Uncategorized on richardleggett.com

Postman Collection to HTML (node script)

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 11:10:33 +0000

If you use the excellent Postman for testing and developing your APIs (and if you don’t yet, please give it a try!) you may find this little node script helpful when generating documentation.

It simply converts your downloaded Postman collection file to HTML (with tables) for inserting into documentation or sharing with a 3rd party developer. The Postman collection is perfect for sharing with developers as it remains close to “live documentation”, but sometimes you need a more readable form.

Dynamic Application Cache Manifest for PHP

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:29:14 +0000

Earlier today Paulo Fierro blogged an example of how to build a dynamic application cache manifest for HTML5 web apps using Ruby.

A cache manifest is a text file that browsers look for in order to determine which files to store locally on the device, this lets you open the site/app offline, great for web apps (on iOS bookmarking a site to the home screen also let’s you specify an icon and removes browser chrome). Creating a cache manifest dynamically means that you don’t have to worry about modifying a text file every time you add or remove a file from the app.

Chrome Web Store: Why Online Apps?

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:48:12 +0000

Yesterday Google unveiled the Chrome Web Store. In a nutshell this is an App Store for the Chrome browser and a critical component in the upcoming Chrome OS. The Chrome browser is found on all major desktop operating systems, on the enormous numbers of Android phones and tablets, and the new TVs and set top boxes from companies like Sony, Logitech and reportedly the biggest of them all, Samsung. Chrome OS is a desktop operating system replacement designed to operate entirely in the cloud, using web technologies, with almost negligible startup times for the instant-on, always connected generation. Chrome touts automatic synchronisation of everything from bookmarks, to auto-fill info and passwords, and preferences.

ASDoc (via ANT) When Using Conditional Compilation

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:43:54 +0000

This relates to using ASDoc to generate documentation for a Flex or AIR project that uses conditional compilation (read more and see tip at end).

Conditional Compilation

Just for some background, the Flex compiler supports what is known as conditional compilation. This allows you to set one or more constants via a compiler flag which is then made accessible from anywhere in your code. This may be a boolean, a string, a number and so on. Within your code you can read this value and switch between using certain methods, or execute blocks of code depending on the value it contains.

EncryptedLocalStore processErrorCode() in AIR

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:54:24 +0000

I’ve just migrated from an old MacBook Pro to a new one using Apple’s Migration Assistant. I then thought it’d be a great idea to perform some manual cleanup and accidentally deleted a keychain (in KeyChain Access) which was used by an AIR app I am currently developing.

After doing this I started getting the following error when running my app, as soon as it accessed EncryptedLocalStore:

Error: general internal error<br></br> at flash.data::EncryptedLocalStore$/processErrorCode()<br></br> at flash.data::EncryptedLocalStore$/getItem()

Bullet Point Characters Incorrect for Word Documents in OpenOffice Mac

Sun, 17 May 2009 16:00:53 +0000

Just a very small post here because I had trouble finding a solution myself. Users of OpenOffice for the Mac may experience odd-looking bullet point characters when opening and saving MS Word .doc files. The character looks like a W inside a box.

Anyway, the problem is due to MS Office not encoding the character correctly when saving the file, but the temporary solution is to use OpenOffice’s Font Replacement feature (see Preferences), to replace “Symbol” with “OpenSymbol”.

Filtering Hierachical Data in Flex using ITreeDataDescriptor

Mon, 11 May 2009 21:27:07 +0000

This post describes how to filter data for use with any component that displays hierarchical data, such as the Tree, AdvancedDataGrid, or your own custom component. For the purpose of the post I’ll just consider the Tree, but the same technique applies to the others.

Background

Suppose I have constructed a “Library” of Folder and Leaf nodes and I want to display that in a Tree. Each Folder node has an ArrayCollection called “children” which contains any child Folders and/or Leaf nodes.

Loading SWFs into AIR 1.5.X and LoaderInfo.sharedEvents

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:05:38 +0000

Today I had a bit of a nightmare with regards to loading SWFs into AIR. Specifically, I am loading my SWFs from somewhere inside app-storage://, and those SWFs use Flash CS4 UI components. These components extend UIComponent which accesses the stage object. When you attempt to load and add this child SWF to the display list of your AIR app, it generates a SecurityErrorEvent which stops things, dead.

The AIR app owns the stage object, there is only one Stage instance, and depending on what security sandbox the content SWF is loaded into, the child SWF is not allowed access to that stage because it could run amok.

Flex Builder is Free to Students

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:05:54 +0000

Via Andrew Shorten, Flex Builder Professional is free to students. You can sign up for a copy here.

Edit: Also free to those unemployed, limited time only on this one I would think.

Embedding Fonts In Flex – Tip

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:01:59 +0000

Short and sweet, if you want to know the Unicode ranges for various glyphs, such as Latin 1, Cyrillic and so on, open up flash-unicode-table.xml from your “Flex SDK/frameworks/” directory.

You’ll find everything listed, and it’s a good way to save on font size.

Characters Not Embedding With Flex DefineFont4

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:22:09 +0000

In a nutshell: Don’t try to use Windows TTF files when embedding fonts in Flex on OSX, possibly a CFF thing.

Long version: I had a strange problem with font embedding in Flex Gumbo on OS X when trying to embed the following character ranges (using CFF):

																// numerals, full stop, lower, upper, punctuation, basic latin
[Embed(source='ttf/arial.ttf', fontFamily='Arial', unicodeRange='U+0030-U+0039,   U+002E,   U+0041-U+005A, U+0061-U+007A,   U+0020-U+002F,U+0030-U+0039,U+003A-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A,U+005B-U+0060,U+0061-U+007A,U+007B-U+007E', cff='true')]
public static var Arial:Class;

The first range (U+0030-U+0039) contains the numerals 0 through 9, but they were not being embedded in the resultant SWF. The TTF font I was using was Arial (regular) from my XP machine, this is because on a Mac you get a totally opaque “suitcase” file (dfont) for the whole family.

Flash Player 10 Coming to Mobile (en-mass)

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:13:44 +0000

Back in October 2007 I wrote a post entitled “Does Flash Lite Have a Future?” which is one of my most popular posts and it sparked some interesting comments. The main argument I had for this wasn’t that Flash Lite was going down the pan, it was simply that we didn’t need it because the full Flash Player would be suitable for mobile due to touch-screen, higher powered mobile devices and lower power requirements for our applications anyway (the argument here is that we only use a tiny percentage of the CPU for most applications now unlike before).

Adobe Releases Distributable Flash Lite 3.1 Player

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:44:19 +0000

A thorn in the side of Flash Lite has been removed. Today Adobe has released a developer redistributable version of the Flash Lite 3.1 player along with the packager tool. This greatly improves the situation of not knowing whether someone has the player, and being helpless to get them it if they haven’t.

Upgrading Flex 3/AIR Projects to Gumbo/Flex 4

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:52:39 +0000

This article is about creating Flex Gumbo (Flex 4) application that run in either Flash Player 10, or AIR 1.5. I also describe how to upgrade an existing FP9/AIR 1.0 application to use the new SDK. In my case I also had to upgrade a Flex Library project so that’s also covered.

Word of warning: before you jump in please refer to the section entitled “Problem: Losing Syntax Highlighting in Script Tag” near the end. As this could affect you if you make use of Script tags rather than the “code-behind” technique (I now use the former strategy to save on files and promote simpler View classes).

Two AIR Applications Reviewed – GoAir and LiveQuotes

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:16:52 +0000

I’ve just tested out a couple of new AIR applications using PureMVC from SourceBits, they’ve built up quite a few interesting apps in their portfolio, the two new ones being GoAir and Live Quotes.

GoAir is an AIR application designed to provide a desktop Gmail experience, and offline mail support (including sending email when offline, and having it actually send when it detects a connection). This one caught my eye because I also wrote an AS3 Pop3 library and hooked it up to Gmail some time ago, alas mine did not have SMTP so you couldn’t send, and the UI was basic, this one has full SMTP/POP support so you can send and receive.

Getting Rid of If/Switch

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:33:39 +0000

At my last job I met a software architect who, for a Flash project, jumped in and learned ActionScript in what seemed like a few hours so he could work on the domain logic for a complex application. For background, I believe he primarily worked with .NET but this is about portable skills.

Suffice to say he was indeed an extremely good coder and I’m grateful he spent some time passing on a few tips and tricks that apply to all languages, and some nice demonstrations using Haskell, ActionScript and of course C#. One such tip was the use of “pure functions” for example, which is always in the back of my mind now. (As a side note, I think learning a very different language like Haskell or in my case Ruby is a great way of keeping your mind open and it will help with your “daily” language).

OS X Secret Spotlight/Search Syntax

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:52:09 +0000

I got a tip from my friend Alex Peretti regarding the built in search in OSX. Skip to the end if you are familiar with the default search pains.

I couldn’t understand why, when you start typing in the search box inside any folder’s Finder window, it defaults to searching inside files of the entire computer for matching text, instead of looking at filenames inside the current folder. That means every time I search for something I have to change the settings (they aren’t stored) because 99% of my searches seem to bring up some wordy Nietzsche e-book instead of what I’m looking for.

Feed Your Mac

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:11:57 +0000

It’s that time of year again. “Give good food to your Mac” is back with another set of software to choose from. The twist is the more you buy, the cheaper it gets, literally. Choose 3 apps, save 30%, 4 gets you 40% but 5+ gets you 50% off. It’s time limited, so 10 days to go.

Last year I purchased 10 pieces of software for the price of the 1 piece I actually wanted (Unity 3D). In that package I also got an impressive casual 3D modeler, Cheetah 3D. It won’t replace Maya or MAX, but for a lot of tasks it’s perfect. Yes some of the apps on there are a little gimmicky, some of them you may never use, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re getting the other apps for free (in my case anyway).

Xuinet Mobile Flash Competition – $10,000 prize

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:48:53 +0000

Just got news from the guys at Xuinet that they’re running a big competition with a cash prizes totaling $10,000. You need to submit SWFs via email by November 3rd 2008 and multiple entries are allowed. Looks like a good opportunity to re-purpose your Flash Lite 2 content.

Prize categories include:

Blogs and Social Networks
Games
Images/slide-shows
Sports (scores, trivia, fantasy league)
On-the-go (travel, weather, news, etc.)

I must admit I haven’t seen Xuinet before. It appears to be a distribution platform for Flash mobile applications. By the looks of it the files are converted into a “Xui” which runs Flash 7 SWFs in a custom player on Windows Mobile devices. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s tried out the SDK to confirm the implementation details.

Unity (3D) Developer Magazine – Review

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:19:49 +0000

Over the weekend I received a copy of the first issue of Unity Developer Magazine, thanks to Charles Hinshaw. I had high hopes for this magazine, largely because Unity has an incredibly vibrant community of developers and artists. I was not at all disappointed.

The magazine contains a variety of features, including an in depth look at a big budget Edutainment game “Wolfquest”, incredible artwork created in Unity itself, an illustrated introduction to vectors, A* Pathfinding, creating dashboard widgets and a look at some of the hottest Unity productions from a selection of studios and independents.

CalDAV Support Added to Google Calendar

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:29:13 +0000

I’ve been using Google Docs and Reader for a long time now. Reader is the only RSS aggregator that lets me whizz through hundreds of feeds fast enough to keep up to date and from various devices (tried feedburner and newsgator). Docs made it easy to share any document, presentation, todo list with a friend in 2 clicks, and now Docs and Reader have offline support (Google Gears) the worry about not having net access at any point is gone.

[OT] Charity 10k Run – Shout out for Sponsors

Sat, 10 May 2008 20:19:39 +0000

UPDATE: It was raining cats and dogs but it didn’t seem to put people off. I ended up getting 45 mins 5 seconds so I’m quite happy with that and really keen to do another one soon!

On the 26th of May I’ll be running the Bupa London 10,000 charity event beginning and ending in St James Park, London. This is just a shout out to say I’ve set up a sponsorship page, so if you know me, you’ve found this blog useful in the past, or you just feel like helping a good cause please click the link below and donate anything you can.

Unity 3D Coming to iPhone

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:26:36 +0000

I’m a big fan of Unity3D, great for cross-platform 3D games. So I was glad to find out from my colleague James that Unity is coming to iPhone, a platform I have also invested a good amount of my time in recently.

Typically Flash has formed the basis of my work over the last 7 or 8 years, but I’m finding now that the technologies are all so similar, it’s just syntax (and more often than not those are nigh-on the same). We are also more able to apply our learnings in say Papervision, to OpenGL ES for iPhone or Unity without too much of a learning curve, and more importantly, we have many more options for spreading our ideas across a wide variety of media without incurring the enormous costs that multi-skilling in those areas could have meant before.

Adobe Poker Tournament

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:15:45 +0000

Coder?… Poker player?… If so then get down to the Adobe sponsored poker tournament on the 1st of November in London. I’m gutted I won’t be able to make it myself as I’m a hold’em fan but the timing is off. It looks like it will be a great event, and Sean McSharry has even put up a website for it, where you can register for the event and soon be able to check out the prizes on offer. But watch out for Andy Hood, he can be a mean player!

Apple Selling 1 in 6 Laptops

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:04:23 +0000

“You do computers don’t you?”. That’s the phrase I and no doubt many of you have heard from family members or friends of the family over the last however-many years. Any time anyone bought a new computer, had computer problems, setup a new WiFi router (what am I up to now, 20?), or even problems with a VCR it was my job to fix it because “I do computers”. Let me tell you, for a cup of tea and a few biscuits the daily rate you are missing out on fades into insignificance.

Join the Team at AKQA London/SF/DC/NY

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:55:27 +0000

Update:

Just a quick update to say that we are also recruiting for New York, San Fran and DC, so if you are interested please feel free to get in touch via the email to the right.

(original post as follows…)

Some good news, we have a lot of exciting projects coming up and are currently looking to expand the team some more with fresh talent. So if you are interested in working for clients such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Fiat and XBox as part of a great team please read on.

Join the Team at AKQA London

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:59:54 +0000

Our team is known as CRD (Creative Research and Development) and we use technologies including Flash, Flex, AIR, Silverlight and WPF on a daily basis as well as real-world pieces for integrated campaigns and tacticals. Anything cutting edge, we’ll be the ones to use it. Feel free to check out the latest work over at AKQA.com and drop me a mail at the address over on the right.

Review of Buzzword Beta

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 05:48:36 +0000

I’ve had access to Buzzword for a while now, so I think it’s just about time for a review. First of all thanks to the guys at Virtual Ubiquity for the invite and the permission to post this.

Disclaimer: This post speaks only of the preview version of Buzzword, so things may have already been added that might be considered missing at present and it doesn’t reflect the final product.

I think the easiest way to do this is to break things down into some topics to see how it measures up and also what I like about it. But first, a screenshot (click to view fullsize).

New Review of Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices Book

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 07:03:56 +0000

Thanks to Jesse over at ActionScript.org, another review has been posted of our book Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED). Great review thanks indeed to the author, Nathan Daniel.

Read the review here.

AIR (Apollo) Derby – Open to the World!

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:16:50 +0000

This doesn’t usually happen. The AIR derby is open to people all over the world. So if you are a fellow Brit, or European, have a good look at the prizes.

Just about perfect if you ask me, the perfect developer setup, headed up by the insane 8 Core Mac Pro (you can’t even break these things into a sweat), as well as a $100,000 travel certificate, I could really use that with all the holiday time I’ve accumulated working too hard 😉

Google Gears on Google Reader

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:11:08 +0000

I use Google Reader along with the Firefox notifier plugin extensively. It’s one of the best RSS aggregators I’ve ever used, not because it is the slickest in terms of the UI, but because it does its job pretty well and fits in nicely with how I browse the web (unobtrusive, integrates well with Firefox and so on).

I clicked on the Firefox notifier for it today and when the page opened I was presented with the soon to be familiar request to use Google Gears for offline storage.

BBC Silverlight App – Demo’d at MIX

Wed, 02 May 2007 16:25:12 +0000

Just watched the video of the BBC Silverlight app we created being presented at the day 2 keynote for MIX 07. There’s been a lot of traffic in the last couple of days with regards to Flash/Silverlight etc, and I’m not going to get into any of that here. The feature-sets and SDKs/players for the two products are out there for you to decide yourself as a professional whether it suits your needs. I just enjoy working at a place that throws so many new challenges my way, keeps things exciting!

Amiga Releasing Two New Computers

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 04:25:14 +0000

I know there are a lot of Amiga fans out there with you Flashers (that includes you Ralph), so imagine the suprise when I read today that Amiga are releasing a budget and a high-end computer using the PowerPC architecture and running AmigaOS4.

I’d like to say I’m going to get one, but let’s just have a little play first and see how it feels. 🙂

Read the press release.

New TED Site

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:38:21 +0000

I’m a huge fan of TED talks. If you read New Scientist or Scientific American and you’ve never seen a TED talk you may be missing out as the topics covered are generally very similar. And if you don’t, you’re still missing out! You may have seen the now famous multi-touch display, first demo’d (I do believe) at TED.

TED talks are on a variety of topics ranging from “Is there a God?” and “What makes us happy?”, and their new website reflects on these themes with a nice new Flash theme-based visualisation of the (now over) 100 talks, along with some other great new features.

AJAX Exploit

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:57:55 +0000

Just got sent this by Rick Williams…

Security researchers have found what they say is an entirely new kind of web-based attack, and it only targets the Ajax applications so beloved of the ‘Web 2.0’ movement.

Vulnerable frameworks include: Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (aka. Atlas), XAJAX and Google Web Toolkit, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, Moo.fx, jQuery, Yahoo! UI, Rico, and MochiKit.

Read the full story here.

Adobe Viral: What Is In the Box?

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:31:26 +0000

Adobe rocks 🙂 Everyone has a plan, of course, but I will get the box by any means!

WhatIsInTheBox.co.uk

Nice 3D box on the website too.

Adobe Seminar Feedback – (Curse of WiFi)

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:17:37 +0000

To all of those that just joined us in the Adobe Seminar, I must apologize for losing connection 3 times, I can’t remember the last time I lost connection in my house, and I haven’t lost it since, but for those 20 minutes it was cursed. Also note to self, Dual Screen on Windows means issues.

What we are going to do however is record the whole thing for you to play back at your leisure, the slides and source are up in the forums of http://www.flashmobilebook.com (at the bottom), for you to get familiar with the code, and I’ll post on here as well as the Adobe Seminar web page as soon as we have the full recording, hopefully this time with Weyert in there for completeness.

Adobe Seminar (“3 Briefs”) Feb 07 – Source code

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:23:18 +0000

I’m just uploading the source code for part 2 of the “3 Briefs” Adobe Seminar which is taking place today 3PM EST (8PM GMT) Feb 28th, 2007.

Download them from here.

Slides are also included. The FLA requires the AS2 classes that ship with SUSHI Multi-user server (free version available).

Link to original post.

Flash Lite 2 – Online Seminar – Feb 28

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:23:31 +0000

Please join us in an online seminar at the end of this month (Feb 28th). Scott Janousek, Weyert de Boer and myself will be covering topics from our book Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED).

The seminar will be broken into 3, with questions at the end and a raffle with some great prizes. Topics will include:

Part 1: Cool Flash Lite™ Wallpaper and Screen saver content – Scott Janousek
Join me as we do a quick overview on how to design, develop, and deploy cool wallpaper and screen savers for the latest devices supporting these Flash Lite multimedia content types. Note: We’ll cover Nokia Series 40 and Series 60 devices in particular.

Get 23% off Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices!

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:59:21 +0000

Bookpool are doing a nice deal where you can get 23% off Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices.

You can find out more info here (click the book cover on the right of this blog to visit the book’s website).

Windows Vista Emulated in WPF/E

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 03:28:14 +0000

Apart from the speed here (it’s very slow). This is a very impressive emulation, showing images, videos, text and search works too. Click through the icons to see the app. Knowing that this would have been very difficult to do using JavaScript as it currently does, my hat goes off to whoever made this (via Mike Harsh).

http://www.vista.si/main.htm

Plugin for windows

Plugin for mac

Flash Lite Book – Free Chapter No. 2 – Application Development

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:29:44 +0000

I’ve just been informed we have another free full chapter from Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (FoED) online on Adobe DevNet. This one is on Application Development using Flash Lite. If you are new to Flash or coding with ActionScript, I’d suggest first reading chapters 2 and 3 which cover in depth the nitty gritty of Flash Lite 1.1 – 2.1 and a primer on ActionScript 2.0 to boot.

Read the article and download the chapter.

“Microsoft HTML Viewer” plugin – for Internet Explorer?

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:55:20 +0000

There used to be a time when everything tech wasn’t so “meta”, and things (mostly) worked in the way they were designed.

Whilst browsing the web just now using Internet Explorer 7 (normally I use Firefox 2), I get the following request for an ActiveX control to be installed:

This website wants to run the following add-on: ‘Microsoft HTML Viewer’ from ‘Microsoft Corporation’

(Click pic to enlarge)

Flash Mobile Book – Free Sample Chapter (Game Programming)

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:11:42 +0000

Now that the site is live for our book on Flash Lite (thanks to Scott) I’d also like to take the chance to point you to one of the chapters I wrote which is online for free download, available immediately:

Visit the page (PDF on the right)

This chapter contains a variety of concepts involved with game programming on limited devices; including math, physics, collision detection, keypad input, graphics and sound.

Flash on the Beach Flash Lite Guide

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 07:42:18 +0000

I’m pleased to finally announce the Flash Lite Pocket Guide for Flash on the Beach 2006. I had some problems embedding so many images and a large amount of XML parsing required for something like an event guide in Flash Lite 2, the RAM limitation is something you never totally get used to, but on the flip side I believe that limitations can lead to happiness. There are several tricks and tips required to get this working well, but after some effort here we have it:

Flash Lite Contest

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:08:08 +0000

Take part in a Flash Lite (and J2ME) contest courtesy of the Mobile & Devices Adobe User Group of Rome and Jamba…

Flashlite category:
• 1st prize: Flash Studio 8
• 2nd prize: IRiver 2G
• 3rd: 3 O’Rilley Books

J2ME Category:
• 1st prize: Nokia N93
• 2nd prize: IRiver 2G
• 3rd prize: 3 O’Rilley Books

Enter the contest here

FlashFoward Slides and Source

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:41:10 +0000

Just to announce I’ve uploaded my FlashFoward Austin 2006 slides and source.

You can download the zip here.

As soon as time allows it… a mini-tutorial that goes a little more in depth as to how the multi-user example works and how you can set up SUSHI on your machine (the docs that come with it are great though, so get downloading!

In the meantime, to enable HTTP support in SUSHI, you need to follow the instructions supplied with the SUSHI manual, for example, all I had to do was uncomment this line in my Apache httpd.conf config file:

Presenting at Flash on the Beach, Brighton

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 09:13:17 +0000

Hot on the heels of my last post (it’s been a busy month so my lack of posts is showing!) I’d like to announce I’ll be presenting at the first Flash on the Beach, I believe this is the first UK exclusive Flash event in 6 years, and it’s high time so thanks to John Davey for organising it. Flash on the Beach runs from Dec 4,5 & 6th and takes place of course in what seems to be the place to be right now, Brighton! I’ve actually never been to Brighton but it definitely has its fair share of great Flash devs so what better place. My topic is yet to be confirmed but you can be sure the words mobile and Flash are in there!

Backup Options

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 09:17:00 +0000

Do you regularly back up your computer files, code etc? I used to do the usual, which involved sporadically dumping what I thought was important to DVD once a month maybe. Thankfully I’ve only encountered a real problem where I lost work that I hadn’t backed up just once, SVN came to the rescue in this case, but I vowed never to lose work again because of poor backup procedures.

So a couple of months back I put together an external HD, from a 200gig internal 3.5″ drive and a USB 2.0 fan assisted cradle from eBay. This seemed to be to be not only a low cost approach but also hot-swappable when it comes to backing up the backups onto more than 1 drive. So with the hardware sorted I shopped around for a software backup solution to replace my not-so-great xcopy batch file.

Adobe Launch Party Thanks

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:50:23 +0000

Big thanks to Adobe for last night’s party in London, we had a good time and it was great to catch up with everyone. Here’s a bit of fun with one of the photos just before we got there, it’s called spot the Tink. Guy seems to be concentrating on some white dots that happened to be floating in front of him. Mike has some good ones too.

XBox 360 Viral Marketing (168)

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:08:01 +0000

Time for the hype to go up a gear, XBox 360 is out very soon and strange signs have started to appear…

Read and see.

(Let’s all remember our base 16 hey – 168 ;)) Spoiler – link

Flash Lite in a Nutshell

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:47:13 +0000

Just a quick post to say this Thursday I’ll be doing a presentation on Flash Lite at the London MMUG and would love to see anyone interested down there. Also presenting is Rob Bateman of the BBC on best practices for developing components and the upcoming SMX component set, so there should be something for everybody from designers to hardcore coders, just click link at the bottom of the site to attend for free.