A newsletter that doesn't mention my books isn't really a newsletter... so, notice I'm proud of my two best-selling books: ActionScripting in FLASH and Sams Teach Yourself Flash 5 in 24 Hours. After "teach yourself" spent the 6 months in the top three bestsellers (in Publisher's Weekly computer books list) my new ActionScripting book made it to Amazon's #8 ranked book! Okay, so it was for a very short time-perhaps . I'm most curious who the tens of thousands readers really are as I've only received a handful of emails from some of them. With the countless foreign language versions, there's one thing that's particularly interesting. Some just leave all the screen shots as-is while others make a great effort to customize them. For example, in "the blue book" (ActionScripting in FLASH) I make a sample array with pseudo names "Governor Hansen", "Secretary White" (I don't think there's a Governor Hansen). In the French version they replaced all these names with real names such as Président Chirac and Premier Ministre Jospin. Now if they could just settle on my real name instead of using "Philippe" on the cover and "Philipp" inside! It's not as though they even translated my name (which would be weird)-they just made up something (which is weirder).

I got my first chance to experiment with the new features in Director 8.5 Shockwave 3D. It was for the Macworld review I wrote. The most challenging part was that it couldn't exceed 650 words. That would have been fine if one of the two target audiences were excluded from the requirement-I was supposed to reach both veterans considering an upgrade as well as novices who've never touched Director. The few words that got included were fine but it was real tough deciding what to leave out. (Interesting fact: this newsletter contains 2997 words.)

Maybe it's not fair to count jobs for publishers as additional projects-but a growing part of my time is spent reviewing books, articles, and potential books. There's a fair bit of work available to do "technical reviews" where you just ensure technical instructions function properly. Also, the first step to writing a book is invariably a proposal and table of contents (in fact, once you have a good table of contents the book practically writes itself). Anyway, I've been reviewing all kinds of book proposals-even ones that compete with mine! (No, I don't simply suggest they forget about publishing such books.) I try to be balanced but I don't know if bias is avoidable. One thing's for sure, publishers don't seem overly proprietary.

Speaking of technical editors...Doug (which stands for Director Online User Group-www.director-online.com) is now edited by local celebrity Darrel Plant. This has given me an easy in to write a few articles, including a series on using the V12 database engine and a detailed comparison of Flash to Director. It's an honor to be included on this most refined of Director sites-and, yes, I included Darrel's name as a transparent ploy to associate with fame... just as how the French president's name was mentioned earlier.
(Note: Darrel Plant is not the president of France.)

Without saying either that the recession is non-existent or that the world will end tomorrow, I can say I've taken on lots of short/small jobs: The Port of Portland (www.portofportland.com) hired me to do some Flash training. So did Split Diamond Media. I've been doing some consulting on Director for Adidas. I put some finishing touches on a pretty cool CDROM video and history archive of Jean Rouch (the father of cinema vérité). Finally, I provided some consulting to HMH on their new website (www.thinkhmh.com).

I'm still teaching Flash classes at Pacific Northwest College of Art (www.pnca.edu); both Director and Flash for Portland State University (www.pdc.pdx.edu); and a new general programming class (well, Director and Flash) at Portland Community College (http://spot.pcc.edu/multimedia/cascade/)

In the category of personal projects "just for fun" I've programmed a couple fun things. My randometer will help you draw winners from a group between 5 and 200 people (always important when giving away Macromedia software a user group meetings). Building the randometer gave me a chance to play with Flash's color object as well as other neat stuff (see www.phillipkerman.com/randometer). Another game (and this one I actually did customize and license for money) is blatantly based on a popular television show-but should avoid any copyright issues as it was renamed: "Who Wants to be a Macromedia Expert?". All the questions are stored externally as XML data and I even built a management tool (in Director) to create new games. Check out: www.phillipkerman.com/game

A reader inspired me to update my website by complaining it was "just a bunch of links". Well, now it's just a bunch of links-but inside Flash. I designed it for easy updates (storing all data outside Flash in XML form). Naturally, I'd like to revamp it again-but even then, it'll still be just a bunch of links.

Finally, another personal project-inspired by paranoia-is a piece I created in Director. It's nothing more than 3 columns of editable fields that you can print and save to file. The cool part is you can encrypt columns before saving the data to file (requiring a password to decrypt). This way you can store all your usernames, passwords, and private data securely on your computer. (Did I mention I'm paranoid?)

Flashkit Los Angeles www.flashkit.com
Besides me getting a jaywalking ticket, this conference turned out pretty good. The folks from Flashkit (from Australia) had some help putting the conference together from internet.com-but Flashkit's expertise is building a Flash community (as their site has), not necessarily producing conferences. They were successful though. They brought in such Flash celebrities as Jon Warren Lentz, Jon Williams, Robert Penner, Mano, Scott Hamlin, David Lai, Phillip Torone, Pope de Flash, and others. (By the way, I'm currently searching for either a single-word name or pseudonym for myself... I thought only rock stars got to do that.) Anyway, it was like a small version of Flashfoward with a little less of everything. Less (read "no") free beer, no special guests, fewer snacks... but also less hype and a much more casual feel. It's probably not fair to compare any conferences, but this one was unique. The vast emptiness of the L.A. Convention Center gave an uneasy ghost-town feeling-but sure made for convenience in the cavernous bathrooms. For my presentations I did my Smart Clips dance and a 3-hour workshop on "Becoming an ActionScript Programmer". As expected, I got through less than half my material-but you can find it online.

FlashForward 2001 SFO www.flashforward2001.com
Mental note: don't get scheduled at the same time Joshua Davis is speaking... besides drawing people away from my presentation it meant I couldn't hear his presentation. However, I was very happy with my turn-out.

Online Flash Film Festival Barcelona www.offf.org
It was definitely cool to visit the plains of Spain in May (though hard to wait until 21:00 for dinner every night-and nary a drop of rain to make a rhyme). It was the first time I was translated on closed circuit radio as I spoke. Spain has some of the nicest people in the world... interesting architecture in Barcelona... and even an ancient Roman stadium outside of Seville. Of course I had to work for 2 hours too. Oh, Joshua Davis spoke before me and then offered his CDROM for sale (see www.praystation.com/propaganda/). That would have been fine had there been no rush to the stage and near riot.

Macromedia UCON 2001 New York www.macromedia.com/go/events
The announcement of Shockwave 3D made Flash compete for attention-but the unexpected announcement came too late for additional Director-heads to attend. I can barely remember my presentation because I had such a bad head and stomach ache (and, no... I didn't break Toastmaster's #1 rule to never make excuses). The best part, though, was emceeing a version of "Millionaire" at my publisher's booth to give away books.

ThunderLizard's Web Design World 2001 Seattle www.thunderlizard.com
I prepared two presentations ("Where does Flash fit in?" and "The sound of Flash") but delivered three! A last minute cancellation had me fill-in for a Macromedia employee during the "Flash optimization" session. Too bad I didn't bring extra copies of my book to give away (they get heavy).

I presented to American Society for Training and Development (in Portland) "What's new in Shockwave and how it's better than Flash".

In its second year, Macromedia Daze turned out great. It's amazing how much great talent is right here in Portland. I did two presentations: "Flash Scripting" and "Intro to Shockwave".

This editorial's title (and the song title by '80s band Missing Persons) sums it up. But what do you do when you get a $77 jaywalking ticket where the nearest crosswalk is 1/2 the width of a the L.A. convention center away? I guess, just smile and hope the money is spent to improve the conditions for pedestrians in L.A-they sure can use it. In my case, I've been motivated to channel my energies into collating a pet-peeves section on my website. (Ironically, traffic tickets didn't make my list.) The list is not just a way for me to rant and rave-it's that but much more. Really, most of these are meant to be funny. Please take them in stride.

Here a few examples taken from www.phillipkerman.com/peeves
·Honking your horn rather than getting up and walking to the door-it seems so lazy and inconsiderate.
·Loud cell phone talkers who think their voice volume must correspond to the distance to the person to whom they're speaking.
·Over-sensitivity to cell phone rings-sure, it can be annoying when a phone rings... but get used to it, it's part of our world now. (Remember the travesty electronic watch alarms caused when they first came out? ...did we live through it?)
·Using the fallacy of discounting one argument because there's a more important problem. For example, saying people are being robbed so therefore police shouldn't waste time with jaywalkers (oops, maybe that's a bad example).
·Self-righteous environmentalists who feel compelled to tell me all the ways I can improve. All I ask is wait until you've taken every measure to live a pure life before figuring out how I'm supposed to live.
·Hypocrites who maintain pet-peeve lists.

Flash Developer Certification
(www.macromedia.com/support/training/ certified_professional_program/)
Now that I am officially "certified" (as a Flash developer) I shouldn't complain about this test. I took it with a bad attitude but now believe it's a pretty good test. It's administered in controlled test sites (where you need to produce two pieces of ID; you're on camera, you can't talk, and can't even leave with your notes, etc.). Without commenting on the content (which is another "can't" rule), I can say you won't pass the test if you've never used Flash. However, if you're great you can still fail. Also, it doesn't really "test" whether you're capable. For example, if the questions about which I was uncertain arose in real life, it would take me a matter of seconds to determine the correct solution-had I simply had Flash running (or my books handy-just joking). The only thing I really resented were questions based on Flash "history" (stuff you'd only know if you used Flash 4) and insider terms that are common in the Flash community (but nowhere else). I took the "beta" version of the test so much of this may have worked its way out.

QuickTime 5 (www.quicktime.com)
I'm still frustrated by the fact I had to pay another $30 for a new "QuickTime Pro" serial number. It's not so much the money, but since you can't have both version 5 and 4 installed... simply upgrading (the free version) has made my old (pro) version inoperable. Anyway it's not as though this is getting on my pet peeves list... the important thing to know is that Flash 4 movies can play inside QuickTime 5-and even "on top of" QuickTime meaning you can make pretty fancy interactive videos using Flash.

Authorware 6 (www.macromedia.com/software/authorware)
Not the biggest upgrade in the history of software, but not bad either. The biggest thing: true rich text support. You can store RTF files external to Authorware including dynamic expressions for styles and graphics. A new media synchronization feature makes sound and video icons look like decision icons, where each branch corresponds to a specific moment in time. Although I'm sure "one button publishing" is something Macromedia wants to push, it's not terribly exciting. It's cool, I suppose, that Authorware now uses the common Macromedia term "publishing". Cooler features are those designed for extensibility. For example, you can add items to the "commands" menu by building custom (knowledge-object-like) applications. The new "find Xtras" feature is wonderful. If only it were 100% fool-proof... but as you may know, fools are getting smarter every day.

Editorial Note:Although character animation and 3D modeling aren't my bailiwick, the following two products (that create .swfs) look pretty cool.

Toon Boom Studio 1.0 (www.toonboom.com)
Here's a case of a computer animation tool that's really got its roots in conventional cell animation. For example, Toon Boom lets you rotate your drawing canvas-just like you would while drawing in real life (think about it). You could always just rotate your tablet but the monitor is stationary... so rotating what you see on screen makes total sense. There's also simulated depth. As expected your layers are stacked, but from a top view you can vary their separation. This affects the relative speed that the images pass by the camera-yes, a camera. Toon Boom automatically changes the stage view based on camera movements! While each layer is still a 2D plane, the kind of dynamic effects possible are quite powerful. Add to this, useful features such as color styles (that let you globally change any color instance), bitmap tracing, and an automated lip-synching helper-and you've got a pretty amazing program.

Swift 3D 2.0 (www.swift3d.com)
I wish I knew enough about the first version to highlight just new features-but from my perspective the most apparent difference is performance. Through a new rendering engine, complex animations that could take 20 minutes in version 1 now take as little as 40 seconds. Again, I don't have enough experience to corroborate these numbers but it's definitely much faster now. If you use version 1 you'll probably appreciate some of the other new features as well-but, in my opinion, performance is a giant one.

(Realize creations made with either tool above require that either frames are imported or Flash's load movie feature is used to incorporate them into interactive movies.)

Director 8.5
Download 3DPI (www.ullala.at/3DPI)
I suppose this should appear in the Reviews section, but 3DPI is an inexpensive shareware marvel of Director programming that runs inside the authoring environment to give you a detailed view of the 3D world. Just like any property inspector (that lets you view and change sprite or member properties) this one gives you access to everything inside your 3D members. Lights, textures, cameras, models etc. However, because 3D worlds' properties revert every time you close the file, you can't use 3DPI to permanently change your worlds. But still, this tool is essential to beginning to understand the 3D member type

Flash 5
Dynamic Clip Referencing: The dot syntax to refer to a clip's property: address.instanceName.property works fine when you know the clip's instance name. You may, however, want to refer to a clip when you don't know the exact name-say "clipn" where "n" is the value of a variable (so you really mean clip1 or clip2 depending on n). Simply write a dynamic string expression, place it inside square brackets, and precede it with the address (but no dot): address["string"].property; e.g. _root["clip"+n]._alpha;
Smart Clips: When your Smart Clip depends on a symbol's linkage (for attachMovie or attachSound) be sure to include an instance of the symbol in a Guide Layer of the Smart Clip. Only this way will the symbol get copied when you copy the Smart Clip.
Sound Object: If you want to control the volume of two sounds separately you must include an optional "target" parameter when instantiating the sound. It's weird because the parameter has nothing to do with where the variables containing the objects reside. Just use:
myMusic = new Sound(clip1);
myVoice = new Sound(clip2);
// and then you'll be able to control each separately (e.g. myMusic.setVolume(20);)
Color Object: Ironically setRGB() accepts a hex value argument... but you can use this instead (substituting r,g, and b with 0 through 255):
myColor.setRGB(r<<16 | g<<8 | b);