Posts

We were lucky enough to have Luciana Haill from IVBA (Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyser) come in to work the other day and demonstrate the bluetooth enabled brainwave monitoring hardware and software on offer. To summarise what it is, this device monitors in realtime the frequency and range of brainwaves in the pre-frontal cortex and pumps that data wirelessly to a computer for many uses. Here’s a video that shows the data it captures being rendered in 3D: ...

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). ...

There appears to be a bug with ExternalInterface when your Flash movie is inside a FORM tag, which is what ASP.NET does by default. You will get a “null has no properties” type error because the JavaScript that ExternalInterface generates at runtime is unable to reference the Flash movie. It appears to be due to IE not putting the form in the same place as other browsers’ DOMs (specifically the window object). ...

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.

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 😉 ...

Science doesn’t progress smoothly, it makes huge ugly leaps and bounds. But recently a couple of articles really sparked my attention. The first was that they have managed to create a life form artificially. That is, creating life where previously there was none… not just allowing bacteria to enter a given environment as it naturally does. This is a huge step for us all I think; luckily I am not a religious person because I would hate to have to deal with the personal and community-wide ramifications of that “little feat”, it might just open up a lot of questions for someone that may have previously been content in their views. We are already seeing articles with sensational titles such as “Does God have competition?” springing up all over. But this is not a bad thing, the ability to question something you have been told by people you trust is an admirable skill, whether they turn out to be right or wrong. On the negative side, they are trying to patent it which has the potential to raise a bigger moral question on the world stage. ...

No one can really doubt the success of MTV up until now. People like music videos. But I’m left confused when I look at music videos being sold for download on mobile devices such as phones and iPods, and sold at a premium. Watching music videos on TV is something I only do if I’m doing something else at the same time and just want some background (I don’t say background “noise” because I think it’s safe enough to say many people now look for background sound and video at the same time, strange as it may sound). As for actually spending money and downloading a music video to my phone or iPod, with those tiny little screens and in the case of mobile phones, horrible sound quality- is surely the worst possible way you could watch a music video? ...

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. ...

This affects projects that make use of FLAs and runtime shared assets, commonly sharing things like fonts or components amongst several SWFs to prevent embedding them several times in the various files that might make up a project. The first thing to note is the “Load Order” in the settings panel in Flash. It defaults to “bottom up”, and this means it streams in the contents of the bottom-most layer first, before loading and executing code that lives on any layers above it. ...

I’ve posted about Buzzword before, the upcoming online (/offline with Apollo?) word processor. To me Buzzword really illustrates why I continue to back Flash and Flex over AJAX. I don’t care what people use if it’s a good experience, but the limitations are definitely becoming more and more apparent, and perhaps in 2007 we will begin to see the Flash apps just accelerating away from the current kings of the RIA scene, not just in demos and prototypes, but in the real world. The great thing about this game is that you don’t have to compete by spreading FUD, you can just build users by building better experiences, they (/we) are a fickle bunch! ...