Richard Willis

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?

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!

Sitting at the back of Grant Skinner’s session at ‘Flash on the Beach’ a few weeks ago i got my cellular automata classes out and did another visualisation with them. It’s really nice that they’re so easy to use, I can bash something like this out with in just a couple of hours. Again, just click the wee arrow to get going:

OK, not the most astonishing work, it would really be nice to push the envelope a bit further with it. Putting autonomous objects in a controlled environment is obviously going to be a rich vein for software, visualisations, experiments and games for the foreseeable future and I’m currently wondering quite how we can use that stuff in interesting new ways.

I love the tools I work with but if I’m being honest, some things just don’t measure up. CSS in Flex for instance: it doesn’t do half the things a genuine CSS implementation should do. Thanks go to Tom Kennett for bringing to our attention this great blogpost about just how far short of the mark Flex’s CSS support falls.

One of the most irritating aspects is the fact that the ‘width’, ‘height’, ‘percentWidth’ and percentHeight’ properties of UIComponent - which is the base class for all visual components - are exactly that: properties, not styles. That means they can’t go into the CSS, they have to be added to the mxml tags themselves:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application 
  xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
  <mx:VBox width="100%">
    <mx:HBox id="header" width="100%" height="80" />
    <mx:HBox id="content" width="100%" height="100%" />
    <mx:HBox id="footer" width="100%" height="50" />
  </mx:VBox>
</mx:Application>

Even in an unrealistically small file like this, the ‘width’ and ‘height’ attributes make it difficult to read. When working with actual, lengthy .mxml files, a bit of simple editing can become like hacking through the jungle. I’m not really into that so I thought I’d sit down today and see if I could concoct a workaround that would allow me to put the ‘width’ and ‘height’ declarations in the CSS instead.

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There is a fantastic technique for getting graphics drawn in Flash into Flex by means of classes compiled into a swc. It’s a really nice little method and if you wanna learn about it Ultraviolet Design have a great post about it here. I’m pointing you towards their post as this post is not going to be about that. Instead it’s going to be about what happens when that technique - which usually works fine - goes unexpectedly and bafflingly wrong.

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// this:
var id:int = 0;
var name:String = id.toString();
 
// as opposed to this:
var id:int = 0;
var name:String = "name_" + id.toString();
 
// and ESPECIALLY this:
var id:int = 0;
var name:String = "obj_" + "name_" + id.toString();

Conclusion: each additional concatenation adds roughly an additional 20% to processing time

Twenty percent is a lot if you’ve gotta run through a long loop and assign properties to a whole bunch of properties. Anywhere where you can avoid concatenation you should. Storing values indexically with integers seems by far the best way to go with this, whether you are storing your data in Arrays, Dictionaries, Objects or your own bespoke class. Concatenation is going to drag you back wherever you use it.

Having put the original cellular automata swf up a couple of days ago I found myself in a coding frame of mind, so I decided to devote the whole of yesterday to it. I abstracted the data sections of the previous version out so i could use their mechanisms to produce new generative visualisations and having done that got straight down to making a second. Here it is, just click the wee arrow to get going:

Works well with music, particularly ‘In the Musicals‘ from the soundtrack to ‘Dancer in the Dark‘, somewhat unexpectedly.

This is a great little bit of generative art, probably the best I’ve ever made. It’s based upon ‘cellular automata’. Click the wee arrow to start. Be warned though: it moves at a pretty slow pace and takes a good five minutes to get really good. i like it that way.

For some background as to what cellular automata are and an explanation of what the black & white squares along the bottom signify, read on…

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// this:
public var id:int;
 
// as opposed to this:
private var _id:int;
public function get id ():int
{
    return _id;
}
public function set id (id:int):void
{
    _id = id;
}

Conclusion: Public properties are roughly 20% faster than private vars with getters & setters

If you don’t need to run any code on a class property why bother writing a getter and a setter for it? It’ll take longer to type (FDT users aside), make your code fatty and run slower. Tell me the advantage in all that. Instead, why not just use a public variable with the caveat that if you need to turn it into a private variable with a getter and a setter later you can?

That, in a nutshell is your three-step guide to instance class-creation happiness in AS3. Let me explain:

public function SomeClass ( name:String )
{
    _name = name;
    _init();
}
 
private function _init ():void
{
    // your initialisation code here...
    reset();
}
 
public function reset ():void
{
    // your reset code here...
}

This public - private - public approach to initialising your AS3 objects will make you life SO much easier. Let me tell you why:

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