Do you ever find yourself wishing you could temporarily mute the audio in a FLA while working on it?  It’s easy enough, of course.  I’m not sure how it works on a Mac (surely just as easily), but on Windows, you simply mute the volume control in the system tray.

Ah, but there’s the rub!  On Windows—XP at least, which is what I’m using—that’s an all-or-nothing “solution.”  The trouble is, I like to listen to music while I work, and most of the time that means playing audio files directly on my computer.  If my system is muted, it’s muted.

For years, I’ve simply been dealing with this, but I finally had enough.  Just last week, I started searching online for ways to selectively mute individual applications on WinXP.  For my money, IndieVolume wins, hands down.  Not only can I mute Flash—which temporarily silences both my FLAs and SWFs—I can also selectively mute, say, Safari or Firefox, which lets me enjoy the same benefit when testing in a browser.

Even better, I can leave my apps audible, but adjust their volumes individually (panning, too), which means I can keep my Flash content quiet while leaving my audio player and other system alerts/sounds going strong.

If you’re interested, try giving IndieVolume a shot!  The developer offers a free trial period, and you even get a discount for endorsing the product on your blog.  I’ve been spreading the word anyway, because this app is one of those cases of “it’s the little things that count.”  I’m truly a happier coder for the quiet. 

This is just a quick note.  When I originally recorded my Layers Magazine tutorials, Flash CS4 wasn’t yet publicly available, which means I wasn’t able to supply Layers with my sample files at the time.  I followed up with them shortly after CS4 hit the market and provided a set of ZIP files, but didn’t check to see that the files had actually made it — my fault! — so thanks to prompting from a recent Layers visitor, Adamanta, I followed up again.  As of yesterday, the files are now available.  Enjoy!

http://www.layersmagazine.com/author/david-stiller/

A good friend of mine, Branden Hall, uses a startling metaphor to describe what it’s like when scheduling has gone insane, when too many projects are due at once, and when, in general, “overwhelmed” isn’t a strong enough adjective.  He aptly calls this feeling “drinking from the fire hose,” which fairly describes how I felt while writing my books last year.  Somehow, the image always makes me chuckle.

It’s been about six months since I last wrote an entry here, and that’s much too long!  A handful of regular readers have even checked in to ask what’s going on, which I appreciate.  The simple truth is that I’ve been catching up on things other than Flash (and work in general), and it has honestly taken this much time.  In fact, I’m still not as caught up as I’d like.  (For example, I have nearly two hundred comments to get to from this blog!  I feel awful about the delay — some messages are easily a year old — but I keep chipping away at them and do intend to eventually work my way through.) 

For the record, I’m still very involved with Flash, as much as I ever have been.  I still use Flash every day and, honest to goodness, still love my job.  The only thing that’s changed, really, is that I’ve significantly reduced the amount of time I work in the evenings and weekends.  It was getting pretty unhealthy there for a while!  Instead of working, I’ve been spending time with my wife and daughter, which has been an absolute boon to my sanity.  It also means I’ve been sticking to my New Year’s resolution for 2009.    In fact, I’ve even indulged in a few new hobbies, including homemade cheese, gardening, and bread making … things I have to do with my hands, away from the keyboard.  In short, life is good. 

Ironically, this return to “the simple things” occasionally increases the stress of my work day, because it means I have to get things done during normal business hours, rather than into the evening.  I do put in “overtime” every now and then, as everyone does, but I’ve had a goal for quite some time to make that the exception to the rule, rather than the norm.  I do feel like I’m making strides, even if it takes a while.

I recently started recording video tutorials for an online training center, partly to market Foundation Flash CS4 for Designers (friends of ED).  I’ll mention when those are ready.  I’m also still writing articles for CommunityMX.com and have been percolating a few ideas to continue helping folks make the transition from ActionScript 2.0 to 3.0.  More on that down the line, when time allows.  I do plan to keep writing Flash tutorials for this blog, as soon as I can wrangle my calendar into place.

Thanks for the patience!

I just got word from Adobe that a number of The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide excerpts are freely available in PDF format from the Developer Connection’s ActionScript Technology Center:  Check ’em out!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/as3_quick_ref.html

Combine those with the freebie excerpts at CommunityMX.com, and you’ll find you have a decent selection to help you choose if this book would be useful to you. 

How AS3 Helps You Program with Purpose
Working with Library and Linkage Changes in ActionScript 3.0
Flash CS3:  What Happened to the WebServiceConnector Component?

Reader response has been great so far!  From Margot Sheehan’s Amazon.com review:

I was browsing at Borders at Park Ave and 57th, where they had exactly one copy of this.  I’d heard of this book but hadn’t seen it yet — it was announced over the summer but O’Reilly kept delaying publication so the book could be current with Flash CS4.  I looked up a few items in the ToC and index, and went straight to the checkout queue.  I had to have this book right away! even if Amazon could sell it to me cheaper!

Okay, why is the book good?  I’ve spent more time with it now.  I’ll give you my three biggest reasons:

1) It’s readable.  It really is.  It’s friendly and accessible.  Did you ever enjoy those … How-and-Why science books that started out with something like, “Hi!  This is a fun book, and we’re going to take you on a fun journey, step-by-step …”?

Well, did you like books like that? I did, and I’ve always resented scholarly and technical books that didn’t introduce themselves along those lines.…

This book is overtly addressed to users of ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, and those already using 3.0; to artists, designers, and developers of all stripes. It’s all-inclusive. Like Rich Shupe’s Learning ActionScript 3.0, it has a friendly, hand-holding attitude that goes through the length of the book.

Read the rest of her comments here:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R22FGEDQ9XAW0U/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Most of us have at least one mentor, even if it’s someone we haven’t met in person.  In fact, if you’re anything like me, you have a different mentor for each field that interests you:  someone who inspires you to keep practicing the piano, to get creatively crazy in the kitchen, to learn yet another unicycle trick, and to keep strengthening your grasp on Flash (or Photoshop, or Dreamweaver … you get the idea).

When it comes to Flash, one of my mentors has helped me significantly with troubleshooting — with making things work when, against all expectation, they simply don’t work. In a recent four-part series I wrote for CommunityMX.com, I explored a single theme — troubleshooting — from a variety of angles, sharing with readers what my mentor has shared with me.  Along the way, the series turns up a few quirks involved in working with Flash, but more importantly, it reviews how to approach arriving at useful workarounds, regardless what the issue is.

The first of four articles is free and investigates a puzzling visual issue I encountered while working on a set of custom UI tabs.  (It was originally published back in November, but I didn’t realize at the time it was a freebie!)  The follow-up articles go into other scenarios, and each one stands alone.  Community MX offers free trial memberships, so it’s possible to read all four without cost, in addition to other CMX content.  If you want to subscribe, do — but there’s no obligation. 

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=49197

Generally speaking, Flash designers have become more considerate. In the late 1990s, it was common to encounter dozens of Flash websites a day with bloated, pointless intro animations. Ultimately, sure, content was king: users would eventually get to the meat of a website, but all too often, were subjected to unnecessary bells and whistles, simply because Flash was the shiny new kid on the block. Nowadays, bloated intros are largely a thing of the past, but back then, designers were proud of these intros and assumed users were thrilled to see them. Frankly, it just wasn’t so.

Fortunately, designers began to change their ways. Best practices took hold, and the “Skip Intro” button became a fashionable device (in fact, it appeared so often it became an industry joke). If users were really lucky, they’d even see an “Always Skip Intro” button, which remembered their preference for the next visit. In this freebie Community MX tutorial, you’ll learn how to create such a button.

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=124BC

Back in March, I made a quick blog post (“New O’Reilly Title, Coming Soon!”) about a book I had just finished co-authoring.  My eleven chapters were done, and I was happy with my portion of the book (the other chapters were not yet completed).  This one aims to help folks migrate their existing skill set from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0.  Which folks in particular?  Not the hardcore programmers.  There’s a whole community of advanced developers, most of whom are now using Flex, that doesn’t need this book  This reference is for people who have a decent understanding of timeline coding, who may have begun writing custom classes in AS2, but do most of their programming in the Actions panel and are bewildered by the changes in ActionScript 3.0.  From a standpoint of tone and encouragement, I like to think this book has a lot in common with Colin Moock’s InsideRIA.com article “ActionScript 3.0:  Is it Hard or Not?,” which I’m quick to recommend on various forums as a confidence booster.  You can read a few chapter excerpts from the links below. 

When I finished my chapters in March, I couldn’t have guessed that a phrase from that very blog post, “new O’Reilly title,” would become true in more ways than one.  Six months later, I finished the book a second time, because delays in the project meant we decided to gut the necessary chapters and rewrite the whole thing for Flash CS4.  As a point of interest, the sample files are still saved as Flash CS3 FLAs, so even though all the figures show the new CS4 interface, this book is still useful (probably better than 90%) for current users of Flash CS3.  The reason for the extra work was to make the book relevant for the release of Flash CS4, but honestly, while writing new content, dropping some chapters, combining and/or splitting others, we took care to tighten the focus on ActionScript 3.0 itself, rather than cater to a particular version of the authoring environment.

For this reason, I’m even happier with the book now.  While working on it, I got to meet and become friends with some talented colleagues — Rich Shupe, Jen deHaan, and Darren Richardson — and learn a lot more about Flash (the learning never ends!).  In fact, Colin Moock took a look at my draft and said it was “great content, and nice and practical … will be very useful for the ‘Flasher’ crowd,” which meant a lot to me coming from him.  As you might expect, the title of the book has changed (that’s where the phrase “new title” takes another meaning).  It’s now called The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide, and is currently up for pre-order on Amazon.

Here are three excerpts from various chapters, published as free content by CommunityMX.com:

How AS3 Helps You Program with Purpose
Working with Library and Linkage Changes in ActionScript 3.0
Flash CS3:  What Happened to the WebServiceConnector Component?

Notice the mention of Flash CS3?  When these excerpts went live, I was still under a non-disclosure agreement with Adobe not to mention Flash CS4, so I adapted the excerpts back to CS3-relevant versions.  Fortunately, rolling them back meant little more than replacing “CS4” with “CS3” and digging up the previous set of screenshots.

Adobe has announced the CS4 lineup!

Hop around to your usual favorite Adobe-focused blogs, and you’ll find quite a few sites demonstrating new features (and there are tons of new features in all of these apps!).  Chris Georgenes, for example, spells out a number of Flash UI improvements at his keyframer.com site.  Colin Smith demonstrates some slick new Photoshop features at photoshopcafe.com.

And me?  I created four Flash CS4 video tutorials at the companion website for Layers magazine, layersmagazine.com.  Check ’em out!  If any of you are curious what I sound like, now you’ll know.    I’ve enjoyed working with the Layers folks very much, and will be happy to do so again, so this might just be the beginning!  Quick note:  I did include sample files with some of those videos, but until Adobe makes Flash CS4 available for purchase or trial download, you wouldn’t be able to use them (they’re saved as CS4 files, which means they don’t open in CS3 — you can actually save CS4 files as CS3 files, but naturally the new features disappear when you do).  I’m assuming Layers will update those pages when the time comes.  If not, I’ll pester them, and/or you can email me for the sample files. 

In related news … though it’s not listed on Amazon yet, friends of ED just posted the product page for Foundation Flash CS4 for Designers, by Tom Green and yours truly.  This is one of the new books I mentioned last time.  It’s the second edition of our Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers from last year—which means we didn’t write the book from scratch—but don’t let that lull you into thinking this is just a second edition.  (I fell for that one while writing this book!  It took us nearly as long as the first go around.)

So what makes the second edition different?  That would make a good topic for a blog entry of its own, but in a nutshell:  it’s completely updated for Flash CS4, as the title indicates.  That was a big undertaking!  The book features new sample files, new chapters, and (we estimate) around 100 new pages.  For the rest, we scoured every existing chapter and made improvements based on reader feedback (Amazon reviews, conferences, classrooms, and direct email contact), and then infused each chapter with workflow enhancements based on the features in Flash CS4.  We punched up the ActionScript chapter a bit, too, but it’s all still aimed at the same audience as the first edition.

Highlights include a second animation chapter, covering features like the new Motion Editor panel and inverse kinematics (IK).  The Motion Editor panel is a biggie.  The motion tweens you’re used to are now called classic tweens (still available), and the new motion tweens behave very differently.  You can see some of this stuff in the Layers videos.  There’s also a chapter on the new 3D tools, and of course earlier chapters include explanations of (and sample files for) new drawing tools like the Deco tool, Spray Brush tool, and more.

There’s a new “Building Stuff” chapter, in which we overhauled our approach to the more complex sample files in the first edition.  In particular, we heard from several readers that the MP3 player was a bit advanced, as early as it appeared, so we rearranged the more sophisticated projects and put them in a chapter of their own.  Not only that, but we made sure these projects built on each other.  You’ll move from a preloader to an XML-based slideshow, to an XML-based MP3 player (a different one!) and eventually to an XML-based video player whose UI controls overlap conceptually with the MP3 player’s.  If you have the first edition, you’ll remember that the slideshow originally appeared in our XML chapter.  To fill the space left when we moved that exercise, we added a new one that uses XML to draw letterforms on the stage.

Generally speaking, we embellished, tweaked, packed more into a book that has already sold better than Tom or I expected.  It’s been a great ride, and great to hear from so many readers on what worked for them personally and what didn’t.

I tend to think of it like this.  In jazz, all the great standards have a recognizable tune (of course!).  In that sense, this is “the same book” as the first edition.  But like any jazz performance, you’re getting a new interpretation of the standard.  In this case, the performance is more nuanced than the first one, with new riffs and a better sense of cohesion overall.

I’ll blog again when the book hits the shelves.  I’m looking forward to this one!

Last night, at the stroke of midnight (I kid you not), I finished the very last exercise for the very last chapter on my plate for a new book for friends of ED.  When I lifted my hands from the keyboard, I was beaming.  Why?  Because it’s been a long time since I’ve had a normal work week.  This is all about to change, and wowzers, am I looking forward to it!

The main reason I’m happy is that I’m about to get more time with my family—time where I’m not bleary-eyed and half asleep.    Another part of my happiness, though, honestly, is that I’m about to get more time to spend on this blog, on forums, and on tardy email replies.  I’ve added a special folder to Outlook just for blog comments.  I really do read every single question, and I do my best to answer them.  If you’re still waiting to hear from me, please keep hangin’ on!  I’ve been behind on replies for months (that Outlook folder has 62 items as I write this) … but that’s about to change too. 

My wife and I use a special phrase to support each other during challenging times.  We call it “back to basics,” which generally means some combination of “keep your chin up,” “I’m on your team,” and “let’s simplify this.”  Sometimes projects get stacked so thick, it’s hard to see the end of the tunnel (like balancing books with regular client work).  During times like that, it can be tough to keep trudging, but I’m glad I pulled through to last night.

Having a garden in our back yard helps, believe it or not.  Plants grow so slowly, I’ve been able to draw parallels (and encouragement!) just by looking out the window.  Suddenly—where there was seemingly nothing only a week ago—we have dozens of eggplants and tomatoes!  I’ve been able to make ratatouille twice already with partially homegrown ingredients.

I had a teaser preview, nearly a month ago, of the excitement I’m feeling right now.  That’s what the picture shows at the top of this post (thanks for the photo, Amy!).  I was in San Francisco for the Flashforward 2008 conference.  They tried a new thing this year:  the Speaker Slam (20 speakers, two minutes apiece), and I was one of the speakers.  It’s tough to say anything meaningful in two minutes flat, but I did my best, and the audience was enthusiastic.  If I can piece together the gist of what I said, I’ll put that in a future post—it was about reading the Flash help docs (no surprise, right?).    The micro time span definitely meant I had to bring it back to basics.  It felt good.

In some capacity or another—researching, writing, preparing sample files, proofreading—I’ve been working on this new friends of ED book, and another for O’Reilly, since February.  During that time, I spent one month per book of fulltime writing, usually 12-hour days.  The rest was evening work, at least four hours a day.

Averaged out, that’s still less time than I spent on Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers last year, so I’m happy with that.    I didn’t work on weekends, either.  That’s an improvement!  Even so, it feels good to be done.

Friends keep asking me, “How do you do it?”  The honest answer is, this time, “I very nearly didn’t make it!”  Two books in one year was a lot to chew.  But I’m happy with my chapters (these were all co-author projects).  Details coming soon, including some free excerpts.  [Follow up: Three excerpts from The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide are now listed in "Sent to the Printer!  The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide".]

After I take a few weeks to get my bearings, and ramp up to speed on my usual client work, you’ll see more of me on this blog again.

In one implementation of the QuickTime VR format, known as QTVR Object Movies, the user can click-and-drag an image to seemingly rotate it, as if spinning the real-life object on a lazy Susan.  This simulated 3D interactivity can improve multimedia curb appeal, and makes for a nifty way to showcase merchandise.  But it doesn’t stop there:  the same basic principle can also bring click-and-drag responsiveness to short video sequences and even user input widgets, such as the click-and-scrub input fields of numerous Adobe dialog boxes. 

If you’re a Flash developer and interested in click-and-drag functionality, you might be interested in a new tutorial series I’m working on at CommunitMX.com.  CMX content is generally subscriber-based, but this intro article is free.  It does take you completely through the steps of creating basic click-and-rotate content (in other words, it’s not a hook), though future articles will delve into variations on the theme.  The bulk of the article is written in terms of ActionScript 2.0, but the same general principles apply in ActionScript 3.0, and an AS3 summary is provided.

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=8F0CA

As a quick note to regular readers of this blog, I’ve been waaaaay behind — as you know! — in my usual activity.  The simple reason is that I’ve been working on two new books in addition to my normal client workload.  One of these is the O’Reilly title I mentioned back in March.  Although my chapters were done at the time, a handful of challenges tipped O’Reilly into delaying the original publication date.  Given the change, we were faced with the opportunity of rewriting the book for the next version of Flash (post-CS3), and we took it.    That meant dumping some chapters, combining others, splitting yet others, and writing new content altogether.  Ultimately, ActionScript 3.0:  The Quick Answer Guide for Flash Professionals is a better book for all the additional input and reworking, and I’m thankful for that.  The other book an update to Tom’s and my Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers, which we’re working on as I type this.

When the dust settles, I’ll be a on a no-new-books kick for a while.  And I’ll back to blogging.    I miss it.