Noticed anything different lately? We’ve been beavering away behind the scenes to make some last minute improvements for racers. You should now be able to see up and coming prize tokens and rainbows on the thumbnails for the next sites.

If you need some tips, Mattias wrote some good pointers on his blog, they are right on the money. The worst thing that can happen is that you get stranded without boost, so I recommend that you only put your foot down when you see some more coming up.

Happy boosting!

Update: We’ve fixed that annoying “your balloon has left…” screen appearing twice if you had left the computer for a while. Now when you follow your balloon you should go straight to it

This is the first phase of the latest project I’ve been working on at Poke, a flash site for Orange www.playballoonacy.com. Finally the big clients are letting us use AS3 (Flash9). This project is massive. Thankfully, I’m getting some help from Gabes aka Pixelbreaker. Get a balloon or submit your site to be part of the race.

I finally made the switch to FDT. My munificent employers stumped up the 599€ for the enterprise version which is a fairly substantial outgoing. Up till recently I have been doing all my AS editing in TextMate, which at €50 is considerably cheaper and in many ways rocks. I love it’s straight forward interface and customisable features.

TextMate is flexible. With a bit of help from some eager contributors from the TextMate community I had some really great additions to my workflow. You can publish swfs directly from the TextMate interface using the open source AS2 compiler MTASC (see this post) or Adobe’s free MXMLC compiler ( I haven’t managed to get it to work with the faster FCSH yet) along with integration with ANT build scripts for fast and easy multi-swf builds (see Simon Gregory’s blog for the AS3 bundle and the ANT bundle).

So what does FDT offer? Well as-you-type code checking, and cross referencing of your custom classes for one. Automatic organisation of imports is a massive time saver. Refactoring of classes, methods and properties is also something that is trivially easy in FDT. I seem to be spending a lot less time maintaining the boring stuff and more time concentrated on the ‘real’ bits of code.

I still miss a few things about textmate, being able to drag any project on to textmate and have it opened in a few seconds. Vertical text selection and editing. In the end the features of FDT are just too powerful to resist. For an Actionscript project, especially if you are working with frameworks or AS3 where there are many packages to remember it saves a lot of time.

Publish AS3 from Textmate

The Unlimited website mentioned in this post is up for FWA Site of the Year. If you’ve got a sec please throw a vote it’s way.

Just finished work on the Jenny Packham site, lots of Flash wizziness which once again benefited from the Pixlib framework. I sort of inherited this project after the original build went a bit haywire. I’m starting to see how a project’s complexity increases exponentially when many interactions are possible from anywhere in the application.

Credits:

Project Management: Simon R | Art Direction / Site Design: Buzz, Al | Flash Programming/Build: Dezza, Russ| Back End: Nilesh, Igor

This is a project that we just finished at Poke for Orange’s ‘Good things should never end campaign’. It’s an unlimited web page! That’s as in unlimited not *unlimited. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out in the end, as the concept of unlimited made me pretty nervous to begin with. This is the second project I’ve completed using Francis Bourre’s open source Pixlib framework for Flash and I must I am loving it. Thanks Francis!

Credits:

Project Management: Alex, Karen | Art Direction / Site Design: Julie, Nik, Nicky | Illustration/Animation: Rex | Flash Programming/Build: Dezza, Dee, Stinky, Matt, Marius | Back End: Knotty, Marc | Sound: Nick

I’ll be honest, I am a bit nervous about starting a blog. I spent many months making a content management system for my existing site, and when it was finished, never seemed to find the time to update it. Hopefully I’ll fare a bit better with this.

I’ll be posting random rants and some work related stuff. But that’s going to have to be another day as it’s a beautiful sunny day in London which happens for only a week or so each year. Later!