Doing freelancing it seems like half of the work is not the freelancing. It’s administration, accounting, management etc…

I got tired of spending my time doing those types of things and started looking for solutions, I quickly found the FREE CreativePro Office by Jeff Denton at UpStart Productions. It has already made my freelance life easier! Since it is free, I wanted to put out this review as a thank you to Jeff!

The site claims:

CreativePro Office is the most complete set of online office management tools you’re likely to find at any price – and it’s completely free! Manage your team, clients, projects, invoices, events and quotes (coming soon) from one web-based application.

CreativePro Office is well suited for both independent professionals and small teams of graphic designers, programmers and web developers.

I’ve been doing small freelance web design jobs on the side since I was in school, but noticed that sometimes I spent seemingly as much time with administration as I did designing. Since I was always doing small things on the side, it never seemed important to be organized, but I can assure you that being organized is much easier than getting organized . But CreativePro Office seems to be exactly what I need, something better than email threads and spreadsheets to keep track of hours, rates, tasks, clients, projects and bills! I was up and running in minutes and already have a good understanding of how to manage myself better, I’ve even sent some invoices! It is much more professional than what I’ve been doing (keeping the tab documented on post it notes). I have learned a lot about my process through freelancing and I’m trying to incorporate that into a more transparent, organized and overall more professional process now. It can’t do anything but good for the client experience, and help me keep track of my tasks and hours without having to use my own clock and calculator. =)

I even wrote to Jeff personally to thank him for the great work he’s done and the service he is providing. He says there are many new features coming soon that he is very excited about. He says CPO 2.0 “will include features that are being requested most frequently!” Their website says CPO has amassed 15312 users, 14213 projects & $48,207,004.99 invoiced

CreativePro Office seems pretty flexible, and I can imagine a number of different business types utilizing it. So if you are wanting to focus more on actual work and not the other half, go check it out!

Keith Peter‘s Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

Can I just say WOW! Being a student of art and animation before turning to the flash world, I love how Keith is able to explain programming in terms that are very easy to understand and follow. I’ve been a huge fan of his since I first peeked at Flash Math Creativity and Flash Math Creativity, Second Edition. I then followed to his bit-101 site and devoured his tutorials there: gravity, easing, elasticity, etc…

This book helps me transition all those techniques I’ve incorporated into my practices from actionscript 2 to actionscript 3. He also teaches me more about object oriented programming with the same simplicity he explained gravity years ago. It’s a great read and an essential part of my collection. I could safely say that I’ve learned more (at least as much as) from Keith’s work than anyone else in the industry. Anything from him always make sense and inspires my code and projects to be better. So go get his book to support him!

Also, friends of ed makes available the source code that goes with the text here.

Thanks Keith — and keep up the great work!

StomperNet has been a ‘buzz’.

After Andy’s ‘Mea Culpa‘ why wouldn’t it be…

But this is so much better and bigger, learning many lessons from the last launch – StomperNet strikes again!

Teamed up with Paul Lemberg a new product called FormulaFIVE (F5 for short).

Just launched a video to excite the industry!
So check out stomperf5.com now!

Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser’s Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner’s Guide.

This book is published by O’Reilly and is part of the Adobe Developer Library.

This book was a great way for me to move into as3. I’m coming from a visual design background with little formal programming training, to know more of my background check my about page. Being mostly self taught, I found myself learning about basic programming skills with this book. This book helped me catch up to the as3 world and I began doing some really cool things in flash once I had a base for understanding all the differences and new things in as3.

I really enjoyed the visual aspects of this book as well. Many of the diagrams and illustrations have the hand drawn look. Like so:




I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand actionscript and actionscrip3 more specifically. It’s a great helper at migrating from as2 to as3. On the cover, it claims to teach “everything needed for non-traditional programmers–web designers, GUI-based Flash developers, those new to Actionscript, visual learners–to understand how Actionscript works and how to use it in everyday projects.” I would agree with that whole-heartedly. All I can say is that after reading it and working through some of the samples included, I better understand AS3 and am confident that through the foundation it has helped me lay I will soon become an actionscript ninja.

Thanks Ryan and Zevan!

I’ve been thinking about this blog and what kind of content I want to be creating for the world and yes, you. I really enjoy creating working tutorials and open source project or components available to download and learn from. I make these available so that you are able to pick it apart and hopefully learn something from it. And in the best of scenarios it helps you solve some problem in one of your own projects, or you contact me and are able to teach me a better way I could have done it (my personal favorite). There are no shortcuts to this kind of stuff. Learning is a process, and the way I learn (especially when it’s related to flash) is to get my hands on something that already works and pick it apart. So that’s what I try to provide in my “tutorials”- I use the term loosely because, they aren’t really walkthroughs per say, but more working examples for you to look into and see how it has to (or at least could) fit together and work. I have really enjoyed the direction I’ve gone with the blog, and to get to my point…

I have also learned a lot of what I know from books. Reading books and understanding the whys to all the ways things are done in actionscript has helped me a lot. It may have been an epiphany, but I thought – why not share the ones that have made the biggest support for me, or at least list the books that sit the closest to my keyboard when I am working through a project.

So books are good. I will be continuing with my tutorials and open source working examples and put up as much code as I can, but I want to also talk about where I learn some of the things I learn.

So if you follow the blog, thanks! You’ll start to see a larger variety in posts. Dare I put this in writing but I’m also trying to increase the frequency of posts. I’ve been pretty good at getting at least one post a week, so I’ll try to bump it up to at least 1 and a half posts a week Go ahead and subscribe to my feed if you want to be sure not to miss any of them, and please jump back to the posts when it’s interesting and let me know, comment with any books that have helped you better understand you specialty.