Man in Space - FWA Mobile of the Day!

I'm extremely happy to announce that our first iPad App 'Man in Space' has won the FWA 'Mobile of the Day' award on www.thefwa.com. For those of you that don't know, the FWA is an industry recognised site that gives awards to websites and other digital products of excellence.

Man in Space iPad App - Video

Check out the video of the App in action demonstrated from by Dan and Will from the Sky at Night Magazine team.

Our first iPad App is now available in the App Store

I am very pleased to announce that our first iPad App - Man in Space, is now available in the App Store. It's an interactive book all about manned space flight through history right up to the present day. For those of you lucky enough to have an iPad here is a link to it. Even if you don't have one go take a look. There is a full description and several screenshots.



P.S. it's currently ranked 14th in the USA!

Award Winning Team

Yesterday in work the results of the BBC Magazine awards were revealed and I'm very happy to say that the BBC Customer Publishing team won the Innovation award for the interactive digital magazines they produce. So kudos to Julie Williams, Alison Hazell, Paul McIntyre, Pat Reid, Alun Harris, Cavan Scott and last but not least, Kerry Bradshaw and - me! The two Flash developers that build the magazines.

Add the Facebook like button to your Blog or Website

Did you know you can add a Facebook like button to your blog or website easily without having to do anything with API's or code?
just paste the code below into your blog template or webpages/articles or posts.
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://yourwebsiteaddress.com &amp;layout=standard&amp;show-faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" id="facebook-like"></iframe><br />
Don't forget - if you like this post - press the button!

I've been recruited!

I'm happy to announce that as of 28th Jan I am a Junior developer for magazine services in the city of Bristol. Its a great place to work and I am part of a young dynamic team of developers and designers. My work will be a nice mixture of XHTML, CSS, Flash, PHP and Drupal and who knows.... The ethos of the online team is to learn and share knowledge and they run skill swap afternoons and support creativity to the max! I'm very happy to work there :)

Video Cube

activeden tweeted about this a while ago describing it "this is one of the coolest flash things I've seen". I think its pretty cool too - take a look for yourself

Link: 101 five minute fixes incrementally improve your website

If you're like me and you find it hard to get inspired to update your website or portfolio, this post is really useful 101 five minute fixes incrementally improve your website

Bilbao By Dusk

After the press launch we went for an awesome lunch and then we took a ride up the funicular tramway to a high point  and overlooked the city as the sunset. Somebody let me have a go with a real camera and here is a selection of my shots of Bilbao in the dusk....

 

 

Metro Installation

Today we installed the exhibition in the Casco Riejo Metro station which involved hanging the 12 large panels on the tunnel walls. we also quickly inflated the photosphere which will be there for the opening  tomorrow (9th Dec) morning. There will also be a press conference. Here are some pictures taken on my phone, there will be some nice PR shots tomorrow.

 

 

Friday in Bilbao

Went down in to the City yesterday to Bilbao Arté (thats the art centre you know) where we were to meet a van with 12 2.5x1 metre prints. They soon arrived in a van and we hurriedly offloaded them so that Bilbao's traffic flow wasn't too impeded. After struggling up 2 flights of stairs we unwrapped them and they were carefully scrutinized by people with eyes that work.
It seemed all was not well. There were bubbles, bands, wrong colors and I suspect, other more mysterious anomalies all of which were to the obvious displeasure of Matt and Janire. A phone call followed and if you have never heard an angry Spanish woman on the phone let me tell you; it makes a humming birds wing beats seem positively slow. Rapide!
Still, there was fun to be had on Matts new bike on the way home.

Divine Comedy

Well what a mission that was. I left Newport at 10.30 on Wednesday morning on a national express (without a jolly hostess) and from there it all went downhill. The driver announced over his magic microphone that the diesel gauge wasn't working and, even though he thought there would be enough fuel, he wanted to make absolutely sure so we would be stopping at the garage to fill up. This took 20 minutes. My connection in London was 15 minutes after this bus was due to arrive - which the driver informed me - I should never have been booked on because the company always allow 40 minutes for a connection. But it wasn't all bad. The guy opposite me had clearly been a master of deception at some time in his life because I didn't notice him drinking - or even that he was drunk - until he got his old boy out and started urinating where he sat!
I moved to a different seat.
When we were off the motorway he moved to the pavement.
So I got to Victoria Station and caught the A6 national express to Stansted airport. At this point I still had an outside chance of making my flight - that is until we turned out of the bus station. From there on all the way out of London and on the M25 the traffic was a nightmare.
So I got off at the airport and asked when the next flight to Bilbao was. At 17.15 I was told - tomorrow!
Great. Now I had to work out what to do for 24 hours. After some investigating I found that there was a Holiday Inn on the airport, but at £69 a night I thought **** that. So my friend Matt sorted it for me to stay with his parents in Colchester, about an hour away. So I checked out the buses from Stansted. Guess what - National Express! So I asked the guy in the national express office what time the next bus to Colchester was. "8 pm, bay 28" he informed me. I thanked him and went to find a seat for 2/12 hours. I made it to bay 28 in good time and waited for my bus. And waited. And waited a bit longer. I then went into the office again to ask where the 8 o'clock bus to Colchester was. The new monkey behind the desk informed that it had left at 8pm. I was of course perplexed by this and explained my state of bewilderment to the monkey who told me between bananas that I should have been at bay 22. I now had to wait until 9pm. I manged to get the 9pm bus and I'm glad to say that Matts Dad was waiting at the station for me and drove me back to his house where I was far more comfortable than I would have been in a £69 a night Holiday Inn room. Apart from walking a mile in the rain with all my luggage to catch the bus this morning, the rest of today went very well - mainly because I was sure to arrive 2 hours earliy for everything!
Anyway, I'm happy to say that i am writing this from the Ghosts in Armour residence in Bilbao. And I recommend National Express for all your budget journeys.
Adios.

Balloon Bass and Box

I'm really not one of these thats trawls TYoutube all day long watching funny/weird/wacky/cool videos and sending links to everyone via every possible form of social media but.....

This is cool honestly

Beautiful Flash 3D

This is just so nice. I'm not going to say anymore. Just go look for yourself

Cubo Realidad Aumentada

Hola Amigos!

I am in Bilbao, Spain on the last day of the Jetlag BIO festival. If you didn't already know we are here to run an Interactive Augmented Reality stand that is a kind of information point for festival goers. I will write a more detailed post with pictures soon but for now you can go to urbanreaction.org, click on "interact" and follow the instructions to have a play with the "Augmented Reality Cube" or as I like to call it "Cubo Realidad Aumentada".

Interactive Flame Thrower

Just for fun, a little bit of experimentation and a bit of insomnia. I've never used Flash's ability to read microphone input so I thought I would check it out. Its actually quite limited in terms of accessing the raw data (although there is an online petition to get Adobe to allow access to raw mic data, and some cool stuff here). All you need to do is blow at your microphone and make flames!
Try it for yourself

Javascript/Flash mp3 Player

I was recently asked if I could make a Flash mp3 player that was controlled with Javascript. Obviously my first question was why on earth would you want (or need) to do that? The answer I got was perfectly understandable. To have the ability to integrate the Flash element seamlessly into HTML content. In other words the links would be normal HTML links that when clicked played the song in the Flash player. Of course this also has the benefit of streamed content speeds, the user doesn't have to download anything. Flash's ExternalInterface class is the key to this solution, it makes linking from ActionScript to Javascript a piece of cake.
Here's an example. The white pixel in the top left corner of the grey panel is the the Flash content (it's white to show you can see it).

Sometimes I surprise myself....

I am working on my portfolio/website at the moment, in between other things, and since I'm only putting my email address on my contact page for now, I thought it needed something to fill the space. I had an idea to use my business cards since they hold my contact details and I had thought of using Papervision3D and making an interactive card that flips over etc. but came up with the idea you see above. I'm really pleased with the way it came out so I'm sticking with it for now (I surprise myself because I'm generally really bad at graphics).

Flash Developer available for work...

Well I'm still looking for a job but in the mean time if you need any Flash work done, whether its a website, image gallery, template - anything Flash related, let me know. I can also offer web related services including HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL.

SoundMixer.computeSpectrum + Timeline Audio

I am posting this little Flash ActionScript hint here in case somebody googles the same problem...

When a sound is embedded directly in the timeline of a Flash movie as opposed to being loaded dynamically, using the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() method doesn't work. Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. I had a working sound visualiser when I went to bed last night, and this morning I didn't. No changes to the code at all.
After a lot of googling I found this post by Jason Van Cleave on the [Flashcoders] mailing list. Thanks Jason!

Basically you have to load in an mp3 of silence, assign it to a channel and play it. Then your spectrum analyzer will work with your intended sound/music.

I know - its weird!

I also found loads of posts about how it is not a true spectrum analyser yadder, yadder which were quite interesting. If you like that kind of thing...

[CODE]
// Strange silent mp3 hack
var s:Sound = new Sound(new URLRequest("2sec.mp3"));
var channel:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel();
channel = s.play();

var ba:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
var g:Graphics = this.graphics;
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, loop);

function loop(e:Event):void
{

SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(ba, true, 4);
g.clear();
g.lineStyle(3, 0xFFFFFF, 1);
g.beginFill(0xC11226);
g.moveTo(0, 250);

for(var i:uint=0; i<256; i++)
{
var num:Number = -ba.readFloat() * 500;
g.drawRect(i*2, 250, 2, num/15);
}

}

[CODE]