The crew over at FDT asked me for an interview, and I’m excited I was able to oblige. They are a sponsor for our upcoming Flash Camp in St. Louis where I’ll be speaking during the last session of the day.

During my session I’ll be giving away a free FDT Pure license. That’s a $129 value, and all you have to do is listen to me tell some stories, play with some code…so get yourself registered and I’ll see you there!

To read the full interview, head on over to the FDT blog: http://fdt.powerflasher.com/blog/?p=2662

It recently occurred to me that when meeting someone for the first time, you can’t go wrong by giving them respect. You just never know who that person might be, what amazing talents they may possess, or what their relationship might mean to you in the future.

Fundamental to giving someone respect is setting your attention on them rather than posturing yourself. If your tendency is to think more about showing your new acquaintance all the coolness that is you, perhaps this is the right exercise for you. Give some respect on credit and probe for what is unique and valuable about them to warrant such respect.

My bet is you’ll find something, and you won’t make a fool of yourself in the process.

I’m excited to be speaking at Flash Camp St. Louis coming up very soon on September 3rd. Come get a jump on your holiday weekend and join us at the City Museum for a full day of great sessions and mingling.

Be sure to register right away. Space is limited, and it’s only $60 for a full day of sessions, lunch, and probably some free giveaways.

I really hope that my session will have some appeal for both developers and designers. I’ll be focusing on asset management in more advanced, dynamic, or heavier projects. When you have a Flash project with a lot of logic and thus code, and you’re talking to databases and social networks, you find that working with just a Flash FLA file isn’t enough. But how can you continue to utilize the strengths of Flash Pro for animation, composite components, vectors, and general layout? And what do you do about video, audio, social network content, xml, json, and other data sources?

I’ll be looking at different ways to address these questions, the developer and designer workflows involved, and the libraries and tools I’ve found most useful in the process.

To wet your appetite, here is an 18 minute screencast I put together covering one such strategy, the use of a SWC file to provide assets to an Actionscript or Flex project.

Use Flash Pro Assets in Actionscript and Flex Projects from David Ortinau on Vimeo.

In this screencast I use one of my favorite tools, FDT from PowerFlasher. I don’ think I mention it in the screencast, so let me highlight the 2 keystroke combinations you need to master in order to unleash all of the amazing tricks you’ll see me do.

Quick Fix - CMD + 1 (CTRL + 1 on the PC I think)
This fixes missing imports, generates var declarations, initiates new classes, generates handlers, and on and on

Code Complete - CTRL + SPACE
This keystroke is also present in Flash Builder, but has some extra oomph it seems in FDT. Type part of anything and hit it to see options on what you might mean. Also generate constructors or other code blocks.

Hope to see you at Flash Camp!

Flash Camp St. Louis

September 3, 2010
9am - 4pm
The City Museum