Dynamic Flash

Every year Yahoo! gives its employees a Christmas present. In the past we’ve received fleeces, blankets and sleeping bags, but this year we’ve been allocated an amount of money to donate to a charity of our choice. We can donate to any US registered charity, including the likes of Amnesty International and Greenpeace - but I would like to donate the money to a smaller charity where the impact will be greater.

Since I don’t live in the US, I thought I’d turn to you to see if anyone out there knows of a small, worthy charity that does good work for children. Leave a comment and I’ll check them all out and choose one from your suggestions.

Many thanks, and Happy Christmas

Update

So I’ve decided to donate to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America. Not quite the small charity I was hoping for, but these people do some really good work in the UK with terminally ill children.

Now that I’m a Londoner Tink has roped me into speaking at the London Flash Platform User Group November meet-up on November 30th. The session is titled ‘The Wonderful World of E4X’:

With the rise and rise of APIs we’re seeing an increasing number of developers using them to create mashups, either just for kicks or hoping to be snapped up by Yahoo! or Google for a boat-load of cash. Many of these web services output XML, and if you’ve ever tried to deal with complicated XML structures in ActionScript 1.0 or 2.0 then you have my sympathies. Stop messing around with endless child and sibling references and see the light - ActionScript 3.0’s E4X is the answer to all your problems (or at least the ones that involve processing XML in Flash) and this session aims to show you how.

The other session that night is Adam Robertson’s ‘Flash for Linux’:

With Adobe’s recent release of Flash Player 9 for Linux and the proliferation of OS flash tools, Linux is rapidly becoming a viable environment for developing real world Flash content. And unless you’ve been living under a rock recently you’ve almost certainly heard of Ubuntu, the current poster child of Linux distributions, and arguably the first Linux distribution to provide a truly usable desktop OS.
In this session we’ll take a closer look at Ubuntu, and cover turning a shiny fresh install into a full featured Flash 8 developement environment using (mostly) Open Source tools including Eclipse, MTASC, ASDT/FDT & SWFMill.

If you’re in London on the 30th come along and say hi - I promise I won’t bite. You’ll need to register your interest to get in the door, but it promises to be a good night of beer and geekery.

Update: I had to pull out at the last minute due to being stuck in Bristol. I’m working with Tink to get this presentation rescheduled for January or February 2007.

Somewhat in preparation for my joining Yahoo! later this month, I have been familiarising myself with the YUI Library, using it to build a small internal application that we need at Featurecreep.

One of the things this application needs to do is communicate with our SiteServer application using its XML API. Inevitably there were some issues, and having quickly tired of clicking my way though numerous alert() windows, I thought I'd take the YUI Logger component for a spin.

Unfortunately, no sooner had I integrated this into my mini application (a simple matter of including a few external JS files and adding 2 lines of code) than I hit a show-stopper of a problem: the YUI logger didn't attempt to escape any of the big 5 entities (<, >, &, " and ') before using innerHTML to inject the message into the logger entry list. This meant that Firefox treated my XML data as HTML elements it couldn't understand and silently skipped them, rendering my XML data unreadable. Bummer.

Never one to be defeated, I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into the logger.js file. I needed to catch the message and replace the entities as the HTML string that will be injected into the document is being built. This is being done on lines 2024 to 2034 (or 1012 to 1017 if your line breaks aren't messed up like mine are):

Now, it's only actually necessary to encode two of the big 5 entities for the browser to show us the proper information, so all we have to do is change the last line of that statement to read:

A small change, but all of a sudden I can log messages that contain HTML or XML code, or any message that contains the encoded characters. Hopefully this'll get incorporated into the main YUI Library, but in the meantime feel free to download my modified logger.js files (logger.js, logger-min.js and logger-debug.js).

I'm very excited to break the news that, as of next month, I'll be a Yahoo! employee. I'll be heading up the Flash work that they do in the UK, and also getting my hands dirty with lots of XHTML, CSS, and DOM scripting goodness. In the past few months they've hired at lot of good people from the industry recently, and I'm really looking forward to working with and learning from all everyone. I hope that I can contribute back to the group with my knowledge of all things Flash.

I know I've had my disagreements with Yahoo! in the past, but as I understand it these decisions were made entirely in the US and had nothing at all to do with the fine folks at Yahoo! UK. Besides, it's often better to try to change things from within than from without, and Yahoo! really seem like a company that's open to change.

Of course, this means moving from Bristol to London, which is a bit daunting for a country boy like myself. Several friends have offered suggestions of good places to live in London, but if any of you have any ideas I'm all ears. I'll be looking to rent a one or two bed flat initially for around the £1,000 per month mark, so if you hear of anything that's suitable and available in the next month or so then please let me know.

Before I go I have to say that I'll be very sorry to leave Featurecreep. There's some really exciting stuff going on here at the moment that I won't get to be a part of, and I wish them all the very best in the future. If you need a state-of-the-art content managed, fully semantic and accessible website, do give them a call! Ben, James and Jamie: thanks for the ride of a lifetime!

As I move on to pastures new, I don't know what that will mean for the future of this site. I have the impression that Yahoo! are a very liberal company (the Yahoo! UI library is a good example of just *how* liberal they've become) so hopefully I'll still be able to post thoughts, rants, experiments and useful code snippets here when I have time.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that I am still alive. We've just finished a really big project at work (more on that when the site launches to the public) and I finally have time to finish some of the half-written posts I've been lining up.

I will also have time now to finish implementing the missing Flash 8 features for swfmill. We already have support for some Flash 8 features (scale-9 grids, for example) in the current pre-releases and I'm part way through filter and blending mode support. If you've got a favourite Flash 8 feature that you'd like to see in swfmill, head on over to the swfmill mailing list and let us know.

Finally, I'm getting back into authoring again with those nice folks at Friends of Ed. I've got a couple of books lined up, but I think they're supposed to be top secret for now. I promise I'll let you know more when I can.