Ginormous

Bluetube Interactive Launches Allure of the Automobile

Grant Davies — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:54:03 -0500

Bluetube Interactive and Gnoggin Studios launched Allure of the Automobile this week, a flash based micro site for the upcoming automobiles exhibit for the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The Exhibition will feature some of the worlds most beautiful pieces of machinery ( cars ) and the micro site will allow patrons to preview the exhibit, learn about the cars and share their car stories online.

Grant Davies — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:46:10 -0500

We are hiring, looking for a mid/sr .NET developer http://www.bluetubeinteractive.com/Careers.aspx

Defend the Dome season ended

Grant Davies — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 14:35:33 -0500

The Flash games we built in Flex with pureMVC have come to the end of the season. So we moved them to our development server so people can play them and we can continue to use them for marketing and demo purposes. If you haven't had chance to play, the driving game is a lot of fun, but deliberately difficult.

Defend The Dome Game

Are you tough enough to become John Abraham ? :)

Flex on iPhone and soon other mobile platforms

Grant Davies — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:39:37 -0500

Looks interesting, now sure how it will perform, I'll need to create a demo soon.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=11296120&gid=65596&trk=EML_anet_qa_ttle-dnhOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA

Grant Davies — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:54:39 -0500

nice unity demo http://helloracer.com/

Flex Builder IDE redraw problem

Grant Davies — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:27:53 -0500

This issue has been driving me batty for a while now so I figured I post and see if anyone can shed light on this issue.

I'm using Flex Builder 3 standalone and it runs fine, except many dialogs / windows do not draw properly until I drag the divider. Some Windows don't draw at all, no matter how much I drag them around. I do not have this issue with Flex builder 4 or any other piece of software so I doubt its a graphic card driver issue.

Example - Here is what the Flex Buld Path Dialog looks like when I first open it :

Then once I drag the divider to the left a little, it draws :

This is very frustrating as I spend a lot of time draging windows around to make them draw. I read on one blog that they thought it could be the logitech setpoint software which I've disabled and it had no effect.

If anyone has a clue, it would be a great help :)

Eclipse Import Existing Projects into workspace

Grant Davies — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:55:31 -0500

I've been using Eclipse for many years, originally with JAVA and for the last few years with Flex. We have one project that has around 20 projects in it since it uses a lot of modules and different developers work on different modules. We use eclipse work spaces extensively since we use linked resources to define paths so that the project files can be shared by developers regardless of where they put the source code and regardless of them being on the OSX or Windows.

This has worked well for years but whenever we setup a new machine its a bear since you have to import around 20 projects, one after the other..... until now.

It appears I'm a fool, and have never noticed this wonderful feature in eclipse hidden away on the the import -> other menu.

Lets suppose I have all my projects under

clientname/trunk/project1

clientname/trunk/project2

clientname/trunk/project3

etc..

Instead of importing those projects one at a time, however, instead you can do

File - > Import - > Other -> General - > Import existing projects into workspace

Then I browse to

clientname/trunk

The dialog then populates with all the projects it finds under the trunk folder and child folders.

Check the projects you want and click "ok", and now all those projects are imported into your workspace.

Wish I'd known this feature was available about 2 years ago :) But its great to learn something new.

Windows 7 Experiences

Grant Davies — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:54:03 -0400

I've been running windows 7 for about a month, due to being part of MS technet, developers got the full release of windows 7 early. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on an older laptop :

Dell E1705
4 gigs ram (3.25 addressable)
Intel Core 2, 1.73GHZ
Windows rating experience : 3.7

I did a fresh install since my Vista install was a good 2 years old 32bit and I wanted to "clean out", I'll be upgrading my desktop soon that runs Vista 64 ultimate.

So far there is not a single piece of software I've been unable to run, from Visual Studio 2008, Adobe Flex 3 & 4, Directory Opus, Photoshop CS4, Adobe Flash, Filezilla, Charles, Enterprise Architect to name a few.

The only thing I could not get to work was the new sprint Franklin card that does the 3g/4g, however my business partner Paul has clear 4g card working under Windows 7 with a bit of driver version switching (not running the latest drivers).

In use, Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, its fast, responsive, I'd say at least 30% faster on lesser hardware than Vista, All the new features like live preview of application windows by rolling over the application in the start bar are nice, but truly the fact it just works, its fast and it doesn't hang like vista did is what makes it better for me. I am especially happy with the drive upgrades/installation and how seamless it is and I don't seem to have to go downloading a driver very often, windows finds it, so their integration with vendors driver libraries has been much better.

I would highly recommend switching to Windows 7, if you're currently on the fence.

Launched Defend The Dome

Grant Davies — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:22:55 -0400

Bluetube Interactive is pleased to announce we launched defendthedome.com last night, a promotional site for the Atlanta Falcons and Ford, it features the first of two games, drive, where you get to drive an F150 or Flex to the Georgia Dome. The site was built in flex with flash animation by gnoggin studios. Design by Artistic Image and the agency who brought it to us was JWT.

It was a challenging project but a lot of fun, using pureMVC, Fabrication and the new pureMVC finite state machine. We have heavy timelined flash animation that was pulled into flex via a swc and then our timeline managed allowed us to control and jump to labels in the flash timeline without having to re-animate the content in flex.

We'll do a case study on the project soon to explain how it all came together.

Cheers
Grant

PureMVC Finite State Machine ( FSM )

Grant Davies — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:14:15 -0400

We are building a couple of Defend The Dome games in flash for the Atlanta Falcons and Ford, one is driving game where you get to drive an F150 from Flowery Branch to the GA down avoiding ladders, sofas and the things you see on i285, and you can get power ups, avoid cars, and take shortcuts if you get qualifying power ups. In that game I had a command that managed the "state" and managed the changes in state, but it was quite a bit of work and often felt a bit "hacky" where the command was really deciding things that mediators should decide for views.

For the 2nd game we are doing a sacking game, where you get to be John Abraham. This game is more like "dragons lair" where you watch video and then at strategic points you interact by entering a key sequence, or pounding your keyboard in a power meter. We have 4 progressively harder downs and lots of video cut scenes. For this I'm using the pureMVC Finite State Machine.

At first I wasn't sure it was going to help much, but after studying the stopwatch demo, and then using the FSM visualizer ( its very buggy, don't rely on it), I got a good picture of how complex the application was and how many states I'm going to need to manage. I think the FSM has easily saved me a ton of time and complexity due to it managing the state and dispatching notifications when the states change.

Here is a rough capture of the my state machine for the sacking game from the FSM visualizer, sorry its not "great" but the print function in the visualizer doesn't work and it also doesn't allow scaling or zoom of the image.

Once I'm done I'll also publish the XML so people can see what a not trivial FSM looks like in pureMVC.