Flashing the Iron
So I’ve agreed to take part in the LA Flash User Group’s second Iron Flash competition…to defend my title from the first event. I don’t have the highest of expectations at my chances, as I will be flying back from New York that afternoon, showering, then driving up to Venice to compete, and my internal clock might still be set three hours ahead. Yet I do have one advantage over my formidable competition: I have done this before.
If you should ever find yourself competing in an Iron Flash competition, following are my secrets to success (note to my formidable competition: you can go ahead and do the opposite of everything listed here):
• Spend 15 minutes sampling the supplied materials; don’t view everything
• Spend 15 minutes sketching ideas/layouts on paper
• Go with the first-best idea you have; don’t second-guess yourself…you don’t have time (after all, you’ve just spent half an hour and haven’t even touched Flash yet)
• Know your keyboard shortcuts (hopefully, you already know these by this time); especially the text editing shortcuts (skipping around words, blocks, copying, pasting, etc.)
• Work on a computer that’s familiar to you (okay, so I don’t even follow this guideline, as I had to borrow LA Flasher Stephanie’s PowerBook last time, and I’ll be bringing my wife’s PB to compete this time)
• Stay focused on your overall goal (and time limit), but not at the expense of details; details elevate your work; the judges commented last time on my dynamically resizing, rounded-corner content box (this was in the days before 9-slice scaling), the staggered debuting of buttons (rather than all at once), and incorporation of sound
• Write your ActionScript as quickly as possible; worry more about the end result than about the perceived quality of your code; I was scored lower than my opponent for the relative “AS2-ness” of my code, but I won overall because I wrote more, faster, and was able to cram in features and details
• Above all, have fun; this is not worth doing otherwise; do something outside your comfort zone, something different