ed dickins

Ace.

I am not goint to write a review here, but I like my new nokia n80.+é-á I have a feeling that the futuristic flash website that shows it off had quite a lot to do with me wanting it so badly.

Apart from just wanting a new gadget, I wanted to have a wifi enabled phone that I could develop flashlite content for.+é-á It will be a while before I finish reading up on how to develop in flashlite 1.1 but from what I have skimmed through it should be fun and probably quite testing..

Flashlite 2.0 sounds more fun but it has not been released onto phones yet.+é-á I haven’t decided whether to use flashlite to try and make a game, or make a thrilling xml based app that consumes lovely data.+é-á I will decide when I have had a proper play with it.

I got a funky little World Cup flash app to run on it, and damn me but I use it every day.+é-á There are some clever ways of displaying lots of text and navigating the menus in it.+é-á Very funky.

flashcodersbrighton started up last week.

Inspired by flashcodersny a New York based collection of flash ActionScript programmers, Brighon now has flashcodersbrighton. It was fun to go and meet other programmers, some of whom have completely different skills bases to me. It was really interesting to talk about process and design and programming like a big load of geeks. Everyone seemed to be very interested in contributing and swapping ideas.

They have a blog too.

Gah. Spam and lost logins.

Due to moving house/city and not updating my blog software to the latest version I have suffered from the two worst things a blog can fall to. Neglect and spam.

I need to upgrade to wordpress’ latest version of their software which is more spam protected and now that I have remembered my password I need to try and keep this place up to date.

In the last six months have been enjoying my new job at Epic in Brighton. I make e-learning apps in flash with a great team of programmers. There is a lot of experience and creativity there and it is superb to be working with other programmers that really know their stuff.

Interestinginly Epic mostly develop for massive companies, and those types of clients tend not to update their plugins and browsers that often since their systems are so large. This bring familiar restrictions to what version of the flash plugins they have on their systems.

We are still doing a fair amount of work in Actionscript 1.0 which is a blast from the past for me. Mostly because the display engine Epic use was built using Actionscript 1.0. However the principles of good code remain the same and it is interesting sometimes to have the restrictions that only using Actionscript 1.0 presents.

We are currently rebuilding our main content display engine into a version that uses Actionscript 2.0 so that we can take advantage of using proper classes and inheritence, and proper OOP. Also, we will be moving up to flash player 6.0.79 as our minimum spec for client machines so we have a few more flash capabilities at our disposal. It has been great fun doing the specs for the new display engine and working so closely with the other departments to make sure that it does its job, and more.

Other than this, on the work front there is not much personal news. I have been looking at flashlite 1.1 and I am interested in mucking around with that as soon as Orange get me a flashlite enabled phone in. I am looking at a Nokia n80 - it is feature packed and wifi enabled.

Flashlite 1.1 will be pretty much like writing for flash 4 again, which will have its own restrictions. It will be interesting to see just how restrictive it will be to write for such a limited framework again. Sadly the phone has not arrived in time for me to write a World Cup planner application. It will have to wait until Euro 2008. By then I would expect most phones will have flashlite 2.0 at the very least.

And of course Flash 8 came out, and Macromedia were bought by Adobe. And Actionscript 3.0 of course. And Flex. Cor blimey, what exciting times.

I have been very busy recently working on a very interesting project for Learning Inc, a company run by my old friends from Video Arts days in Manchester.

Many interesting aspects to this job, the Learning Design and Graphic Design (as usual for Learning Inc), but for me there were lots of interesting programming parts too.

Firstly I got to implement a large scale Model View Controller (MVC) application in ActionScript 2.0 - based on Colin Moock’s example in Essential ActionScript 2.0 using a proper Object Oriented language. Something like this has been theoretical to me for a long time and it was liberating to put it into practice. The advantages and benefits of planning properly on paper (or on computer screen) first were immediately obvious once things started to both expand in scope and, as they frequently do, change in requirements.

Firstly it was easy for me to outline my approach before I started work, so that it was clear to both me and Learning Inc how I was going to go about building the app. I also found that by documenting everything - from UML style Class diagrams, program flow, logic flow and use case scenarios - the code starts to almost write itself after a while. Suddenly making a large change to how the whole program works doesn’t feel quite so drastic, if you know that you only have to change how one class works internally to implement it. I kept hearing myself saying ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’.

Secondly it was interesting to be working with the UFI framework. A package of classes and components for developers that save us the job of re-writing code that many other developers need to write for each application. This included screen magnifiers, scrollbars for textboxes and MovieClips, LMS Connectors, and much more. There was plenty of documentation to get through, and some of it read more like a murder mystery than an API companion, but by the end of it I had a pretty good understanding of how the framework fitted together.

Thirdly, and most challenging, the application had to be accessible. Screen readers - particularly JAWS - had to be able to read the application. JAWS can be a cruel mistress at the best of times, and we were not surprised at how unforgiving it can be with code and reading/tab order on-screen. We found that we were a lot less forgiving with its performance than many of it users possibly are. We finally settled on the policy that if you can achieve what you want to buy using the correct key strokes, then it works.

It was a shame that we were not able to make a case for building the application in Flash 8. It would have solved a lot of problems that we had to take on ourselves. Particularly with respect to Accessibility issues. Maybe if we had another 6 months for the plug-in to have got greater adoption on the web then we could have done that.

There are still some tweaks to be made to the application, but in effect it is finished. It was exciting to be working with Learning Inc again, particularly Ivor, and as usual it is looking great.

http://hiddenresource.corewatch.net/index.php?itemid=4

This is better described on the H1dde3n R3sourc3 site, but this is a brilliant piece of JSFL that enables you to munge library items in a batch process to rename/export/convert library items.

H1DD3N.R350URC3: Download: SciTE 1.61 for Actionscript 2.0

A new version of the SciTE|Flash editor for ActionScript. Now with ActionScript 2.0 support. It has a fancy new UI, you can test directly in Flash MX, open help files, and there is a link directly to the ActionScript Dictionary online.

I would have liked an explorer panel like there is in the SEPY editor so that you can jump directly to methods and properties, but I have had a couple of bugs with the SEPY editor and the SciTE|Flash editor has normally been very robust. It is nice to have the luxury of having two to choose from and one will prevail I am sure.

Macromedia Developer Relations Podcast: Macromedia Podcast #1

Macromedia Developer Relations have started creating podcasts. This is the first one. Very interesting idea and something to listen to on my mp3 player. A great idea for the flash community I am sure that they will get very popular. I won’t spoil it by saying what is in it.

Working with LearningInc I have developed an XML editor for their latest diversity training software for DEFRA.

They required a way of editing the dynamic content of their new diversity awareness application that was easy to use for demonstrators that had no experience of writing xml.

So I built an Editor application that consumed the content XML and displayed it in a scrolling window with each learning point encapsulated into a MovieClip with editable fields. The demonstrator could then edit the content using a familiar editing environment and preview the new content in the Presentation Application before saving the new content to an XML document.

One of the interesting parts of this project was to place the Editor application into mProjector a nifty piece of software from ScreenTime. It allows you to go outside of the Flash sandbox and read and write files from the users harddrive. This allows the Editor application to save new versions of the XML onto the computer when the demonstrator is happy with the new learning content.

I also got to write some cool recursive functions so that the dynamic textfields used in the Presentation application could find their way to the data no matter where they were placed in the Presentation Application. This made it easier for the designers to move dynamic content about in the Application and know that they would still find the content they needed to display. If I had a little more time I would have made them components, I still might for my own satisfaction.

Just finished another flash game/application.

This one was called Sin Free City and was for young offenders that are being counselled by Youth Workers after being arrested and/or taken into custody. Bit of a strange product if only for the content. Poor kids if this is what they are dealing with at their age.

Hopefully it will meet the brief of getting them to be assessed correctly and given the help they need. Sheesh. Not a fun topic for an application.

http://www.sephiroth.it/python/sepy.php

So far this is the only competition to the brilliant SciTE|Flash Actionscript editor. At first sight Sepy has lots of features that you might not think you would use, and the menu looks a little cluttered. But if you start using it and its tools to the fullest then you can make sense of it pretty quickly.

Highlights are the xml document viewer that gives you the path to a node when you click on it in the explorer window, and you can browse whole directories/packages of classes with an Explorer type view too.

When you have a class open in the main editing window, you can see all the methods in the class in the explorer window on the left and jump straight to them just by clicking on their name. This could end up being a Godsend for long classes. As you would expect there is also the ability to fold code into more manageable blocks by clicking on a expand/collapse icon at the start of each major code block.

I will still be setting mine up with nice fonts and the colour schemes that I am most used to for the next couple of days, and I will have to get used to switching programmes to edit .as files, but anything is an improvement on Flash’s find/replace function in the native Actionscript editor.

[edit] I might have a buggy release but it was acting oddly the other day. It was still tracing commented out trace statements. This makes me think that it was looking at an older version of the .as file or not saving correctly. I will keep an eye out for this.