Matthew Fabb's blog

It’s been a while since this blog has been updated as I have been incredibly busy. I’m going to blog a bit of what I’ve been up to for the past several months. Then I hope to be blogging a bit more regularly, as there’s a bunch of topics that I would like to write about. It’s just a matter of finding the time to type out my thoughts.

Last November 2008 at FlashInTO (the Toronto Flash user group), I was one of the people presenting on some of the new technology announced at Adobe MAX 2009. I did not attend Adobe MAX, but had been closely following all the announcements and was investigation into some of them on my own. I ended up doing 2 small overview presentations one on Cocomo (which has seen been renamed to Adobe Flash Collaboration Service) and the other on the Text Layout Framework (TLF). Both are really cool technologies that I think have the potential to have big impacts on web applications.

The presentation at FlashInTO went quite well, presenting to somewhere between 20 and 30 people. What is quite interesting is that I posted my presentation up on SlideShare and the following day I was surprised to find out it was up on the front page of SlideShare as one of their featured presentations. Then very quickly a good 1000 people had viewed my small little presentation. It’s currently over 3000 views and even more surprising to me is that if you do a Google search for “Text Layout Framework Flash” my presentation is on the first page of results.

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Since this past July, I’ve been one of the Technical Editors for Wiley Publishing working on a Wrox book Professional Adobe Flex 3. Joseph Balderson (aka JoeFlash) the main force behind the book did an incredible job in assembling a top notch group of writers from the Flex community including: Andrew Trice, Peter Ent, Joe Berkovitz, Tom Sugden, Todd Prekaski, David Hassoun, and Jun Heider.  While I’m obviously bias, I think it’s going to be a really great very in depth Flex book (around 1200 pages worth!), going into some of the more advanced topics that I’ve yet to see cover in any of the Flex books on the market so far.

This is the first time I’ve been involved in a book and it’s been quite the interesting process. I was originally ask by  to contribute some chapters. However, I simply did not have the time and I was unsure if my technical writing skills were up to the task. So I was later offered the job of to be one of the Technical Editors, which I accepted and it’s proven to be quite the fun job.

I often have a large stack of various technical books that I’m making my way through, but it’s one thing to casually read a programming book and such a complete different experience when going through the text to paying very close attention and verifying every little detail. As while I have a good handle on the Flex framework, I’ve often been double checking the documentation to make sure I do not have any wrong assumptions. Especially when it comes to smaller elements from the framework that I haven’t used for projects I’ve worked on. The happy byproduct of this job is that I’m getting to know the Flex framework even better than before.

Now here’s the shameless plug of the book, with links online where you can pre-order it:
Amazon.com link to the book
Amazon.ca link to the book

A couple of months ago Rick from FlashinTO (Toronto’s Flash user group) asked if anyone wanted to do a presentation on Subversion (SVN). I do not consider myself an expert on SVN, but it’s a tool that I’ve used on a regular basis for the past few years, so that I felt that I knew enough to put together an introductory presentation on the topic. So I volunteered to do the SVN presentation for the FlashinTO. Also I had originally learned about SVN years ago thanks to one of the speakers from FITC, whoblogged about why Flash developers should use SVN and provided a great documentation how to get set up up SVN for Flash development. So it was cool to give back to the Flash community, from what I had picked up previously from the Flash community.

Also in the process of creating the presentation, I discovered Adobe’s Version Cue CS3. I had heard of Version Cue before, but had no idea what it was and did not realize it was a version control system. I did some research to provide information in the presentation for the designers in the crowd. Because for designers dealing with images, video and other media files Adobe’s Version Cue would be a better fit for them over SVN.

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Before I start writing new original posts for this blog, I want to link what I’ve written so far that’s out there.

At FITC Toronto 2008, I was invited by FITC be one of their official bloggers to report on the event.

I was proud to see articles I had written get a lot of attention in the Flash community and I felt I wrote some good quality articles. It was very cool to see people react and discuss my postings in the Flash blogsphere.

However, I was very disappointed of the number of articles that I managed to get out. I took notes on every session I attended, but only got 5 articles out, by the end of it. I think I was spending too much time trying to polish my blog postings and should had more brief postings.

Anyways, here’s links to the articles I wrote for FITC Toronto 2008:

• ActionScript 4?? by Colin Moock
• FITC: AIR + Photoshop: What Happens When They Talk? by Dr. Woohoo
• Multi-threading is coming (sort of) to Flash Player 10!
• New Flash Player 10 & Flash CS4 features announced at FITC Toronto!
• Mapping with Flex and AIR by Greg Sadetsky

Here’s 3 videos that didn’t end up in any of my blog postings as showing a demo of the new XFL format that will be used in the upcoming Flash CS4

• FITC – Flash CS4 – XFL demo – Part 1
• FITC – Flash CS4 – XFL demo – Part 2
• FITC – Flash CS4 – XFL demo – Part 3

Finally, as part of reporting, I ended up taking all sorts of pictures, which can be seen here on Flickr.

So my old portfolio website, done in Flash 6 many years ago, is horribly outdated with few working links. Since I don’t have time right now to create a new website, I’ve decided to switch matthewfabb.com over to a blog format.

For anyone still interested in checking out my old portfolio website it can be viewed here.

For those who know me personally and looking for my thoughts on music, movies, graphic novels, or anything else in that nature, you can find me on Facebook here. Focus for this blog will be on my professional career and technical interests in the web.