2012 Retrospective

I was very tempted to forgo my usual end-of-the-year rundown with just a big middle finger to end 2012 off… this year was terrible on a number of levels; industry uncertainties around Flash and related tech, growing pains with new technologies and products, a lot of bad news from the community both in people’s personal lives and work, suicides, major illnesses, and far too many national and world tragedies.
2012
It seems that a lot of good stuff actually happened along the way as well though… so here is my portion of that for 2012.

Publications

2427EXPsmI was fortunate to ahave a lot of work published this year. 2 books and 5 video courses. I really need to take it easy on this stuff as it takes up a lot of my time. So much time that I won’t elaborate on them any more. Here they are:

Books Written:
Learning Adobe Edge Animate
Adobe Edge Quickstart Guide

Videos/DVDs:
Edge Animate Intensive
Edge Animate Power Workshop
Adobe Flash Professional CS6: Learn by Video
Getting Started with Flash Professional CS6
Adobe Flash Professional CS6: New Features Workshop

Tech Review:
The Game Jam Survival Guide
Adobe Edge Animate: Classroom in a Book

Music

FVM007_250I had a few music-related projects underway this year. After contributing to February Album Writing Month early on, I took the material produced to create the album blootletshadows under the new project name of shivervein. The idea behind this new project is that it doesn’t have any of the baggage that An Early Morning Letter, Displaced does – so I can express myself in different ways.

I’ve been working on a few other tracks as well – at least one of these will make it onto the upcoming Emergent Collective Two release next year. I’ll be taking submissions of tracks and artwork up until the final hours of 2012 – so if you are considering a contribution… get cracking!!!

Lastly, I did a few remixes for other projects which should also see the light of day sometime in 2013. I haven’t done any remixes in about 10 years so that was quite fun for me.

Gaming

BABBY MUST NEEDS SLEEP!This has been a weird one. Back when I was just learning ActionScript in 1999/2000, many of my small projects were game/goal based works. Fast-forward to 2005 and I found myself teaching a game development course at the university. This was ActionScript based and quite fun… up until this year, this was my last foray into the world of game development. With Adobe focusing runtime engineering on gaming, it made sense for me to get back into things and it’s admittedly been a slow start. One method I’ve used to jump start my learning is to participate in game jams. This has worked out really well for me so long as I don’t have anything else going on during the development window. Hope to continue this in the new year.

Speaking and Posting

Demo requires Flash Player 11.2 or above!Close to 20 major speaking engagements over the past year! This may be too many for me. A lot of time is put into research and testing, authoring examples, getting slides together, making sure the flow is right, final tweaks… it’s a lot of work to prepare a presentation. Perhaps in 2013 I’ll be a little more reserved in this area.

One thing that turned out nicely this year is my ActionScript Quickies series of example posts on new things (and some old things) in the Flash runtimes. They seem to be helpful for others and they are absolutely helpful for myself when getting to grips with new features. I plan to continue this.

What Else?

A ton. Way to much to write about here – so I wont go on. I’ve touched upon the major points that remain with me right now, during this brief recollection.

2013

MAX 2013 is coming... with CATS!Curious to how this year will play out. A bit of uncertainty for me… but I have high hopes. One definite positive is that I will be relocating my office at the university from temporary space and into a renovated academic commons building. A huge upgrade in comfort, convenience, and technology that should occur in February. Also looking forward to MAX 2013 – after not having a MAX in 2012… I’m feeling it. Otherwise, I plan to work on more personal projects and less contract work – though I’ve said the same over the past number of years.

Happy new year, all.

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