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

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

I stumbled a bit getting GreenSock’s LoaderMax bulk loading utility running from an XML doc, but after looking through multiple examples in the documentation I have it working. Here’s the deal:

Ready: The XML

The structures doesn’t matter much overall until you define the loader elements. You can add anything LoaderMax supports. I’m just loading some images.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest>
	<images>
		<ImageLoader name="largeMap" url="assets/images/bg_largeMap.png" estimatedBytes="3300" load="true" />
		<ImageLoader name="shortMap" url="assets/images/bg_shortMap.png" estimatedBytes="6600" load="true" />
	</images>
</manifest>

Set: Loading

First you need to activate the loaders you’re going to use. Then fire up XMLLoader and load the xml document. XMLLoader will sniff out any known and activated loader and process it according to the rules you define in the xml.

LoaderMax.activate([ImageLoader]); 
 
var loader:XMLLoader = new XMLLoader("assets/xml/artworkManifest.xml", {name:"xmlDoc", onComplete:onReady});
loader.load();
 
private function onReady(e:LoaderEvent) : void {			
	// finish up or whatever
}

GO!

You’ll call a static function to retrieve the asset.

// when the asset is needed
var staticMap:Sprite = Sprite( LoaderMax.getContent("shortMap") );
addChild(staticMap);

You’ll also want error handling and display progress, etc. Hit the docs for more details about that.