Flashmech

Right, so yesterday I did a presentation at the local Flex Usergroup about Gaia, titled “What’s Gaia?” It’s kinda a last-minute-decision title, but I guess since the majority of the attendees are Flex programmers, they may not know the existence of the powerful Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash.

What was really cool was that Steven Sacks, the creator of the framework, joined us in the presentation via our channel in ustream.tv as well. He even helped to answer some questions from the floor that stumped me. Thanks Steven! *w00t~*

As promised, you can take a look at the slides, and download them to view or play with them. Remember I mentioned that site.xml is _the XML that rules them all_? Have fun!

The session was also recorded (embedded below), but you have to forward to approximately the 24th minute to skip the announcements.

Biggest turnout at FUG yet!

Ma look! Me presenting!

I should have really blogged about this earlier but work have to always come first. Better late than never I always say.

Come August 13th, I have the pleasure to be sharing with the Flex UG about Gaia! *w00t~!*

Are you thinking that it’s strange that I’m sharing something non-Flex in a Flex UG? *loL~* Well, the great part about our UG is that we get speakers to touch on a diversity of topics on the Flash Platform, though usually with more focus on Flex. This allows us to not just learn about Flex, but also what’s happening platform wide, which I think is really a great style to run the UG.

I’m really excited to be speaking about Gaia, as it is really a time saver framework. At the moment I’ve already drafted the outline (which hopefully will _wow_ the crowd), and planning to create some real world examples where Gaia is able to step in and save your ass in a tight deadline. After the session I’ll be releasing the slides and examples over here and annouce over at FUG Forum, so stay peeled!

What’s making me excited is that Steven Sacks, the creator of Gaia, will also be attending the session via our live broadcast. So for all those who are interested to attend but yet are not residing in Singapore or temporary out of the country, do remember you can catch us live too.

This is the part where I feel I should have blogged earlier. If you’re keen to come down to the Flex UG session this month, please RSVP as seats are very limited (only 3 more seats as at this writing). This coming month’s turnout might be the biggest yet!

For more information, you can check out the official blog post.
See you on August 13th!

Gaia has always been a framework that I wanted to use to develop a website, and so when I got the chance to develop this project, Gaia immediately came to my mind.

The site itself was kept pretty simple in the effects departments, because it had to portray the heritage and premium quality of the product, so classic fade ins and outs were employed. Although my passion is to explore generative effects, it was good to keep it simple for this project as I can then focus my attention on how Gaia works.

Although I met up with a couple of difficulties during development (due to my inadequate knowledge of the framework, of course), I must still say it was a joy to develop. Transition changes between pages were easily fixed because of the Gaia flow, and adding pages to the site was a breeze with the scaffolding engine.

In addition, it also helped me to create the context menu, deep linking to various sections within the site, and gosh! I can even forget about loadMovie, because the loading of external assets are already taken care of by Gaia. It definitely made the development of this project so much more enjoyable!

The website is now live, and you can check it out here.

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*