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.