simple info on how to use the cpp pre-processor to pre-process ActionScript files. I showed how you can use the #ifdef directive to conditionally add / remove stuff from the final ActionScript file. However, cpp can do a lot more than just conditional section includes.

You can use the #define directive to define constants within your ActionScript file / class.

For example, lets look at a simple example:

class ObjectCreator
{
    var DEFAULTWIDTH:Number = 5;
    var DEFAULTHEIGHT:Number = 5;

    function ObjectCreator()
    {
    }

    function createObjects(Void):Void
    {
        for(var i:Number = 0; i < 10000; i++)
        {
            var o = new Object();
            o.width = this.DEFAULTWIDTH;
            o.height = this.DEFAULTHEIGHT;
        }
    }
}

In this case, we use a naming convention (all caps) to denote a variable that should be treated as a constant. However, it is not a true constant. This means that it can be changed at runtime, and that the player has to look up the value each time it is accessed. In certain circumstances, this can have an impact on performance.

One thing I often do in my code is create custom trace / output functions that recursively go through and print out properties. However, this requires that I add some custom code to my classes which I don’t really want in the final version.

So, I started exploring pre-processors that I could use to make it easier to add and remove debugging code. I first looked at m4. While it seems to be very powerful, it was overkill for what I needed, and looked to be very difficult to use. Christian Cantrell then suggested that I look at cpp, a C pre-processor. I checked it out, and it does exactly what I need, in an easy to learn and use syntax.

Just noticed this, but Colin Moock (author of Essential ActionScript 2.0) is doing a couple of ActionScript bootcamps in May and June. If you want to learn ActionScript from the master, or take your skills to the next level, this is the perfect opportunity.

Colin will be doing sessions in Toronto, Los Angeles and Rochester, NY. You can find more information, including content and dates here.

I am trying to put together a list of non-English weblogs which discuss Macromedia technologies.

If you have any suggestions post the URL and language in the comments.

Geoff Bowers has posted the intro movies from the day 1 and 2 keynotes at MXDU. These were created by Necatarine, and are hilarious.

You can view them here.