Welcome to the blog
of Gareth Parker.

Flash and Flex Developers Magazine

A while a go, I saw Lee Brimelow’s post about a dedicated Flash and Flex Developers Magazine (FFDmag). So i instantly jumped on bored and subscribed. The magazine was more than useful and provided a decent read on the train to work most mornings. It seemed to drop off, and my subscription was no longer fulfilled, so I wondered what had happened to it. After two seconds on Google I came across the FFDmag site and realised they sent everything digital, and best of all free!

I personally think this is a must for anyone looking for tips and tricks, or for anyone to try and get in to Actionscript 3. The magazine seems to hit all levels, with handy code panels and also downloadable content to go with the magazine.

Although this makes it harder for me to read on the train in the morning flicking through pages on my iPhone, zooming in, then out, then in again. I can’t recommend it enough, and i’d like to give a big shout out to everyone in the FFDmag team for making this magazine in the first place, and also for taking it further in to the digital age to try and capture a wider audience.

Head over to http://www.ffdmag.com/ to get the mag.

Bourne new site launch

If anyone didn’t know, I work for a digital agency in Glasgow called Bourne, and this is our new site.

Snow Leopard vs The Flash Player plugin…

There is no hiding that I’m a massive Mac freak, and recently seeing the new shiny 27″ iMac’s arrive in the office Its just made me want one at home even though I don’t need one.

I have an early 2008 MacBook and a late 2008 iMac both with Snow Leapord on since it was released, and ok there was a screw up with the flash player released with it, but that was rectified, however I know I wasn’t the only one to notice how utterly terrible Flash player was in Safari, the tweets were flying about fast. It seems The plugin now functions as a plugin and if Flash falls over Safari looks down on it as if to say “get up you bloated bastard”, which is fair enough, why should the whole Safari app crash just because the Flash Player did.

This was happening often though, and sites were running as if they were set at 12fps. I couldn’t go to a web page on my MacBook without it sounding like it was going to burst into flames from the fans going like mad, and the animation looking like it was streaming on a 28k connection, so I opened activity monitor, only to see:

Flash Player (Safari Internet plug-in) %CPU 121.1
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Making the Close Paragraph act
like a Close Paragraph in Flash

Recently, i’ve become infuriated with Flash and the way it treats HTML text, especially while working on projects that have needed to be put in to a Tridian system ( Anyone who does this, will understand my hatred for it. ). One of the things that got me annoyed for a whole day was the fact that when any XML was uploaded to Tridian it decided to completely collapse all of the white space within the file. So I did some digging around and thought how it’s acting the same way that ‘condenseWhite’ does in flash. Basically what was happens is that the tag within any Node gets treated as:

<p>This is a paragraph</p>
<p>This is a new paragraph</p>

Where as it should be treated, or at least it is in HTML as:

<p>This is a paragraph</p>

<p>This is a new paragraph</p>

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MAXwidget

Hexosearch

Walking in to the office today, I was informed of a new Actionscript search engine called Hexosearch, so I thought I would take a look. Its actually quite impressive and should be in everyone’s favourites. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve spent hours on google trawling through forums that are 3 years old and by the time I get to the end doesn’t answer the question I wanted to know the answer to. I recommend everyone go check it out…

Flash on the Beach 09 Round up

Arriving back from Brighton on Thursday morning, it dawned on me how fast the past three days have gone, with everything whizzing by like mad. Only now have I had chance to reflect on how much amazing, inspirational and down right fucking mental shit I’ve seen.

I’ll try and provide a quick round up of the sessions I attended, and also provide links to slides, videos and anything else that came along while in there. I would also like to say, to anyone I met there and had a chat with about random mindless shit, thank you!! I can’t wait for next year.
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Flash on the Beach 09

Ok, so this year will be my first time at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. It’s going to be good seeing old and new friends that I talk to in the Flash community.

I hope to meet many new people there, come say hi.

Big up Brighton!!

An Update…

I recently haven’t posted any entries, probably the burden of having a blog is if you have some time off you tend to neglect it. I have had some time off, and since being back for the past couple of weeks I have been busy working on various projects which have meant I haven’t been able to update.

Not being able to update has annoyed me, there have been many things happen that I’ve wanted to blog about and put my opinion on. The recent release of Snow Leopard, Jesse Freeman (The Flash Bum) has started discussing the lack of CSS support in flash and also many of other things…

So I promise over the next few weeks there will be more posts…

OSX and Windows Side by Side

I am a massive Apple and Mac fan, I use Mac’s day in day out at home and in the office. Although I know Mac’s are not perfect by any means, I don’t think I could go back to a Windows based machine, or at least it would take a lot of persuading. However recently I have found myself wanting to try new things. The beauty of the Mac is that it has Bootcamp, which for me tops everything off. I’ve used it since I purchased both my MacBook and iMac. However the whole booting thing becomes a pain sometimes ( Or maybe it’s me becoming lazy ). I only really boot Windows once every few months to update and then switch back.
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