Flashmech

Coming this February, Adobe will be having several free, one hour eSeminars that you can attend right at the comfort of _________(insert favourite place here)!

However, I have no idea why Adobe is restricting the number of participants for the eSeminars. After I registered, emails containing all the events that I registered for were being sent to me, with the following message:

You are on waiting list for this event.
We will notify you once there is a seat available for you.

Forgive me for my lack my knowledge, but since it’s an eSeminar, why not accept all participants? There’s neither actual seats that we’re taking up, nor is there a real room which possibly can’t accommodate the size of the audiences. It just buffles me. :S

Anyway, there are some pretty good titles and I believe you should take a look and get yourself registered. Looking at the duration however, I got a very strong feeling that we will just be gliding through the winds.

And you should too! Smashing Magazine had just compiled a “best of” list of tutorials for Flash that is just way too cool!

Everyone says that “content is king”, and I’m not about to dispute that. But the right effects applied to the right content will make the necessary cut that you might need to stand out above the rest, and that makes all the difference in securing the pitch for your next project.

Roughly about 6 months ago, my then colleague Arul blogged about Gaia (pronounced “guy-uh”), and that marked the changes in me ever since.

Authored by Steven Sacks, “Gaia is a front-end Flash Framework designed to dramatically reduce development time”. What I love about it is that it provides common solutions to repeated tasks that we, as front-end developers, have to face in almost every project, such as:

• Navigation
• Transitions
• Preloading
• Asset management
• Site structure
• Deep linking

From my own experiences of using it in a recent project, Gaia has indeed proven itself in the following areas:

1. The Scaffolding engine creates a click through version of my site in less than 10 minutes! I was able to have a basic run through thereafter with my designer and setting things right the first time saves us a huge amount of time changing later on.
2. I used to hear about swfobject and the goodness of deep linking that swfaddress brings, but I never had an idea of how to implement them. With Gaia, they’re already done for me! No pain, all gain!
3. I am able to do things the way I like, without restricting my coding style by the way Gaia is implemented. This is absolutely a plus, because I don’t have to conform to it, and it still works!

These are just some of the key points actually. The extent of the convenience and time that I saved allowed me to even blog about this right now. To fully understand it’s capabilities, there’s no other better way than to use it in your next project.

You can download the latest framework here, find the documentation here, and if happen to have a few minutes to spare, watch how you can build your very first Gaia project here!

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:

The long awaited AS3 Gaia Framework is nearly upon us! Find out how to participate in the beta release on January 22nd! *w00t*

I’ve always been very keen on learning design patterns (especially being a self taught programmer), and this just seems to be the perfect chance to ease myself into the world of MVC for Flash, Flex, or AIR platforms. I’ve just gotten myself signed up as a beta tester for this courseware, and with credentials that this courseware is excellent, I suggest you get your feet wet with this as well.

In case you have not heard of PureMVC, it “is a lightweight framework for creating applications in ActionScript 3, based upon the classic Model-View-Controller design meta-pattern”.

Read more about it here.

Why not get yourself started as well?