Today I attended the Flash Camp Birmingham event, with some key presenters from Adobe, TweetDeck, Yay! Media and RIM along with some other amazing speakers such as Niqui Merret, Neil Nand, and Seb Lee-Delisle.

The weather was amazing in Birmingham, and the day started with me being late and missing the keynote, however I was greeted with some free Adobe goodies and off I went in to James Whittaker’s (TweetDeck) talk, instantly gripped by the mobile theme of the talk it was enjoyable and really informative.

Next up was Mike Jones (Adobe) talking about games which took me back to my school days of playing on my SNES and Megadrive, it just shows how far games have come from being on a console to being in the browser as blazing performance.

Niqui Merret’s talk was about bugs, and went over sniffing bugs out, the talk was really interesting for something so infuriating that affects all developers, however annoying they are though we all get that amazing feeling when we squash them and make our code flawless and robust.

Wowza Media Server is something I always grazed over when looking at Media Server Platforms, but how I wish I didn’t. This thing is amazing as Demonstrated by Steve Carpenter, if you haven’t checked it out I suggest you do. You can see his code examples here: http://blog.yaymedia.net/2011/03/wowza-and-flash-builder-demo-files-from-flash-camp-midlands/

Unfortunately Mark Doherty from Adobe couldn’t make it to the conference, which was a shame I was looking forward to watching his presentation on Air for TV. The time was filled by Neil Nand, an incredibly talented Flash Developer who had only been in the UK for 15 days since coming over from Australia. Neil is obsessed with Flash and SEO and created a CMS that allows users to build rich Flash websites that also fall back to HTML, the CMS was impressive. Unfortunately there was nothing available to download to allow users to test the CMS but he’s hoping to get something available soon.

The next talk was something nearly everybody was waiting for, the BlackBerry Playbook, Sanyu Kiruluta from RIM came to talk about developing for the new tablet and even had one to demo it’s capabilities. This is a really smart device, and it looks like RIM are pulling out all the stops to try and make this thing succeed. I’m impressed by the size of the device, and it looks incredibly sturdy. As much as I’m not sold on the whole swipe gestures at the moment, I’m sure they’ll iron them out before release.

The final talk of the day was given by Seb Lee-Delisle, I’ve seen Seb a few times now from Flash on the Beach and also following DotBrighton when it was streaming and on Vimeo. Seb is a massive figure in the Flash community and caused a little stir when he presented What the Flux at FOTB last year, if you haven’t seen his presentation I suggest you check it out as soon as it becomes available on the FOTB Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/channels/flashonthebeach. This talk was a follow up to What the Flux, and I think it was clear even from the reaction from everyone in the talk that a lot of community, both Flash and Javascript is / has moved on from the anger we were facing over a year a go. It’s time to embrace new technologies, Flash will become a niche technology, it won’t die and Adobe will continue to evolve the platform as they have done before. Seb also conducted a Family Fortunes style game called Flashy Fortunes at the end, but we wont talk about that lalala…

Overall the day was amazing, I met some new people and got some free gifts. The organisation of the event was top quality and I hope to be able to attend the next event.

Below is a set of links for you to delve in to:

http://www.flashmidlands.com/

James Whittaker – TweetDeck
Mike Jones – Adobe
Niqui Merret – Jade Hopper
Steven Carpenter – Yay! Media
Neil Nand
Seb Lee-Delisle – Plug-in Media

I’ve always admired the MacBook Air since they were first announced but always found them that little bit too expensive that I couldn’t justify getting one over the original MacBook, recently though I realised that my MacBook was now coming up to three years old so decided to look at a new model.

I do quite a bit of travelling and often go to the coffee shop to work, and while my iPad fills a hole, it’s certainly not a laptop replacement for me anyway.

My previous MacBook was the 13″ White model, and as I own an iMac, I saw no need to get a larger screen. The MacBook Pro was my original thought but these things are quite heavy, I found my previous MacBook a pain to carry around sometimes and it took up far too much space in my bag when going away for a few days.

So I started to look at the MacBook Air’s again, after all I didn’t really want it to be my workhorse machine as that’s what my iMac is for, I decided to get the 11.6″, 64GB model upped to 4Gb of RAM, and I have to say i’m blown away by this thing, it’s thin, sleek and immensely sturdy.

I was torn between the 64Gb and the 128Gb but decided to go for the smaller option, the reason being that I found my MacBook to become cluttered with rubbish so this is a minimal test for me, installing only what I need, when I need it.

You can see more of the machine below.

I’ve never been a massive book worm, going through school trying to read as little as I could so I could go out and play football, however in the past few months all that has changed, I’m not sure if it’s the Scottish weather or weather i’m just so passionate about what I do that I want to just keep learning.

After going on holiday and only being restricted to taking two books, as development books are quite thick and heavy I found myself yearning for a Kindle, but not sure if I would use it or not, so in stepped my iPad.

I’ve been using my iPad on and off recently for mainly browsing the web and controlling my Macbook when connected to the TV, I’ve always had the Kindle application but never really read anything in length on it, and wondered how it would perform with a development book with code snippets and images, I must admit I’m massively impressed.

As much as I think that digital will never beat holding a physical book, it is a totally different experience, and not in a bad way. I’ve now purchased five books from the Amazon Kindle store, and although they’re not that much cheaper than the physical version, I don’t mind after my ‘Actionscript 3.0 Design Patterns’ got destroyed on holiday this is a far better method of taking books away.

One of the best features about the whole Kindle network over iBooks is it’s ability to span across multiple devices, I have an iPhone, the iPad, a Nexus One and even my Macbook, all with the Kindle application installed and they sync perfectly between them. I will be purchasing a Kindle in the next coming months, just so my dog can lick it like on the advert.

Anyone who knows my, knows I have a passion for Flash, there’s something about it that is fun and allows me to achieve my day to day goals in my job, I’ve using Flash now for a while now and I’ve always dabbled in other technologies but never shown a passion for them, this is about to change. One thing I stand strongly by is using Flash for the right job, not as an easy way out or to achieve something silly that doesn’t help anyone, now it’s time to practice what I preach.

I’ll still be working in Flash and using it as much, but I’ll be spending some of my time learning new technologies, I’ve already started to spend an hour a day delving in to Javascript more and I’ve recently purchased ‘iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide‘ so I’ll be spending some time with that as well.

I’ll try and keep posting my updates as I go along, so in to the beyond I go.

Bourne were approached by Billy Wingrove to create a mobile application to raise awareness for Billy and also get children out playing football. Billy Wingrove is a freestyle footballer who has worked with some of the biggest football stars in the world such as Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, David Beckham and many more.

We came up with the idea to create a mobile application that allowed children to create their own schedule providing skills, diet and tips and tricks on a healthy lifestyle. The idea was to get over the people how hard you have to work if you want to become a professional footballer and to stay in top shape.

Billy Wingrove also wanted a challenge option within the application to allow children to practice tricks and battle others within the app to allow users to unlock new options and build up points depending on the complexity of the trick.

Below is the concept artwork for the application we presented to Billy.

This piece of work was pitch work created for Hankook Tires by Bourne, we were required to come up with a full digital campaign that would increase sales of Tires and increase Hankooks brand awareness.

I was required to mock up an iPhone app that could be pitched to Hankook that users would find informative, engaging, and provide data collection.

The idea was to create an application that allowed users to register their new tires, each registration holds information about the tire that would allow users to have information pushed to their phone such as when to renew their tires, annual mileage and any offers that were at their local garage for different types of tires.

The app would hold information about safe driving in extreme weather conditions and also provide information about the different types of tires that are available from Hankook.

You can see more images of the app below:

Possibly one of the largest projects I’ve ever worked on, Dell often give presentations to customers on various levels which resulted in a large PowerPoint presentation. Dell approached Bourne to create an interactive presentation that could be demonstrated to customers and also sent to customers to use themselves.

Using Flash we created a web based version and a standalone version that could be translated in to 12 different languages using XML, as well as translations it was also built so the layout and the content was completely editable and easy to create a new presentation as and when it was required.

Using SWFAddress we were able to add deep-linking in to the web based version to allow for a full web experience.

You can see more images below, and you can view the project here

Dell required a microsite to demonstrate the features of their Management Console to customers. The microsite was to be delivered in three languages across Latin America, designed in Fireworks and built using AS3, and After Effects.

You can view the project here or you can view more images below.

After upgrading to the Flex 4.1 SDK due to having some new projects starting I came across possibly the most annoying thing that stumped me for a few hours, when compiling via ANT in Flash Builder I was receiving the following error:

Warning: This compilation unit did not have a factoryClass specified in Frame metadata to load the configured runtime shared libraries. To compile without runtime shared libraries either set the -static-link-runtime-shared-libraries option to true or remove the -runtime-shared-libraries option.

So this got me stumbling around Google like some sort of drunken monkey trying to find the problem, what the hell was this error? where the hell did it come from? I came across the solution of placing the following in to the Additional Compiler arguments in the propertied of the project:

-static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true

However this solved nothing and left me frustrated when this is all I could find on it, so I took it in to my own hands and copied the SDK to a safe location so I could dissect its structure and hopefully find a golden nugget, and I did. Located in frameworks/flex-config.xml there is the following preference:

<static-link-runtime-shared-libraries>false</static-link-runtime-shared-libraries>

Change this to:

<static-link-runtime-shared-libraries>true</static-link-runtime-shared-libraries>

And you are good to go. If anyone knows of any other solution please let me know.

I recently went to Marbella on holiday, and after nearly getting run over by a Bentley Continental on the first night I decided to spend most of my time reading, I’ve had this book now for a while and only ever got through the first chapter at a half arsed attempt whilst on the train. So I started it again, and I can honestly say I now have a fascination with Design Patterns no matter what language they are for, they bring order to chaos and help bring developers together.

As much as I love Design Patterns, I also wish I had more time to test more out in real world examples however I know this is wishful thinking with the tight deadlines developers and designers work to.

If anyone is looking to improve on their coding, looking at bringing developers together or even looking to discover a new pattern on the projects you are working on I can’t recommend this book anymore, it gives amazing examples and break downs of how things work. I can honestly say this book has improved my code and also my way of thinking about implementing elements before starting to slap away on the keyboard like a mad man.

You can find the Amazon UK link here.