I think it's important to optimize the file size of your Flash movies and with the advent of high speed internet preloaders become less and less necessary. However, I still think they are an extremely effective tool in some circumstances.

I am now doing strictly AS3 for my Flash projects(except for updates to legacy work, and select circumstances).  I've also improved me PHP, HTML and CSS chops while at this split role. I still do primarily Flash Development though. It is about a 75/25 split for Flash/Web.

Here are some links to some work I have done over the last few months, some is through my employment at Venture some is stuff I have done on my own time.

• Call Of The Tundra - This is a contest site done for Toyota's "Call of The Tundra" campaign. It was a pretty tight timeline, but overall a very fun build. I used the APE physics engine for certain aspects(mostly the game) which was very interesting. I also used a utility class that I wrote a while ago for the parallax scrolling effect.
• Mahogany Living - This is a site for a community being built by Hopewell Communities . It is a content managed site. I didn't really do any Flash development on this one but I like to get my hands dirty in some PHP and CSS once and a while.
• LCBO Holiday Microsite - This site was done to showcase gift ideas from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. It is a small site with some cool features. I did the majority of the Flash Development with some contributions from another Flash Developer. All content is manageable by the client and there is a French version.
• LCBO 2008 Beer Expo - This is another microsite done for LCBO to showcase beers from around the world. It is probably my last AS2 project and was pretty fun to work on. I did deep-linking on this site but in the end it was loaded in a pop-up so the deep-linking was not neccessary.

There is some other stuff but these are the bigger ones I have built in the last few months.

InVigor Microsite:
I did the banner on the home page which creates shows how quickly and problem-free their hybrid seeds grow. This banner was also re-worked to be used in a Google adwords campaign. I also created a standalone video player as well as a video player that toggles between 4 different videos on the "Growers Talk" page.

Infinity Microsite:
The Infinity site is another Microsite that uses a similar video player setup and also has an "FMA" to grab attention towards the product and its features.

Herbicide Resistance:
For the Herbicide Resistance site I created an educational Flash "FMA" that gives a brief overview of "Herbicide Resistance" and a possible solution.

There are a few other items launching soon, so stay tuned!

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I created a banner for a site a month or 2 ago and the company decided they wanted to re-work it for their AdWords campaign, so a designer here at work used the class I built to re-build the ad in a bunch of AdWords sizes. All seemed peachy... Then upon uploading the ads our media person was given the error "Encountered flash error - ad cannot have random numbers".

We contacted their customer support via phone and the only reason they could give us was that "it is possible that random numbers can be used maliciously". They would not give us anymore information beyond that. I really do not see how a random number can be used maliciously other than calling a random script, but AdWords already throws an error for calling outside scripts.

I suppose I could generate out a list of random numbers and use them in an array as follows:

 
var _counter:Number = -1;
 
var _random:Array = [
 
0.404158900026232,
 
0.717061429284513,
 
0.776794651523232,
 
0.924381226301193,
 
0.349322804249823,
 
0.271397457458079,
 
0.840603074524552
 
];
 
function randomNumber():Number {
 
 _counter++;
 
 return _random[_counter];
 
}

Theoretically I should be able to just do a find and replace of Math.random() with randomNumber() . It won't be different every time but at least I should be able to maintain the "random" look of how the items are positioned.

This post on Kirupa has been an amazing resource for the Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 migration.
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=223798

This AS2 to AS3 migration cheat sheet helps a fair amount as well:
http://actionscriptcheatsheet.com/blog/quick-referencecheatsheet-for-actionscript-20/

So far the hardest part of it all, is creating COLLADA models to import into it. I did a tiny bit of 3D work using 3D Studio Max while I was at SAIT, but I no longer have access to that program so I am using Blender which is free and very cool but also has a steep learning curve. Most of my experiments so far have just involved using basic primitives like spheres, cubes and cones. Hopefully I'll have some examples to post up here soon!

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