eccheung4

I start online character animation school at AnimationMentor.com end of june for the summer session. I already got the required books “The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation” and “The Animator’s Survival Kit“. I’ve already started reading the books and they are pretty easy to read, but I’ll probably have to read it a few times to get the concepts down.

I’m really looking forward to the classes. I’m sure when it comes time to plan things out for a scene, flash will come in real handy.

If you decided to join the program, put me down as a referral when you apply and I’ll get $200 after you complete class 1.

I know this isn’t related to any technology, but it is for a good cause. I am part of “Team Muffin Top Fighters” looking to raise awareness and help fight cancer. For more information on how you can help by donating or joining our team follow the link below.

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/eccheung4

Thank you for your support

InsideRIA started a new series of articles covering Facebook Application Development using the new Facebook ActionScript 3 library. They always produce great articles and I’m sure this will be a great series with 20 articles to come!

InsideRIA: Facebook Application Development with AS3

The first lecture was released today. If you’re interested in learning more about iPhone development this will be a good way, however, it won’t be covering iPhone 3.0.

Check out the course page CS193P iPhone Application Programming

Obviously Facebook is popping up everywhere and I’m sure a lot of companies will be looking to integrate it with flash. Pieter Michels has started a great effort in bridging Facebook Connect and Flash using Actionscript 3. He provides a simple example using Flex and AS3.

Pieter Michels post on Facebook Connect to Actionscript 3
Pieter Michels Code Library at github as FBFlashBridge

Example of Facebook Connect with Flash at http://connect.redbullusa.com/

http://developers.facebook.com/
Facebook Connect Wiki
Facebook Developer Forum

UPDATE 3/30/09: I just noticed this post while looking through Facebook documentation. Looks like Adobe and Facebook are officially working together to support Flash and Facebook.

ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform - revamped open source version by Jason Crist
Adobe Developer Connection for Facebook - materials and samples

Forgot to mention there was an recent update to the Career Navigator for the Army Experience Center. I worked on making the Papervision 3D helix loop around and adding in the job titles on the planes and various other bug fixes and improvements.

Text in Papervision 3D - Clearing Things Up - This post by Andy Zupko helped with making the text a bit clearer on the planes (basically you need to use a larger textfield and change some settings) - check out his post and demo if your text is unclear on planes.

Tom and John put on a great 360 | iDev Conference. It was a pretty relaxing conference where we were all well fed (breakfast, lunch, dinner) with sessions that were just the right length. There were also pre-hands-on sessions to bring people like me up to speed that have never worked on iPhone development before. Since I’m a flash developer, James Eberhardt’s hands-on session that relates flash development to the iPhone SDK was especially very helpful. He actually teaches a 2-Day course on it with the Rich Media Institute.

Overall, the conference was well worth it and more than I expected. It was inexpensive and a great introduction to the iPhone development world. It was also nice to learn that part of the fees goes towards a charity. Awesome job Tom and John!

Slides from the conference: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/360idev

Here are a couple links/blogs I collected from the session speakers:
http://www.craftymind.com/
http://iphonedeveloperjournal.com/
http://www.byteclub.com/
http://jonathansaggau.com/blog/
http://gamesfromwithin.com/
http://alanmusselman.com/blog/
http://www.mobclix.com/
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/
http://www.luisdelarosa.com/
http://iphone.timefold.com/training/myschool/resources.html
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/

I remember this previous problem with a ComboBox not showing up properly when a swf is loaded into a parent swf and the problem came up again as I was updating a project to AS3.

Main reason for problem (according to yarcub):
“The component uses system fonts and masks only work on embedded fonts.
Finally the FP10 new text engine will fix a lot of those issues.”

Here’s more info on the problem and possible solutions:
http://www.gotoandlearnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=19118