Beautiful UV^d Logo

Our snail paced re-brand has evolved into a rather brisk ramble (we are nearly out of breath) and as you can see we have settled on a new logo. Actually we have almost completed the web layouts but that’s another story (why say it in one post when you can say it in two!).

The basic premise behind the logo / re-brand was that the original Ultraviolet Design brand no longer represented the type of work we do and how we wish to be seen to the wider audience; with the only recognisable industry word in our name emphasising ‘design’ we felt that our other attributes were being unfairly over-powered. For instance, whilst we do web design, the design element is only one function we have to perform in an overall process of many. To put it another way, to emphasise only one skill of the many skills we have seems a little short sighted!

As such, we have re-branded ourselves UV^d and the website will follow shortly. No, it really will! Watch this space.

This post was written by Patrick on June 29, 2009 at 4:33 pm

Flex Builder 3 – Internal Build Error bug

I’ve been struggling with a Flex Builder 3 bug for the last two days where an Error is dispalyed which rotates between:

An internal build error has occurred. Right-click for more information.

&

Classes must not be nested

..neither of which specify a file or line at which the error occurs. Very helpful.

This is not a new bug by any account and from my research seemed to be particularly prominent in Flex Builder 2. This article which lists a few of the reasons which this may happen is very useful and I’ve just noticed that in the comments there is the solution I was looking for. I however didn’t get that far through the comments and have had to painstakingly comment out my code, line by line until the error dissapeared. To add to the fun, it was a possibility that leaving comments within conditionals could have been the cause of the problem as well. Eventually I discovered that the cause of my bug was an empty switch statement:

switch(pageId){

}

…..why I dont’ know.

Anyway I thought I’d add to the documentation about this as it is a very annoying time consuming bug. I hope this will be resolved in Flash Builder!

This post was written by Gareth on June 24, 2009 at 9:35 am

AIR app review: Doc? and Polaris

I have recently been researching small scale desktop application design for a video project we are producing in Flash. The obvious place to start in this instance was with showcases of Adobe AIR applications. Due to the ease with which applications can now be deployed using the AIR runtime, it already seems to have encouraged the development of applications with greater focus spent on the usability and aesthetics of the user interface and experience. Critics of this low threshold may say that this will lead to a lower standard of overall application functionality and perhaps to dirty code powering inefficient and buggy applications. I’m sure there will be many examples of this but considering the small scale and usually simple nature of AIR apps, I think this will not be the case in the long term.

In any case the main reason I wrote this post was in order to make note of two applications that I found during my research, which are notable more for their utility than their design.

Doc? Air Local LiveDocs
As an Actionscript developer without a photographic memory I am forced to regularly visit LiveDocs for Actionscript3 and Flex component references. If I’m unfortunate enough to be coding in the Flash IDE then I use the built in help docs which are slow and clunky and in Flex Builder 3 they are not much better. Doc? enables you to access LiveDocs for Flash CS3/CS4 and Flex all in the one application providing you have those applications installed (you have to point Doc? to the location on your hard disk where the reference files are installed – instructions for this are on the site FAQ). You can also create bookmarks for the pages which you use regularly.

Polaris
Polaris is quite simply a desktop application for viewing you Google Analytics accounts on your desktop. It’s incredibly compact and easy to use plus you still get all the lovely graphs and visuals which you’ll be used to from the Google Analytics web interface.

These are currently my two favourite AIR apps but I’m sure there’s a plethora of others which I’m yet to find. Feel free to present us with any further contenders.

This post was written by Gareth on June 15, 2009 at 1:09 pm