IMD 2002

1. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 IMD 2002 Week 01 – Welcome

2. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • And why am I teaching your class?

3. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I?

4. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Graduated from BIT in 2008 • Actually took this very class

5. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Still have my midterm and final from it too.

6. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Worked at Cognos (IBM) for 2 years • As the only Flash Developer, created a multimedia viewer for their customer support videos and then an interactive software architecture viewer for Cognos BI itself.

7. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Then Fuel Industries for 3 years. • Started out as a Flash Developer making games, mmo’s and interactive sites for clients like McDonalds, Comcast, Electronic Arts etc. • Eventually became the Director of Rich Internet Applications and Games and led a team of 12 in house developers and 3 offshore in Russia and Ukraine.

8. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Now at QNX (RIM) • Working on the SDK for internal and external developers creating systems and applications for the Playbook and future RIM devices.

9. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Also been on the speaking circuit at FITC Toronto, Adobe Max and FITC Amsterdam. • Blog: BreakTryCatch.com • Twitter: @jonkeon

10. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who am I? • Really? Another slide… • Important to know where the information is coming from so you can create your own opinions.

11. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Who are you? • Quick round the class so I can get to know your names, what your interests are with the BIT program and what you want to get out of this class.

12. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 What? • From the bitdegree.ca website: • Using Macromedia Flash students will create web-eCreating engaging interactive experiences with Adobe Flash. Real-world production techniques used to create fully-functional projects that are ready for online deployment. Topics include ActionScript 3.0 development, interactivity, programmatic animation, preloading techniques, file size optimization, and integration of graphics, audio, and video.

13. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash? • Didn’t Steve Jobs say Flash is dead or something?

14. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash? • HTML5 is the future of the Web. But Flash has its place in that future too. • HTML5 isn’t fully supported across all browsers yet. • Code is difficult to manage in large scale applications. • Animations and high performant applications (games) are still tough to do. • It’s getting better everyday but the BEST sites and experiences will be combining multiple technologies depending on the goals.

15. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash? • Current State of the Industry: • Clients only care about eyeballs. Market penetration. • Usually this means Flash 10.1 • Too risky to go to Flash 11 and too risky to go full HTML5 • Some clients like the idea of using buzz-word tech and a few of the bigger ones will even sanction cool experiential sites to promote technology. • Will hopefully see this trend growing as a way for companies to compete and help drive up user adoption on plugins and browser specs.

16. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash? • Still, why Flash? When you graduate, HTML5 will have grown significantly. • True, but so will Flash. • Unity now exports directly to Flash bypassing the Unity Plugin for the more prevalent Flash Plugin. • Flash supports GPU accelerated 3D currently. • Alchemy 2.0 is in the works (C++ compiled to SWF code) • Worker Jobs in the works for concurrency soon. • New compiler Falcon in the works promising increased speed.

17. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash! • Flash is beautiful for start to finish jobs. • Great tooling for art assets and code. • Strong language constructs but forgiving. Good gateway to deeper languages like C#, Obj-C, HaXe, and even C++

18. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Recap • Things you learned last semester: We hope right?  • Flash IDE • Typography • Movieclips • Blend Modes • Animations with TweenLite/TweenMax • Embedding in HTML with SWFObject • Classes

19. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Course Calendar: • Subject to Change as we go. • Week 01 – Jan. 16th • Intro • IDE’s • Directory Structure • Version Control • Week 02 – Jan. 23rd • The Event Model • Inheritance/Composition/Interfaces

20. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Course Calendar: • Week 03 – Jan. 30th • Useful Programming Patterns in AS3 • Function Pointers • 1st Assignment Assigned • Week 04 – Feb. 6th • Work Period / Recap

21. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Course Calendar: • Week 05 – Feb. 13th • 1st Assignment Due • Media Management • 2nd Assignment Assigned • Reading Week – No Class – Feb. 20th • Week 06 – Feb. 27th • Input Management

22. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Course Calendar: • Week 07 – Mar. 5th • 2nd Assignment Due • Network Communication/Javascript Communication • Final Project Assigned • Week 08 – Mar. 12th • Work Period / Recap • Final Project Meetings • Week 09 – Mar. 19th • Bitmap Manipulations and Special Effects

23. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Course Calendar • Week 10 – Mar. 26th • JSON/XML • Localization • Optimization • Week 11 – Apr. 2nd • Work Period / Recap • Week 12 – Apr. 9th • Final Project Presentations

24. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Mark Breakdown: • Your marks for this class will be broken down as follows: • Participation: 10% • Individual Assignment #1: 20% • Individual Assignment #2: 20% • Group Project: 50%

25. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Agenda • Directory Structure • Tools • IDE’s (Learning to let go of Flash) • Debugging/Profiling • Version Control

26. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Directory Structure • Seriously? • YES! Very important to have a clean and consistent structure. • For you • For clients • For teammates

27. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Directory Structure • Bad Directory Structure looks like this: • <project name> • Anim02_lightfire_b_001.png • Anim02_lightfire_b_002.png • Anim02_lightfire_b_003.png • Anim02_lightfire_b_003.png • Avatar_2_final.fla • Avatar_2_final_b.fla • Character_1.fla • com • greensock • jimscode • GDD.docx • Main.as • Main.swf • main.xml • Main-2.xml

28. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Directory Structure • Good Directory Structure looks like: • <project name> • tags • branches • trunk • bin • assets • swf • audio • Etc • fla • <types of flas> • src • support • docs • reference • art • etc

29. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Tools • Flash Players • When developing you always want to be using the Debug Player. • http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html • ActiveX – For IE and FDT/Flash Builder • Plugin – Firefox and other Mozilla Browsers • Projector Content Debugger – Standalone Player • Find a combination that works for you. Ideally you want a setup where you can develop primarily with the Debug Player, Test with a Release Player and do BOTH in the browser.

30. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Tools • Clients will sometimes not have the right Flash Player installed due to their neglect to update or from their company security policies. • Direct them here for easy checks to rule out bugs they might be seeing: • http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html • On a related note, make sure clients always clear their cache before viewing a new build!

31. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Tools • Vizzy • http://code.google.com/p/flash-tracer/ • Simple tool that lets you view what is being written into your Trace log. Very useful for debugging content deployed on a website.

32. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 IDE • Flash is a great tool for authoring content. But a bit behind in terms of writing code. (It is getting better though) • Top IDEs • Flash Builder - http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder.html • Flash Develop - http://www.flashdevelop.org/ • FDT - http://fdt.powerflasher.com/ • Other Notable IDEs • IntelliJ - http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ • Amethyst - http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Products/amethyst-ide/Amethyst-Product-Page • Code Drive - http://www.codedrive.com/

33. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash Builder • Adobe’s entry to the market. • Actually pretty decent. • Supports everything you need and has great integration for deploying to mobile devices. • Eclipse based so it runs on Mac and PC • Part of the Creative Suite

34. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Flash Develop • Free! • Only PC though • Full featured as well and excellent support for other project types (HaXe, Javascript, PHP etc)

35. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 FDT • Disclaimer: I’m biased to FDT • Excellent features for making coding easy. • Somewhat harder for mobile deployments, you may have to write some ANT scripts. • Supports coding for other project types but won’t launch them like Flash Develop. • Windows/Mac/Linux

36. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 IntelliJ • Don’t have a lot of experience with this one. • Those that use it or come from a Java background swear by it! • Windows/Max/Linux

37. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Amethyst • Integrated into Visual Studio • Not that great though from what I’ve heard. • Biggest selling feature is compile time… but it’s AS3 which compiles fast anyway.

38. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 CodeDrive • Relatively new on the market also a plugin for Visual Studio. • Seems promising but haven’t played with it at all.

39. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Demo of FDT • To show what to look for in an IDE and how it is beneficial • Showing debugger and profiler.

40. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Demo of Flash • Comparison of Flash IDE and how to work around it. • Show debugger.

41. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Version Control • Always use Version Control. • Assembla is free and private. • http://www.assembla.com/ • SVN or GIT are the biggest two. • SVN is a bit more intuitive, GIT is more power user. • Great GIT guide - http://rogerdudler.github.com/git-guide/ • With Version Control on an external server you never have to worry. • In my day, I had two USB keys with dated rar files. One of the USB keys would always fail at least once a week. It was a house of cards.

42. Jon Keon | Winter 2012 Demo of Version Control • For those that haven’t seen it.