It clearly hasn’t effected the work flow anyway (which kinda makes me wonder if maybe I should just get rid of the portfolio entirely), but recently I have had some rather awkward questions from clients asking “so, what kind of work do you usually do”. If you looked at my portfolio, frozen in time in early 2008, you’d think my focus was eLearning. A year earlier it would have been games. But the correct answer is neither of these.

So, for the record, the kind of work I usually take on is probably best summed up as: “the meatier end of Flash”. Which these days usually means Flex, but not always. On anything else – industry sector, technologies, job size – I am usually without prejudice. Although, if you are an arms dealer wanting a Flash game about shooting Iraqis, don’t even waste an email.

Anyway, I’m not trying to hawk my wares here, just trying to preempt the questions. I’m pretty much booked up until xmas right now anyway, mostly due to my Generative Art Book. But that, is another area of work entirely …

I’ve been selected to present one of the Flash On The Beach Elevator Pitches, twenty micro-sessions showcasing “hot new talent”. On first hearing of the idea I thought it would be impossible to fit anything meaningful into so short a time – when I spoke at Flash Brighton earlier in the year it ran to more like three hours. But, as Seb reminded me, this is more of a teaser trailer rather than a full feature, so I’ve now got something in mind (something new and previously unseen) which I hope will do the trick. I don’t think there’ll be time for questions though.

To get an idea of what you might expect, see my recent postings over at zenbullets.com. And if you’re at the conference please come and see me. You will be allowed 3.5 seconds in which to applaud.

var bow = bringMe("burning gold");
var arrows = bringMe("desire");
var shield= bringMe();
var clouds = Clouds.unfold();
var chariot= bringMe("fire");

do {
   mentalFight.cease = false
   sword.sleep = false
} while (! England.pleasantpastures.isJerusalemBuild())

Note this code will only run in green and pleasant lands.

I started my 100 Abandoned Artworks project – a weekly series of Generative Art experiments – back in October. Last week it reached the halfway mark, with number 50, where it is taking a well-earned break (which is the reason I suddenly find I have time to write blog posts again!).

The project has already far exceeded my expectations. The feedback I have received has been almost universally positive and I can see a clear upward curve in the quality of the work. I have also managed to keep on a weekly schedule without compromising my client work, losing my marbles or my wife leaving me. We even managed to have our second child somewhere around the 34 mark.

In January I also gave a talk on the subject of generative art, and the journey I had been on with the project, which proved both popular and warmly received. More recently, after seeing how good the stuff looks printed, there has even been talk of a book (!).

I will be continuing with the next fifty on a less rigid, more erratic schedule, starting soon; the project still has a long way to go yet. I suggest you subscribe to the feed if you want to follow its progress. But before I can start thinking about that I have six months worth of emails to answer …

I’ve written a new tutorial: ActionScript and the Twitter API, Simplified

Makes sense. Flex is only the framework, Flash is the platform we are building for, whether we are using Flash or Flex. I was starting to feel a little odd referring to myself as one of Brighton’s Flash Developers when I hardly ever open Flash. Although technically, seeing how 90% of my work over the last two years has been Flex based, I am probably better described as a Flex Developer these days. At least I don’t need to worry about such rubbish now.

Flash Builder (aka Flex 4) is expected to have a Beta release in June, with final release expected in the last quarter of 2009.

If you have any questions on the rebrand, there is an FAQ here.

as3.0 is like a strict german mistress. Very harsh but gets good results.
as2.0 is your stoner friend from college.

as1.0 is for script-kiddies, designers and other non-technical people
as2.0 is for girls
as3.0 is for real men

as3.0 is carefully crafted formulaic pop – predictable, slick, reliable, dull
as2.0 is glitchy electronica – some semblance of form, but playful with it
as1.0 is a child bashing saucepans – imprecise, messy, but lots of fun

as3.0 is a Japanese Chef’s knife. Finely crafted but requires care and technique in its use.
as2.0 is a Machete. Great for hacking things, but useless for anything requiring fine detail or control.
as1.0 is a plastic spoon.

With thanks to Owen and Jim.

Previously Adobe’s own stats tended to be taken with at least a soupcon of salt, as they were based on visitors to their own site (who would obviously be more inclined to be Flash users), but in now employing third party market research for these statistics we might take them a little more seriously.

For an alternative view RIAstats offers some visual data too, which also puts FP10 around the three-quarters mark. Interestingly, they also give stats for Silverlight, Microsoft’s much mocked “Flash Killer“, which is now showing an actually rather impressive 25% uptake. I have slightly warmed to Silverlight in recent months, mostly thanks to conversations with Ed at Unwrong. It may yet be one to watch.

Flex has been around a while now and is ramping up in terms of popularity. I had a handful of Flex projects last year, all of which were a positive experience, and I have more lined up for this year. But while Flex has been embraced quite happily by the Coders (mainly because it is the first decent ActionScript IDE) I’m not convinced it has penetrated our symbiotic co-species; the Designers.

For all Adobe’s claims about improving workflow with the use of Flex Builder, which it certainly has for writing code, I’m not sure the way of creating components and skins for Flex (which cannot be done easily without one of Adobe’s other products) is quite as instinctive. The reason I suspect this is because for every Flex project I have worked on we have had real difficulty finding a suitably skilled Designer.

One of the stigmas associated with Flex is that every Flex site you see on the web, looks like a Flex site. So many times you see the default loader, default buttons and even the default grey colour scheme, which suggests to me the Designers are nowhere to be seen on these projects.

So if you are a Flex Designer reading this, or a Flash Designer who isn’t scared off by Flex, please get in touch. Especially if you are in the Brighton or Birmingham area and are affordable. I have projects you can be helping me with right now.

And Adobe, listen up; Flex isn’t going to change the world until we can get the Designers on board. So perhaps you might want to make it a little easier for them to work with it.

I had no involvement in it at all, but my friend and colleague Iestyn Lloyd lead the project, and almost had a breakdown because of it. It was simply not physically possible for one person to work any harder on a Flash project, so the kudos it has received since is very well deserved.

I had a piece of Director work nominated in the short-lived Interactive BAFTAs back in 2004, but it failed on the night, which was very disappointing. This is why, while I am extremely excited for the Littleloud crew, I’m also seeeeeeething with jealousy. Perhaps they’ll let me touch it next time I’m in.

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.

I can’t recommend Processing enough – it’s very easy to pick up and a great way of sketching out ideas, even for non-programmers. And most of all, it puts the FUN back into coding. There’s oodles of source code on abandonedart.org if you are looking for a place to get started so go, splash around a little, you might like it.

So, for those of you who are looking for an ActionScript freelancer, below is my pick of the best of Brighton.

Naturally I’m putting myself at the top of the list, as I need your work just as much as anyone else. But if you have spoken to me and I am busy, or you owe me money, or you’ve taken offence to my haircut or something, try one of the other guys. My colleague Kris has a longer list here, but these are the people I will personally vouch for.

Matt Pearson (zenbullets)
Neil Manuell (revision)
Matt Sayers (soplausible)
Owen Bennett (steamboy)
Rich Willis (rich text format)

If you contact them do let them know you found them via me. Beer is very expensive in this town.

If it is a Flash Designer you are after, rather than an ActionScripter, they are much easier to come by. Your best bet may be to tap people randomly on the shoulder while wandering around Churchill Square. Roughly one in every five will be a Flash Designer.

There are two things I have had on my to-do list for a few years – 1. do a Generative Art project, and 2. do an Open Source project, so this month I have ticked off two boxes at once with my new 100 Abandoned Artworks site.

A year ago I saw Robert Hodgin speak at FOTB07, which introduced me to Processing, an Open Source Java-based programming language. It is always good to teach yourself a new language every few years, just to keep things fresh, and to give you new perspectives on your work. And while ActionScript is still great, as the language has evolved from the hacky AS1 to the strict, ordered, enterprise-focussed AS3, it has lost a lot of its sense of fun and experimentation; the thing that attracted me to the language in the first place.

So, while I can still use AS3 to make my clients happy, Processing can be my playground. Which is the idea behind 100 Abandoned Artworks (http://www.abandonedart.org). I don’t have the time, or the sympathetic business partners, to be able to emulate Hodgin’s sophisticated works, so instead I am intending to do a high-volume, fast turn-around project (the only thing I can do with a wife, child and 20odd clients to keep happy).

Over the next 100 weeks I will produce an experiment a week and throw it out there, in whatever state I have got it to before one of my dependents puts a stop to my playtime. But I will also post the source code, so if anyone wants to take these works and run with them, or adapt them for another medium, they are welcome to.

I’m hoping it’ll produce some good stuff, and you’ll be able to see a upward curve in the quality of the work over the two years. Make sure you subscribe to the feed, because the more subscribers I have, the harder it is for me to bow out and quietly abandon the project.

This is me bidding farewell to my weekends …

Within the cube you create your own isometric spaces and structures, and rotate and zoom around them. Click on the image to launch, and have a play around.

There will, inevitably, be a game built with this thing one day soon, so this will be the level editor. If you come up with anything cool-looking feel free to email the XML to me, or post it below. With any luck, if the credit crunch starts biting and the work dries up, I may find a day free to finish the physics sometime in the next year. Don’t hold your breath though.

This is going to take longer to explain than it did to build (literally 10 minutes, and 8 of those were spent googling for the image). Click above to see it in action.

Richard Lord was guest speaker at our Flash Brighton user group last night, presenting his Flint particle system. I think every creative coder has found themselves toying with particle effects at some point (do check out my generative stuff) but Rich’s system takes all the heavy lifting from the coding and just leaves the fun part. And it can create some really authentic looking smoke, in very few lines of code.

The movie above is my riff on a very old David Lynch photograph from his “Nudes and Smoke” collection (see here). A lot of Lynch’s “still” art work involves incorporating moving parts into paintings and sculpture, so I hope he would approve of this subtle animation.

Rich will be introducing Flint to a wider audience at FOTB08 next month.

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.

There’s lots of fun to be had with Moo mini-cards, and I’ve been getting good feedback on the batch of fractal cards I made recently, which were created by taking snapshots of one of my flash experiments. The magic behind this was so simple I may as well share it with you. All you need to create your own set is the Flex/AIR app I created, which you can download here, and a Flickr account. This is how it works:

You give the app the path to your swf, and hit enter. It then runs a function to start a timed loop, as follows:

private var _saveDir:File;
private var _timer:Timer; 
private var _counter:int;
private function startSnapshot(url:String, time:Number = 5):void {
    // loadedSwf is  the name of the mx:Image that 
    // will contain the swf
    loadedSwf.source = url;
    // create a directory to store our snapshots
    var dirName:String = "snapshots";
    _saveDir = File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath(dirName);
    var x:Number = 1;
    while (_saveDir.exists) {
        _saveDir = 
          File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath(dirName + String(x++));
    }
    _saveDir.createDirectory();
    // start loop
    _counter = 1;
    _timer = new Timer(time * 1000);
    _timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, snapLoop);
    _timer.start();
}

Then, while the swf plays, the timer loop fires this function every few seconds to take a snapshot:

private function snapLoop(e:TimerEvent):void {
    // create a new BitmapData object based on the 
    // size of the loaded swf 
    var BMPData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(loadedSwf.width, 
                loadedSwf.height, true, 0xFFFFFF);		
    // take a snapshot of the swf, and store it in 
    // the BitmapData object
    BMPData.draw(loadedSwf);
    // encode it as a jpg
    var jpgEncoder:JPEGEncoder = new JPEGEncoder(80);
    var jpgBytes:ByteArray = jpgEncoder.encode(BMPData);
    // save it
    var ourFile:File = _saveDir.resolvePath("snap" + 
               _counter++ + ".jpg");
    var fileStream:FileStream = new FileStream();
    fileStream.open(ourFile, FileMode.WRITE);
    fileStream.writeBytes(jpgBytes, 0, jpgBytes.length);
    fileStream.close();
}

Note that the BitmapData snap may give unexpected results with transparent swfs, so it is best used with swfs that have a solid background.

Once you have a folder full of snapshots, upload these to Flickr. For this example I pointed the app at a local version of my favourite fractal experiment swf, to produce this set of images.

To turn these into mini-cards, the final step is to use Moo’s Flickr import option. Point it at the Flickr set you have created, pay your money, and in 10 days or so a pack of groovy cards pop through the postbox. Simple.

(c/o the mighty mrdoob)

A year ago O’Reilly books generously sent me a review copy of their Apollo For Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide. Apollo, or AIR as it has since been re-christened, was only at alpha stage when the book was released, and was full of bugs. I had spent a lot of time hacking away at both that and the documentation-less Flash 9 Alpha that had been released not long before. With AIR, even with the help from some of the development team, I couldn’t get even the most basic of applications to run. Because of my frustration (and because I thought I was oh-so big and clever) I wrote a deeply sarcastic review of the book for Blogcritics.

So this is my apology. I made my peace with Flash 9 and ActionScript 3.0 some time ago, and now, since AIR finally got it’s first 1.0 official release last month, I have had a complete u-turn in my opinion of that too. AIR is an utter delight to work with. And with Flex reaching version 3 to coincide with the release, they go together like Peters And Lee. Harmonious.