I've not posted here for something like 5 weeks, I've been busy writing elsewhere. With articles for Adobe's Developer Center and for Builder AU I've been using my muse elsewhere - Twitter and more recently Pownce have also received some of my attention as well.
After the Apollo, now Adobe AIR, beginners article for Adobe Labs that I wrote for the public alpha release I was asked to contribute an article for the Adobe Developers Center on ActionScript 3 for Flash CS3. I've been impressed with how E4X can easily manipulate XML data so I've written an article on that topic, avoiding the usual RSS parser example by illustrating my ideas with an example application that utilizes a custom XML packet to deliver multi-lingual translations for a video display.
Builder AU asked me to review Adobe's Spry Ajax Framework for them which I did in the form of a "how to". While Spry is a part of Dreamweaver CS3 I approached my writing through utilizing the Spry download with a text editor to add Ajax to traditional HTML - after having existed in Flex and Flash world for so long it was interesting to have to think about basic HTML again.
I've been enjoying the interaction with peers that Twitter has to offer - while not necessarily as intrusive as IM can tend to be Twitter has offered new opportunities for me that I've enjoyed immensely.
I've also been involved with two user groups this week. The first was launched on Wednesday, ACUGA - The Adobe Connect User Group Asia Pacific. While some of you may not necessarily get excited about online meetings and eLearning the ACUGA was well attended for the 10:00am time slot, the guest speaker was Adobe's Connect Evangelist, or Connectionist, Peter Ryce who presented from San Jose. Peter's presentation was very interesting. Preaching to the converted Peter gave an insight to the future of Connect with the next version requiring a minimum of Flash Player 8 to deliver dramatic performance increases - particularly in desktop sharing. The second user group was QMUG who I spoke to on the same day, demonstrating Connect to them via Connect.
For further investigation:
Filtering XML data in Flash applications using ECMAScript for XML
