FITC usually schedules a series of conversations between big names in the design and development world to promote their conferences. Lately, I’ve been loading up a conversation from the recent Toronto conference in the background while I work at home. So far, the Colin Moock/Jim Corbett conversation has been the most interesting, but they’re all worth checking out—if only to listen to people speak intelligently about Flash, creativity and web development.

Stream the FITC Toronto 2008 Conversations over on the FITC site.

Yesterday, Lee Brimelow mentioned Action Message Format (AMF) on The Flash Blog. I’ve read a little about this topic, but know next to nothing about it. Here’s the official word from Adobe:

AMF is a compact binary format that is used to serialize ActionScript object graphs. Once serialized an AMF encoded object graph may be used to persist and retrieve the public state of an application across sessions or allow two endpoints to communicate through the exchange of strongly typed data.

Basically, it’s a way to more efficiently pass large amounts of information between Flash and the server (i.e., an alternative to XML). Brimelow outlined several server-side methods to utilize this format and promised some real-world examples next week. Jump over to The Flash Blog to read up on Action Message Format.

Download the AMF 3 Specification PDF

Update: Brimelow is on the ball; the first AMF/AMFPHP tutorial is already up over at gotoAndLearn(). Happy coding.

The title pretty much says it all. I spent about 10 aggravated minutes today troubleshooting this issue, until I remembered I had updated to the new Flash Player 10 beta last week. As reported:

sIFR 2 uses the same Flash detection that was originally used in its precursor, IFR, back in 2004. Unfortunately this detection script only expected single digit Flash versions, so it fails to detect Flash 10. This has been fixed in sIFR 2.0.6 2.0.7.

Those using sIFR 2 in past or current projects, take this opportunity to update your scripts. Obviously, this isn’t going to be a rampant issue, because sIFR usage is comparatively low. However, I wanted to at least save some of you out there the headache.

In order to help my migration to Flash 9, I went ahead and read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook by Joey Lott, Darron Schall and Keith Peters.

Overall, I would say that it was helpful and recommend it, but even though my copy was a first edition, it did seem like the book contained way too may typos (both grammatical and in the ActionScript itself). Typos aside, the chapters on the Display List and XML were both extremely concise and informative. If you’re unfamiliar with either, I’d recommend giving them a look.

Like the other books in O’Reilly’s Cookbook series, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook works as a quick reference to commonly encountered problems. Focusing on the end results, their problem/solution approach to education works well when you’re already somewhat familiar with their subject.

Grant Skinner was gracious enough to publish all the slides from his Introductory AS3 workshop online. There are 165 slides, so it’s quite an extensive workshop. If anyone was looking for a nice introduction into AS3, look no further.