So there is a new publishing house out there, which isn't necessarily so bad in itself. But it's a good idea to know who you are writing for, just in case you get screwed over. And being screwed over isn't too tough, quite honestly, no matter what industry or publisher you are working for. So let's take a look at Packt Publishing, started earlier this year.
Some of you might remember that we posted a lot of news here when Wrox/Friends of ED and so forth went down. There were many stories about why Peer (who owned it all) went down, but the general gist of the story is hundreds of authors lost millions of dollars (yep) in advances, royalties, and reserves. That's the money that they hold against your royalties in case books get returned. It is SUPPOSED to be held in trust no matter what, but I guess the guys who ran it spent it. Or someone did. I have reserves for several books vanished into someone else's pocket/business, while someone else currently sells those books. No, I'm not bitter.
A good reason why we all got screwed over is becuase the guys who ran Peer messed it up, and while there are many posts/blogs out there about how it happened there's no point in dredging that up here. BUT GUESS WHAT! The Peer guys who put Wrox down in flames are running Packt Publishing! Not two months after we lost all that money, they started yet another publishing house perhaps with all that money they musta had and did not pay us with. OK, maybe not - but they had something and tons of us were left suffering (me, literally).
Yeah, while I was eating good ol pasta and process cheese and got fat because I lost all my money from MONTHS OF WORK slaving away for their company for absolutely next to nothing (note: much less than minimum wage), they went and started up a new one called Packt Publishing. I wish you guys (and any author that dare work for the publishing house) and Packt the best of luck.
News Source:
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.htm#pp
The Video Exporter has been updated due to issues with it and Media Components. Has 2 Pass. How sweet is that.
More info and the download found here:
Video Update 1.2 for Flash MX Professional 2004.
There's this thing that's great for the mac, called Konfabulator. No commercial interest in this thing, just thought it was cool, and thought Mac Flash developers might be interested. You can develop Mac apps that go on the desktop. Games, system utilities, news feed based apps, calendars, all kinds of "widgets". Essentially this thing is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OSX. But the cool thing is it has minesweeper, which is pretty cool in itself. Oh, and battleship and a barcode clock. I mean that's just plain cool.
Check out the site, and things here. It isn't free, but it looks like it could be worth the $25.
The sixth issue of ventilate.ca [ ventilate.ca ] has hit the global news stand. Featured in issue six:
Nakd.tv - motion graphics - Nando + Linna Costa
Bsimple - conceptual photography - Misha Gordin
Shilo Design - motion graphics
FWA - the man behind FWA and wellvetted - Rob Ford
Untitled - Toronto Illustrator - Errol Richardson
PRMTHN - Toronto designer - Humza Ijaz
ISO50 - graphic design - Scott Hansen
Hi-Res! - video interview with Florian Schmitt
Flash MX 2004 introduced the XPathAPI class which allows you to do simple XPath searches within Flash. This can be very useful for searching XML packets based on node names and attribute values.
In order to use XPath searches within Flash you first need to include the XPathAPI class into your Flash library by including the DataBindingClass if it hasn't been included already. If you've already set up bindings this class may have been included automatically, otherwise you'll need to select the class from the common libraries by selecting Window > Other Panels > Common Libraries > Classes. From the Classes.fla library panel you can simply drag a copy of the DataBindingClasses component into your current Flash document's library. Now you can import the class by typing "import mx.xpath.XPathAPI;" or by using the classes fully qualified name when accessing its methods by prefixing the class' methods with mx.xpath.XPathAPI.<method_name>".
The XPath class has two methods; selectNodeList and selectSingleNode. The selectNodeList method returns an array of XML nodes matching the XPath expression, whereas the selectSingleNode returns only the first matching node.
You can see an example of the XPath API in ActionScript below, before you can test the movie you have to make sre that you have a copy of the DataBindingClasses component in your movie's library by dragging it from Common Libraries > Classes into your current Flash movie's library.
import mx.xpath.XPathAPI;
var rssfeed_xml = new XML();
rssfeed_xml.ignoreWhite = true;
rssfeed_xml.load("http://flash-mx.com/news/rdf_syndicate.cfm");
rssfeed_xml.onLoad = function(success) {
if (success) {
var titlePath:String = "/rdf:RDF/item/title";
title_array = mx.xpath.XPathAPI.selectNodeList(this.firstChild, titlePath);
for (var i = 0; i<title_array.length; i++) {
trace(title_array[i].firstChild.nodeValue);
}
} else {
trace("error loading XML");
}
};
Special thanks to Nate Weiss for helping me debug this. More information about XPath and using it within your Flash applications can be found in Nate's latest book, Flash MX Professional 2004 for Server Geeks.