Well, I for one will continue my love-affair with the Seattle-based chain. Many have often said that there's simply 'too much/too many'. And this may be true. But I can honestly say this: whether I'm in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Vienna, Frankfurt, or even the Netherlands, and I simply want a little taste of home, I can go down to the Starbucks and get just that: a truly familiar taste that guarantees a smile on my face and a warm feeling in my heart. ;) Long Live Starbucks.

Now...I promised some additional pics from Hong Kong. Last night we held an event at the IFC Building in Kowloon and had yet another amazing 'view'. Encased in glass, the venue (a place called, The Box) was tres-chic, and oh so groovy, both at night and during the day. Greg snapped a couple of pics which we quickly stitched together in Photoshop CS3. Take a look...

From the IFC Building in Kowloon, daytime.

And then, night falls...

Delivering the Vision @ the Masters Seminar, Hong Kong, July '08

Lastly, a little out-take from our Korean Press meeting. One of the photographers there snapped this pic at our offices...Audition for our 'new roles' perhaps? LOL

The Masters Audition for 'A Chorus Line' and/or Les Follies Bergeres

From here, we're onto Singapore, so stay tuned for more updates, more CS3, more pics, and more from the CS3 Masters Tour.

Until next time,

Blog on.

The upcoming eSeminar classes are listed here. I'll be covering the ones on creating and burning Blu-Ray discs on the 22nd, and one on adding Production Premium to your Final Cut Workflow on July 29th.

For strongly typed objects, you can implement the mx.rpc.xml.IXMLSchemaInstance interface to provide a QName for the xsiType property to target the subclass to be used during encoding. See: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/rpc/xml/IXMLSchemaInstance.html#xsiType

For anonymous ActionScript Objects, however, you may not know that you can wrap your object in an mx.utils.ObjectProxy instance and set its type property with a QName to achieve the same effect. See: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/utils/ObjectProxy.html#type

Using the following XML Schema as an example...

We may want to provide an Employee instance as a Record's person value, but unless we tell the encoder we have something more than a Person instance, the Employee-specific properties will not be encoded.

To avoid having to create Person or Employee strong types, here's a snippet showing how to create an ObjectProxy wrapper to instruct the encoder to encode an anonymous Object as an Employee:

import mx.utils.object_proxy;
import mx.utils.ObjectProxy;

...

        var emp:Object = {firstName:"John", lastName:"Smith", employeeId:1000};
        var employee:ObjectProxy = new ObjectProxy(emp);
        var employeeType:QName = new QName("urn:MyWebService", "Employee");
        employee.object_proxy::type = employeeType;

Now the encoder should know to include the Employee specific employeeId property:

The source for a complete example is attached as a file to download.

This is your PM after being busted following an all-night meth bender...

Lightroom team member Kelly Castro has been continuing his "Exteriors" project (see the whole collection), photographing people at Adobe & elsewhere.  On Monday he got me into the team's on-site photo studio for a shoot*.  If you're into this style, check out the info that Kelly & Bryan O'Neil Hughes put together on generating killer B&W using Photoshop + Lightroom.  (Kelly also created a color version of my portrait, in which I have the healthy glow of a Barbecue Pringle.)

In other photo news:

• Peep Eddie Murphy's giant head on the interstate.  (I'd like to see versions for Barry Bonds & Ted Kennedy, but I guess it would be redundant.) [Via]
• Don't I know you from the cinematographer's party?  No Country for Raising Arizona juxtaposes scenes from two very different Coen Bros. films. [Via]
• Not just a weird Photoshop job: Chinese cops on Segways (with very tiny guns). [Via]

*These little photo projects tend to turn funky, ranging from foolish to beatific to vainglorious. (Take that, Eddie Murphy.)

I've been wanting this feature in for the longest time... and now it's in the flash player (currently in beta).

Basically now you can create Flash games that go in full screen mode and be able to use certain keys that are often used by games. We had initially prevented keyboard access altogether for security reasons... like phishing... but i guess you can't really phish too much out of arrow keys, space bar, enter, etc.... but you can make some great games this way.

Hope you guys like this new feature :-)