Richard Willis

I recently made this Carousel component for Flex

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Robotlegs is an AS3 dependency injection micro-framework.

Signals is a new approach for AS3 events, inspired by C# events and signals/slots in Qt.

Put them together and you’ve got an elegant, simple & completely decoupled solution to the problem of Flex & AIR development.

I’ve thrown together a really quick example (which you can download below) based upon a couple of things I’ve seen recently; firstly Richard Lord’s framework comparison talk at FlashBrighton a couple of weeks ago, and secondly, Owen Bennett’s  blend of RobotLegs and Signals he showed me last week. Seeing what Owen had put together inspired me to have a go myself. I wondered whether it was possible to create a RobotLegs/Signals hybrid that was even more decoupled than the system Owen was working on. So I created a short (less then 100 lines) class called ‘SignalBox’, named after a similarly named class in Owen’s system.

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I use FlexBuilder. I used to use FDT but the code-completion, hover-over links and - most importantly - ability to compile from MXML that FlexBuilder offers eventually tempted me away. Still, there’s one thing about FDT I miss: it wrote A LOT of code for me. Nothing complicated, stuff like getters & setters that are tedious and time consuming. It was great that FDT could take that off my hands.

These days, with FlexBuilder, I don’t have that any longer. Which isn’t great but I’ve managed to concoct a  workaround using ‘Snippets’, comments and ‘dormant’ variables, which has sped things up for me and which could do the same for you.

Let me explain…

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A subject particularly far away from my heart; I have always loathed font embedding, because there are so many ways of doing it and they don’t always work and when they do it feels like some weird voodoo that could inexplicably disappear at any moment is part of it! Which is why I’m very grateful to have recently been shown a method of achieving this by Unwrong’s marvellous Flash Developer Jonathon Pace. Jon’s method is simple, relatively error-free and seems to work for all font types - the ones I’ve tried thus far, at least - which was always the biggest bugbear for me; it sometimes felt like you had to know a different embedding method for each different font type!

So, using Jon’s method what you have to do is:

1. Create a fonts swc;
2. Ensure your compiler includes every font in your swc; and
3. That’s it! Use your embedded fonts

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I made an eCard for my friends and clients yesterday. With the exception of those who actually make half-decent ones - like my old client TripleTruth - eCards are usually pretty lousy so i just wanted to mess about for a laugh really and make a really amateur effort.

You can find my bad eCard here. The misspelling in it was a genuine mistake that I thought I’d keep. I hope it makes you smile and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

See you in 2009!

Over the summer of 2008 I decorated my bathroom. I knew from doing my kitchen the year before that the most painstaking and time-consuming part of the job would be tiling and I wondered if there was anyway it could be made less so?

I had just come back from BarCampBrighton, where I was inspired by Ollie Glass‘ workshop on writing genetic algorithms; something that turned out to be really simple. So I sat down, chucked some code together and produced this Tile Designer swf, built on a genetic algorithm:

On Thursday 27th of November - two days ago - a handful of other FlashBrighton members and I were at the DiMAs awards in Hove’s All Saints Church. In a previous blogpost I said, amongst other things, that FlashBrighton was a shoe-in for the “Strongest Community” award at the DiMAs. I really felt that it was a done-deal, not because of any weakness on the part of the opposition, but because of all the great things we’ve achieved.

And I was right, WE WON !!! It’s fantastic but I’m not going to say too much about it because Matt Pearson’s has already a great job of that here. Instead let me say this:

I was REALLY, REALLY pleased to see Matt Pearson pick the ‘Best Blog’ award for his zenbullets blog. I really admire good writing and zenbullets certainly has that. The delivery and content are excellent, and his documentation of the victimisation Sussex Police have only-just ceased to put him through is just captivating. For these reasons I also felt that Matt would be a shoe-in in his category, and was pleased to see that I was right again.

Obviously I had a hand in the FlashBrighton award but what might not be so obvious is that I also had a hand in a second award. Blast Theory were nominated in the “Digital Collaberation” category. Now, I thought that it was Blast Theory as a whole that was nominated but it turned out that it was specifically their ‘Rider Spoke’ project. In the words of Blast Theory, ‘Rider Spoke is a work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology’. Part of the work was a Flash front-end for a console cyclists had attached to the handlebars of their bikes (you can see some images of that in action here). Twas I wot made that Flash front-end.

And ‘Rider Spoke’ won too !!! So as Flash coder and copywriter, I came away from the night feeling like I had an important hand in not-one-but-two awards! I also came away from the night feeling quite drunk.

Finally, I would like to mention that Brightonian Flash agencies LittleLoud & Kerb, freelancer Sarah Bird and my former employer DigitalBrain were also nominated in other categories but sadly failed to pick up awards. FlashBrighton members were nominated in so many categories that it was inevitable that some of us weren’t going to get our just desserts. And anyway, LittleLoud are up for a BAFTA this weekend, so things aren’t really too bad for them. Maybe next year guys?

Spurred on by this page on Kristen Akermans’s site and this blog post on Matt Pearson’s blog - which both list freelancers available in Brighton and which both link kindly to me - I decided I should return the favour. So what follows is a list of those people I recommend if you’re looking for a freelancer. Obviously I top my own list - I’ll be wanting the work first, thank you :) - but if I’m busy I thorougly recommend the other guys and gals (listed alphabetically) here:

Designers

Charis Mystakidou: wiredportfolio.com
Kristen Akerman: sting.co.uk
Luke Hornsby: flamingpixels.co.uk
Tim Frost: bullandgate.com

Developers

Richard Willis: richtextformat.co.uk
Matt Pearson: actionscripter.co.uk
Matt Sayers: soplausable.com
Neil Manuell: revisual.co.uk
Nikos Chagialas: devgallery.com
Owen Bennett: steamboy.co.uk

This turns out to be outrageously simple. If you wanna create a grayscale somewhere between pure black and pure white all you need is this could-not-be-simpler equation:

var num:int = 1; // any int from 0 to 255
var grayscale:int = num * 65793;

All you need to ensure is that the value of ‘num’ is an integer from 0 (for pure black) to 255 (for pure white) and that’s it!

The shortlist for the ‘Digital Media Awards‘ - or ‘DIMAs’, formerly the ‘Brighton Web Awards’ - has just been announced and FlashBrighton members feature throughout. Matt Pearson for his excellent zenbullets blog in the ‘Best Blog’ catagory, Iestyn Lloyd (of LittleLoud) for ‘Best Use of Animation’ & ‘Outstanding Digital Design’, Alistair Macdonald (of Kerb) for ‘Best Use of Animation’ & ‘Digital Marketing’, Sarah Bird for ‘Farm Freelancer of the Year’, and FlashBrighton itself for ‘Strongest Community’. Judging by the sheer amount of FlashBrightonians listed, we must be a shoe-in for the latter award. Is that tempting fate, should I keep quiet? Nonsense, fate be damned; we’re on the list through merit alone! Or, should I say, we’re on the list because of all the awesome copywriting I’ve done for us this past year!

It’s unseemly to pimp yourself, right; very un-British? The truth is that I don’t care; I think I do a damn good job with the copy and obviously the judges think so too. But… ok, sure, I guess I have to admit that there are other things that make FlashBrighton great too:

1. That we manage to put on a presentation every single week;
2. That our membership are committed and interested enough to actually make a presentation every 7 days a viable option;
3. That as well as literally hundreds of enthusiasts, professionals and students, our membership also includes such luminaries as Niqui Merret, Tom Kennett & Chris Sperry, Iestyn Lloyd, Aral Balkan and of course Seb Lee-Delisle himself;
4. That we get the best speakers to talk: Richard Lord, Nick Weldin, Bob Swain, Kyle Jennings, Peter Passaro, Serge Jespers, Nick Tandavanitj, plus loads & loads more;
5. That, to paraphrase FB member Neil Manuell, we go from ‘the esoteric to the nerdy‘ with enviable ease;
6. That we put on awesome large events like our ‘Film Carnivals O Fun‘ and the ‘Big Day Out‘;
7. That we give away acres and acres of great blag, such as the free boxed copy of ‘FlexBuilder2′ every attendee at the ‘Big Day Out’ picked up;
8. And that we do it ALL for free, just because we want to;

When you look at it like that, maybe it’s no wonder that we made the shortlist. Here’s wishing LittleLoud, Kerb, Matt Pearson, Sarah Bird and FlashBrighton the best of luck on the 27th of November. I’m also backing the other clients I’ve worked with over the past few years too: my friends Matt, Ju & Nick at Blast Theory and my old employer DigitalBrain, who’s ‘DB Primary‘ portal is nominated in the ‘Best in E-Learning’ category.

I’ll be there on the 27th backing all these guys. And yes, I know its hardly the Oscars… but I don’t care, it’s a bit of fun!

Good luck one-and-all!