Play, Live, Work, Enjoy.

Flashpitt happens on October 10th, 2008 at the Sheraton Station Square in Pittsburgh, PA. I'll be there as a speaker, friend of the organizers, and attendee. I'm really looking forward to it. As much as I love the larger conferences and festivals like Flash in the Can and FlashForwars there's something to be said for smaller more dynamic festivals such as this one.

Flashpitt is a one-day conference for multimedia designers, developers, and artists. It's Pittsburgh’s first major Flash-centric conference. National and international industry leaders will be present to inspire, educate, and challenge the region’s Flash community. The speaker line up will share inside tips, new technologies and behind the scenes looks to Flashpitt’s attendees.

Just a quick link out… you've got to take a look at what these lunatics have done. Go to the link below and click on NoxTools on the upper-right tab. Basically a whole set of synthesizers, sequencers, and effects pedals — built in Flash!!

Fun stuff — now if you could only export an MP3!
http://www.hobnox.com

I recently had the pleasure of teaching an intro to ActionScript 3 class at Campuslinc here in Buffalo. The students were mostly college level instructors and support staff at regional institutions like the University at Buffalo and Canisius College. We had some great conversations over lunch in regards to how best to teach Flash and how to generate a solid curriculum that would provide job-ready candidates to the talent-starved new media industry. The training location was great, the equipment was very good, the chairs were comfy (which is very important for a 7 hour session) and the fact that there was coffee on hand throughout the day was awesome.

Overall it was a great experience. We covered a variety of topics from the basics ("Variables, Functions, Classes") to more advanced techniques ("Sound, External Loading, XML, E4X").

The one negative note I feel compelled to mention was the book and companion CD-Rom that we were given as courseware. The course outline was solid… and that was about it. The book was riddled with errors, typos both in the English language and the ActionScript language it was meant to cover. It seemed that this was a first draft. The code samples were no better. They were inconsistent with the written portion and in many cases published out with errors. Maybe I'm setting my bar a little higher than most, being a game developer but the "finished game" that was supposed to be the payoff of the learning experience was poor at best. I expected much more from the folks at Fig Leaf.

In the end, based on a student's suggestion we stopped using the books examples and I went through the final 4 units on the fly. This worked out, as we ended up with an extra hour at the end of the day during which I walked the class through creating a simple slide-show using all of the aspects of AS3 we had covered over the three days. I will be posting a ZIP with all of the source files from this class soon.