ed dickins

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.

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.

Bah. We didn’t win at the Big Chip Awards last night.

I really thought that we were in with a chance with the Mr Scruff site, and it was nice to get whoops from around the room when our nomination was read out. Nevermind, it was nice to be recognised and included in the category of Best Use of Design.

We lost to Code: ComputerLove for a website they did for a University. I can’t find a link to it on their site.

No matter, we had a brilliant time and scared all the people sat at our table when Mike told them that we were from Moss Side, and he scared me by wearing a suit. We were in full black tie outfits and I learned to tie a proper bow tie in just under an hour (thanks Dad).

Well, call it vanity publishing if you want, but Frank at WeLoveTheWeb and I have decided to submit www.mrscruff.com to see if it wins an award. The Big Chip Awards are to ‘celebrate the wealth of talent in digital industries in the North‘, and we are submitting the new Mr Scruff site in the ‘Best Use of Design’ category.

The awards are very well attended and the standard is always high, although they do tend to be dominated by a handful of the same companies each year. There are many categories that StarDotStar, the last company I worked for will be entering, and quite a few of those entries will be sites and applications I worked on. So if we don’t win directly for Mr Scruff I will probably win something by proxy, but I would be most proud to win in our own right.

Sadly the site only lists who our competition is, rather than what their product is, so I have no idea what we are up against. I think this might be because some of the entries are not online as they are maybe CD-Rom applications. I am quietly excited about it and crossing my fingers.