Been busy at work lately! I’ve got a tight deadline on a big project that involves a system demo with an avatar character.

I’ve been working in XML and dynamic Flash for so long with my inFlite system (more info soon) that I have a hard time thinking in terms of time line based animation. So, I’ve forked RAMEN and am creating a version for work. I’m getting the opportunity to add a few cool features (which probably won’t mean anything since I haven’t shared much about RAMEN here): timer based animation triggers, image distortion, targeting MC’s inside of a loaded SWF, shape objects, eventmanger objects, blah blah blah.

The hardest thing with be to get it to talk to Lectora so that I can make a cohesive template.

Is it just me or is the NOAH Animated Avatar just creepy? Who would design anything and use an army of these little people to communicate about it to the users? You can control the size of them, but the detail that’s drawn into their outfits does not allow for them to be scaled too big.

Since I have a feeling of imminent doom at work, I need to get back into what happening in the online world again. So much has happened in the past 4 years that I just havn’t had the time to even explore: AJAX, Javascript becomming “DOM Scripting”, CSS2, Flex, Microformats, etc. I’ve bought a few Friends of Ed books on those topics and hope that I’ll find time to read them before the year is up.

Right now, I’ve settled on trying to learn Flex 2 and Actionscript 3. I bought Charles Brown’s book on Flex 2 and AS3, and plan on working through it over the next few weeks. I don’t think that I can come up with a “business use” for either of these, so it’ll probably be very slow going. If our client would upgrade to Flash player 9,they just now upgraded to 8, then the situation would be better – I feel like I’m really falling behind not learning AS3 right now. But if I can’t use it at work, I don’t have much free time at home to learn it.

I feel like I could pick up AJAX pretty easily, since I’ve got a lot of experience with JS and CSS in the past, I’ll try to pick that up in the fall.

I returned from vacation to find out that my work just announced a 5% staff reduction. We had a few people hit in my group. I don’t think that I’m in immediate danger, but I’ve taken the opportunity to update my resume and web site.

I havn’t had time to look at Actionscript 3 yet. I’m starting to feel left behind. Maybe I’ll get the chance when Wachovia rolls out the Flash 9 player, but that’s a year away.

Anyway, found a good tutorial on gotoAndLearn() forums on creating a basic AS3 driven site.