November 29th, 2008
While I have always been a proud member of the Flash Brighton group, I became even prouder on Thursday night when we, collectively, scooped a well deserved Strongest Community award at the 2008 DiMAS awards.
Inspired by the New York group FlashCodersNY, Flash Brighton (or FlashCodersBrighton, as we were originally called) started only two years ago, as a mailing list with a few irregular meetings, mostly kept alive by the enthusiasm of Seb Lee Delisle. But since then it has grown to almost 200 members, with regular weekly meetings attracting a consistent stream of quality speakers, initiating collaborative projects, transatlantic link-ups, big screen spectaculars, a one day conference last year, and never, so far, charging a penny for any of it. But, most importantly, it has formed into a highly cohesive group of Flash professionals who like to work together and share their knowledge.
At the awards ceremony the group was commended on how much we had achieved in a short time and the potential of our relatively young collective. But what really stood out was how our presence had become felt not just in Brighton, but across the web.
Pictured above collecting the award are (from left to right):
Al MacDonald – Viral Games Guru at the mighty Kerb.
Richard Willis – Ace Coder and Copywriter responsible, amongst other things, for the fantastic copy on the Flash Brighton blog.
Jo Summers – Creative Systems Lab alumni and lynch-pin behind the organisation of Flash Brighton’s weekly meetings.
Matt Pearson (me) – looking momentarily distracted by something shiny in the rafters.
Seb Lee Delisle – The brains behind Plug-In Media, PaperVision team member, international conference speaker, and founder/manager of the group.
Owen Bennett – one of Brighton’s finest ActionScript freelancers.
Sarah Bird – of AnimNation fame and DiMAS Freelancer Of The Year nominee.
And, the lady who presented the award – whose name, we’re embarrassed to say, no-one can remember.
As Rich pointed out, as well as the Community award, Flash Brighton’s members were all over the DiMAS like a rash this year, having contributed to works nominated in seven of the twelve categories . And I should add, with hopefully a sufficient amount of modesty, that I’m supremely chuffed to have come away with a second award that night too; winning this year’s Best Blog award for my writing on zenbullets.com. I won’t be giving up the day job quite yet though.
Posted in awards, blogging, flash brighton | 6 Comments »
August 22nd, 2008
The simplest ideas are always the best. I did a project a few months back with the very talented Paul Lloyd of FourTwo.net. We built a little Flash carousel component in AS3 for a corporate client. And it came out pretty well.
The data that runs it all came from a remotely hosted XML, so rather than use a fixed set of cards, a whole new application could be created just by pointing it at another XML. Which is what I have done here – making some of my blog posts look pretty.
Now here’s the cool bit – if instead of using a fixed URL I tell the swf file to read the path to the XML from the QueryString, it becomes reusable by anyone. Even you. Here’s an example:
This is the url of the carousel: http://actionscripter.co.uk/projects/carousel/
Create a new XML, and upload it somewhere, eg.
http://www.zenbullets.com/portfolio.xml
… then give the URL of the new XML to the carousel …
http://…/carousel/?http://www.zenbullets.com/portfolio.xml
… and, wahay, we have a slick looking carousel showcasing a selection from my portfolio.
The structure of the XML should be self explanatory, so feel free to try it. Except when you try it with your own URL it doesn’t work. Why is that?
There’s one more thing you need: you have to give permission for the Flash file to use data from your domain. Flash Player has very tight security features, and won’t let swfs grab data from other domains, unless that domain has said it’s okay by putting a crossdomain.xml file on the top level. This applies both to the URL of the XML and the URLs of any images specified inside that XML. For more info, see here. The crossdomain.xml I used for the example above is here, if you copy this and put it at the top level of the domain where you placed your XML/images it should do the trick.
Posted in as3, blogging, development, flash, javascript | 2 Comments »
January 8th, 2008
When I was schoolboy I used to tape music videos off the ITV Chart Show onto a Betamax tape recorder. This used to require studious attention and a steady hand over the pause button. Going back and re-editing a playlist was near impossible. Now the only place I see music videos is on YouTube, and they can be added to or removed from my favourites list with a click. This is what we call progress.
Similarly, back in the heady days of 2007 I used to blog using WordPress, which involved actually writing words, adding links, and embedding media using a WYSIWYG interface. It also required you to have something to write about in the first place. How primitive. In 2008 I’m using Tumblr.
It’s all about simplicity.
Blogging for people who don’t like blogging. Brilliant.
Posted in blogging, usability, web | No Comments »
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