Flash tidbits, struggles, revelations, and teaching

FITC Hollywood  starts next week (Oct 22-23) and it should be a blast. I attended last year and expect more of the same this year.  Sunday (Oct 21) is the pre-festival workshops (Flash animation, PV3D, and Flash New Features). I highly recommend John Grden’s PV3D workshop. I took his two day workshop at RMI and if you are interested in real 3d in Flash, this is the class you want to take.  Â

See everyone there.Â

I’m looking for a new toy to develop Flash for.   Ideally what I’d like is the iPhone, but with Flash on it. Since that hasn’t happened and not sure it will happen, I’m looking for either a phone or mobile device (device needs wireless) that has a touch screen, can run Flash (either Flash Lite or Flash player), and can run Flash full screen SWFs directly from the phone/device without having to navigate with a browser.  Â

Can someone make a recommendation or two?  I’ve seen the LG Prada phone, but I’m unsure if you can develop for it w/o a browser.  I’ve also looked over the Nokia N800 series devices.  Thanks in advance.

Open-source and the Flash community are both great. We share our ideas and source files freely.  How much money have we made off of someone else’s free source code or their open-source product like Red5 or PV3D? How much time have products like XRay saved us?  I bet LOTS would be the answer. Â

John Grden wants to replace his old Dell with a brand new Macbook Pro so he can continue to provide the best cross-platform open source Flash possible and he doesn’t have the funds for it. He’s taking donations and I think giving back to someone who has given thousands of hours of his free time is more than worth it.   Head over to his site and give whatever you can afford.  Every little bit helps.

http://www.rockonflash.com/blog/?p=66

Yahoo has a new revamped Flash Dev Center online and they’ve released some Flash CS3 components that we’ve wanted but Adobe didn’t put into Flash CS3.

 http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/

• Tree component
• Menu
• Tab
• Autocomplete
• Charts

A friend of mine was having problem with some ActionScript code on a frame and couldn’t figure out why part of it was working and then it just stopped working. I took a quick look at this code and immediately saw a “return” statement where it shoudn’t be. It was outside of a function and probably something that got copied-n-pasted from somewhere else.

So here is a puzzler, Flash didn’t throw an error about this return being outside of a function and I have no idea where the flow of the code would return to. I did a quick test of it in a AS3 file and got the same behavior.

Is this something Flash should be throwing an error on? If not, why?

Here is a quick code snippet:

[as]trace (“fe fi fo”);
return;
trace(“fum”);
// traces fe fi fo, but no fum

[/as]