Paul Booth has an informative post titled Fun with preloaders, flashvars, _root and _level0 in which he describes how he implemented a simple external preloader for a recent Arp application he developed. He apparently modified a preloader by Guy to fix an issue with onLoad() not getting called properly and has made the modified component available for download from his site. In his post, Paul also talks about the challenges he faced in getting the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit to function properly with an externally loaded movie and shares the code he used to make it all work.

Nice post, Paul, and welcome to the blogosphere! :)

Peter Elst and Todd Yard have a new book coming out (with contributions by Sas Jacobs and William Drol) and I was lucky enough to get to read it before release and write the foreword. Instead of trying to repeat what I think about the book, here are my thoughts from the foreword:

If there's one thing I've learned as a developer, it's this: Complexity happens; simplicity, you have to consistently strive for. Nowhere is this truer than in education. Our role as teachers, by definition, is to simplify subjects so that they can be easily understood. A good teacher dispels trepidation with anecdote, abstraction with analogy, superstition and magic with knowledge.

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... was a wonderful success. We had close to one hundred members turn up to our meeting to watch presentations on AS3 and Flex2 by Tink and myself.

Tink's presentation, which itself was created as an ActionScript 3 (AS3) project using the Flex Builder 2 Alpha 1 tool, introduced members to those changes and new features in AS3 that Tink "thought were important". These included changes to access modifiers (including the new ones, like internal and protected) and the new DisplayList, Sprites, Events, etc. Suffice to say, he covered a range of important topics and covered them well! :)

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One of my students who tried to sign up yesterday for all five of the Hot Shots Seminars was kind enough to inform me that he had difficulty doing so because PayPal asked him to go through a verification process. This is apparently a PayPal policy for payments that exceed £500. I had originally thought that this limitation was only in effect for payments made from a user's PayPal account and not for payments via Credit Card using PayPal but apparently it applies for both. I have to say that PayPal does a very good job of not advertising this fact in a visible manner.

I've now updated the Hot Shots web pages to add a note informing students that if they run into this problem, they can contact me and I'll be happy to send them an invoice and accept payment via either a bank transfer or cheque.

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Two of the Flash world's top names professed their love for each other today, in a move that is already being called the Bareback Brokeback Mountain of Flash.

Grant Skinner and Aral Balkan publicly declared that they'll be offering discounts to students taking both Grant's Flash 8 Workshop and one or more of Aral's Hot Shots Seminars in London this February.

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