paulmignard

So last year after Adobe Max (it’s a big Adobe conference where they get everybody together and give them candy in the flavor of awesome new tools) they put all of the sessions online which I thought was really spectacular but despite having hours of content available, I failed to watch a single one. I found that, well, it’s kinda hard to sit there for an hour and listen to a session. But this year, I certainly didn’t plan to repeat that mistake. So, short of stapling my hands to the table so I wouldn’t get distracted and head over to digg or reddit or some other site peddling delicious but useless time-wasting information I queued up the first video in my library and proceeded to fill my head with actionscript erudition. Over the next few days I’ll be watching sessions so I’ll try to give a brief synopsis of each…

First up – “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know” by Grant Skinner. This was a great session – I was totally interested from start to finish and there were definitely more than a few gems to grab onto here. From new ways to think about OOP and the pragmatic declaration to “love the timeline” -(when was the last time you heard that advice?)- I found a lot to takeaway. One thing I didn’t think about was using custom tweens on simpler things and eschewing using a tweening engine (despite that fact that his company wrote one) for every single animation (like I’ve been doing ever since I found out you could abstract that chore to a separate library.) Grant has all of his talks located on one page and they’re kinda interesting to look at, highly recommended.

All in all, a very illuminating way to spend an hour – here is the video followed by my favorite slides: