Blog is moving

Being the control freak I am and wanting more control over my blog, I'm now hosting it myself using WordPress. It's now located at blog.noti.ca. See you there!

ProxyLoader Class

With my latest project I had lots of external assets loading. I wanted to make sure people knew something was happening while an asset was loading and I didn't want to create a preloader everytime, in comes ProxyLoader.
ProxyLoader is simply a Sprite that takes care of loading the asset via a Loader, draws a preloader, and border. It then destroys the preloader after the asset has been loaded.
One feature I added to this Class is the ability to create any type of visual preloader using the IPreloadable interface. So you can have a text preloader of one type of asset and a Movieclip for another as long as it implements the interface.
You can use the class in a very similar fashion as Loader, but you need to pass a width and height argument.

var loader:ProxyLoader = new ProxyLoader(435, 250);
loader.load(new URLRequest("path.to.asset"));
addChild(loader);

If you want to see the methods I have posted some docs here. You can download the package here. Hope it helps someone out.

New Site - www.forkedup.com

Over the past 2 months I've been really busy developing and building a new AS3 site for Masterlift called Forked Up. It's a new reality TV series similar to American Hot Rod, but with forklifts. They're trying to have this show picked up by one of the networks here in Canada and the pilot looks fairly interesting.
I built the client side Flash, server sided PHP Classes and the database. It is now officially the largest project I've ever undertaken by myself. The previous was also a job from Masterlift, pimpmylift.

Hope you enjoy it.

Down with Facebook, up with Hobnox

** This post is off-topic from my usual AS stuff

I recently became aware of a new community through my love of electronic music and passion of Flash from Hobnox tools. But now that I have been accepted in the private beta, I've discovered it's so much more. It's a community, a television, blog and other mash-ups of technologies.
The reason I'm liking Hobnox is that Facebook has become a community of odd ball apps that I get asked to participate in at every turn. I haven't even logged in to my Facebook in months (if you're reading this from my Facebook page, it's because my blogger pages get imported automagically) and haven't missed it one bit.
But if you know me, you know I can get bored quickly, so the true test is the test of time. And time will tell.

Earth Hour 2008

I hope you're participating.. sign up with me at http://www.earthhour.org/user/hCke and join the movement.

New AIR app for Aveda

My second AIR app (the first for work) has been finished. It's an application that polls a web server and synchronizes a local database with any new media alerts.
It rose out of the need for Aveda Partners (aka AP's ... think regional managers) to have a quick and easy way to know of new media reviews on products. Previously, this was done via e-mail and caused some issues, like having many alerts in the inbox and having to sort through them all. AP's wanted the e-mail channel free for more sales related issues. They also wanted to have the ability to only download the full pdf alert for the one's they were interested in. This was especially important for AP's in Quebec, where some english alerts have had little value.
I learned quite a bit about AIR building it, like interacting with the local db and using icons. I also learned more about php building the back end.

I'm really looking forward to my next app... a rebuild of my Chart generator.

Unfortunately the application isn't publicly available but I have included a screenshot below.

I walk for water - Every drop counts

My company (Collega Aveda) is very active with the environment and issues affecting the Earth, so every year they participate in Earth Month. This year is "Every drop counts". An initative with WaterCan to make clean water accessible to everyone. (Did you a child dies every 15 seconds in the world due to a lack of access to clean water?)
So what we are doing is the "Walk for water". In major cities around Canada we are trying to get people to walk 5km and raise money for WaterCan.
You can visit www.iwaterforwater.ca for more information and register for the walk or sponsor me for my walk in Toronto. You can also become active in other ways through WaterCan.

On another note, I did build the back end in PHP for this initative (I didn't design it) that's where my comments on PHP from my other post came from ;)