The weekend is almost here and that means soon I'll be making my way up to Canada to attend a workshop for the Flash in the Can convention in Toronto, Ontario. I couldn't be more excited for this trip and I'm really looking forward to the workshop on Sunday, May 1. There are five pre-conference workshops and I'll be attending Lee Brimelow's Flash Gaming Deep Dive session to learn about various Flash game engines, platforms and the new molehill API. (more...)

I'm surprised it took me this long to encounter this problem; but FlashDevelop doesn't seem to know the location of the fl class package by default. I found this out today while trying to use a Color (fl.motion.Color) object. To my surprise, FlashDevelop didn't seem to recognize the import. I tried to build and received an error message that the class couldn't be found. (more...)

When running a Flash movie from the Flash IDE, you can use the Debug menu commands List Objects and List Variables to see what kind of things you have living in your swf file. This can be especially helpful when you're trying to clean up objects that your file no longer needs. You can use this feature to ensure that any object you're trying to destroy actually gets destroyed. However, I recently found myself working from FlashDevelop with the Flex SDK and this option wasn't available. I ended up writing a small script that traces the display list and figured I'd share it here. (more...)

This post is for people who are using Flash Professional CS5 that want to make use of all the cool new features in Flash Player 10.2. Sure, you can use Flash Builder and the latest Flex SDK to do it, but currently there's no officially supported way of doing it with Flash Professional CS5. There is, however, a work around that I'd like to share! (more...)

I just started a new contract position at Monster Media in Orlando, Florida and as it goes with most new jobs, the first week is a lot of learning about processes and technology. The new gig seems pretty cool as I get to work with a lot of stuff I haven't touched before such as motion tracking and large touch screen applications. Of course, being a big gamer and all, I quickly set about creating a game with the new tech. The result? Two player Pong on a 6 foot, touch-screen wall; pic after the jump! (more...)