We have finished an enjoyable project for SPAR International, which involved creating an athletics game based around the button bashing classic, Daley Thomson’s Decathlon. When creating the graphics and style for this game we wanted to utilise the nostalgic bitmap effect which you see quite often in Flash games and in the graphic style of Pixel Art. From a development perspective this was very convenient because I have been looking for an excuse to try the Actionscript 3 game framework, Flixel, which I have seen lorded around the Internet as perfect for this purpose.

It has it’s own global render cycle which simplifies the process of adding bitmap graphics to the stage and creates a predictable fps independent game loop. Forum posts on the Flixel site state that this rendering process is more efficient than Flash player alone due to the fact that is purely geared toward low resolution bitmapped graphics. There where many elements which increased the speed of development such as the inclusion of the FlxObjects which are already set-up with simple motion facilities such as acceleration and velocity on both x and y axis which allow for the simulation of horizontal character movement and also vertical forces (i.e. gravity).

There are many other noteworthy features of the Flixel framework such as Sprites for Animation and the global/static FlxG control class which have been very well designed to make game development in Flash easier. I will, however, not go into detail about these because a concise post about Flixel from the Inside RIA blog has covered these. For those (developers mainly, I suspect) interested in understanding the affordances of using this framework over creating a game from scratch, reading this and also exploring the host of games and tutorials on the Flixel site will be worthwhile. Canabalt is a particular favourite game due to the intense screen shaking and accompanying music.

The game we created is called Beat Barni and is online now. Due to time constraints we created a pentathlon (5 events) rather than a decathlon, so feel free to challenge Barni to any of the following events; 100m, 400m Hurdles, Javelin, Pole-vault and Long Jump.

With the recent shock revelation that Mrs Kipling does actually exist and was once an actress in Corontation St we thought we should make sure that the exceedingly good cakes were as good as we remembered.

Safe to say that the despite the implications of some sort of power shift within the Mr Kipling marketing machine, the cakes are still high quality. Just take a look at Patrick’s face. He’s loving that Bakewell.

GOOD produces a website, videos, live events, and a print magazine. They seem to successfully mix an ethical ethos with good design throughout their projects.

I came across the results of a competition they have recently finished for the best infographic which would “highlight executive compensation (as in, how much CEOs etc. are paid) in an interesting way.”

It’s nice to see creative visualizations of mass data and these are very good examples of this.

One of the first blog posts on the UV^d blog was about Java application called Wordle which created pretty looking tag clouds based on word occurrences in blog RSS feeds, del.icio.us accounts or any block of supplied text.

It is quite interesting to see a peripheral snapshot of how a blogs content changes over time. Saves the trouble of reading it all as well.

We’re so close; I can smell it! Our new site is careering dangerously towards completion. One element of the homepage is a frivolous physics environment which I was kindly allowed the time to make in Flash using the Box2DFlash physics engine.

The engine has been ported from Eric Catto’s powerful C++ physics engine (Box2D). It took a little time to adjust to some of the coding conventions that have also found their way from the C++ version but after that initial steep learning curve the engine is fantastic to work with.

I’ve released this today before the site launch so that people can play with it and inevitably find the bugs which I’ve lovingly engineered into it. Feel free to put it through its paces!

http://demos.ultravioletdesign.co.uk/physics/

One of the most beneficial and exciting parts of being a web developer in London is the welcoming and engaging community which exists here. There are continuous events and workshops being held (usually for free) on various technologies and topics relating to our industry. My expectations of these usually small scale and low key events were massively surpassed by the 1st Linked Data Meetup I attended last Wednesday. A large portion of the Linked Data community were present and some of the leading developers and thinkers in this field were there to showcase applications of Linked Data.

For those not acquainted with the phrase and its meaning it would be beneficial to watch Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction to Linked Data at the TED conference. But in brief it is one of the many possible methods of incorporating meaning (semantics) into the abundance of information that is available on the World Wide Web. Essentially Linked Data could bring us closer to a Semantic Web or as Tim Berners-Lee calls it the ’next Web’. His image is of a web where explicit URIs are used to represent things in the real world (people, places, events, objects, etc). Once this URI exists, as a representation of a concept or object, it can then be used as a reference point to be talked about or linked to by other sources of data; hence creating linked data.

I cannot begin to cover all of the information relayed during the half day event particularly that relating to the formal specifications of linked data. However one of the messages of the day was the importance of exemplifying the incredible potential of Linked Data by either blogging about it (tada!!!!) or by creating compelling applications which utilize it.

Firstly we will be endeavouring to use RDFa in our future web projects to embed rich metadata into our web documents and I strongly recommend that other agencies and developers do the same. Secondly I would like to draw attention to a couple of the projects which were illustrated at the event which exemplify the possibilities of Linked Data.

MusicBore
A project completed during the Music Hack Day in London which uses Linked Data to essentially remove the need for radio DJ’s. \o/

Data Incubator
Data Incubator is a project which is focussed around taking mass datasets from willing participants (NASA, Discogs, OpenLibrary) and opening them up for wider reuse. They do this by converting the data into accessible linked data and through a community of developers maintain the dataset with the intention of eventually giving it back to the original owners. As stated on their site; “the goal is not to steal, but to show that there is a better way.”

Sig.ma
An RDF search engine. If for example you typed your name into sig.ma, you will receive results from various different online sources which already embed RDF, RDFa or microformats into their sites. An impressive array of information will be returned which is eerily specific to you rather than any of your namesakes which you tend to find on Google.

On a personal note I am very proud of myself (and Marc who I attended with) for not screaming like girls and demanding the autograph of Tim Berners-Lee when he arrived at the conference and sat at the table with us! I wish I was wearing my I LOVE THE INTERNET tshirt!

I’d like to draw attention to some impressive new interfaces which seem to be bringing a Philip K Dick reality ever closer. Using various open source technologies it is possible for artists and programmers alike to experiment and innovate with things such as computer vision, augmented reality and tangible holographs.

Computer vision enables face detecting and motion tracking of live video footage meaning that a user can interact with software using gestures or that the software can autonomously react to user’s movement. The video below does not illustrate the practical potentials for openCV but is too pretty to not include here.

Gold dust from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Amongst other things computer vision enables the process of Augmented Reality (AR); the fusion of computer graphics/text and live video imagery to ‘enhance’ the experience. This has become more popular on mobile devices of late and there are many AR applications for the iPhone on the horizon. Here is an illustration of mobile based AR:

Touch screen interfaces such as that of the iPhone have almost been absorbed into common use and understanding in their short existence. Despite this, one of the difficulties of using this type of interface is the lack of tangible feedback from the smooth screen apposed to pushing buttons on a phone or keyboard. This problem also applies when flailing around your arms whilst interactive with a gesture based computer vision interface. This almost seems like an impossible problem to overcome. Of course this is not the case as illustrated by this Tangible Hologram which responds to user interaction using small blasts of air or “Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display” (via). Amazing if not a little scary – love it!

This is the first of our cake of the month posts. Today we found inspiration from an M&S Coffee & Walnut cake. Whilst discussing the finer details of our ongoing redesign we enjoyed moist coffee flavoured sponge with just the right amount of buttercream.  Highly recommended by the whole team.

Future cake of the month reviews will consist of a wide variety of butter filled, sugar coated blog posts. Our intrepid team of eaters will be happy to accept free dessert based gifts from readers who wish to raise the profile of their cake making enterprises. Sponge, pie or flan; biscuit, Battenburg or birthday.  We will eat it all. Stay tuned.

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&

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!

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.