Tag Archive for 'work'

09
Feb
10

My babies alive!

By Jason Langdon 1 Comment
Categories: Flash Tags: , , , .

http://www.wrench.com.au/

Initially built using AS2 but never launched in 2006 (due to time constraints i.e. doing real work), the domain that was supposed to showcase my wares remained as a coming soon page for nigh on 4 years. Finally the bullet was bitten in the latter part of 2009 and the decision to port the entire site to AS3 and utilise the Gaia framework was made. Within 4 weeks, a fully functional, SEO compliant, user accessible site was finished and launched. Kudos to Steven for the framework, rock on Gaia!

Feel free to leave any comments you’ve got about the site; be they good, bad or otherwise…

Wrench screen grab

28
Nov
08

re: Australia

By Jason Langdon 2 Comments
Categories: General Tags: , , , .

At first my comments below were driven largely by the offence taken (as an Australian) at Daniel Freeman’s post titled Australia. Check out the article, it refers to working in different countries and the opportunity that brings (or not as the case may be).

Now I find over generalising isn’t a great way to make a point.

“I tried to convey the potential of what I was doing. But Australia just didn’t understand technology, and there is no real strategy”

Bollocks. I live in the UK now and I can safely say that the internet infrastructure available to most UK homes is inferior to that available in most of Australia (not withstanding the huge geographic divide). I use the example of the UK as he mentions living in England in his post. Now this doesn’t imply an advanced knowledge of the technology, but surely the fact that it’s there is because of the demand for it to be so. You don’t build incredibly expensive IT infrastructure unless there’s a fundamental requirement do so.

Further to this, what about being specific to the city you lived in. Last time I checked Australia is a fairly big place, so saying that Australia doesn’t understand technology is a pretty big call. Maybe the clients you encountered didn’t understand technology. I know that most of mine do and are more than happy for me to use it when it’s justified.

As for there being no real strategy, I’d suggest this again is a generalisation. There are various Government sites (one of which is http://www.dbcde.gov.au/) that go into great detail regarding future plans and current legislation.

What I will agree on you with is the inability for things to get done in Australia. Finding a consensus on issues can be difficult (involving many points of view guarantees this) but in Australia we’ve made it into a bit of an art. From Federal to local government all facets of the decision making engine are stymied by an inability to act on what (to us mere mortals) just seems like common sense. Have at look at the news items on Whirlpool (the place to go for Australian Broadband news and information) to get an idea of this in action.

And it’s this inability to act that is one of the main reasons I’m writing this post from London, and not little old Adelaide, South Australia. I wanted to see how things get done in a city that seemingly doesn’t stop for anyone or anything.

And although at first I was offended (hey, I’m Australian! ;-) I do agree that there are more opportunities available beyond her fair shores. Though I suspect that has something to do with the sparseness of the population… which is just common sense.

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24
Oct
08

My foray into the world of Flex

By Jason Langdon 0 Comments
Categories: Flex Tags: , , , , .

For the last week or so I’ve been diving into the world of Flex (after a few false starts with Flex 1.5 and 2 over a year ago).

Thought I’d post a few links that have helped out or have been of some interest along the way.

Firstly, this one’s closely aligned to my heart - Finally I get to learn Flex. I’m hearen ya Brad, I finally get to learn a bit about Flex as well!

Next came an example about Rich ItemRenderers. Seeing that sort of stuff always gets me excited about the power of Flex.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been playing (quite literally) with a rather cool Flex interface.

Then I got involved in the discussion at polygeek when I was trying to make text in Flex look like a normal HTML link.

I’ve also been actively looking for Flex books. Checked out Doug and Deepa’s Adobe Flex 3.0 for Dummies at the Borders near Covent Garden (and yes I’m name dropping, the novelty of walking around the streets of London hasn’t worn off on a boy from lil ‘ol Adelaide… yet). I think I’ll wait until Programming Flex 3: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Media Applications with Adobe Flex lands in the UK. I’m also reading the pint size Getting Started with Flex 3 via the free 45 day trial Safari offers. Should be able to polish it off in 45 days, so not sure about the logic of offering a book like this on a trial like that.

Possibly a bit ahead of where I’m at at the moment, “top 10 mistakes while building a flex application” gives some insight into things I’ll need to (and to an extent) already am aware of.

Lastly the site that’s been the greatest help during my first tentative steps into the world of Flex has been Flex Examples (and specifically the Tags page). Love your work Peter deHaan! (who incidentally has impeccable taste in blog design ;-)

I find the willingness and depth of support for Flex astounding. And the view source feature is genius (whoever at Adobe came up with that one can probably take a reasonable amount of credit for the ever expanding Flex developer base).

I’ll post more about what I’m working on in the forth coming weeks. Plus I’ll get to posting the currency converter I whipped up (once it’s been Airified and Vistafied) as well.

So there you have it, a whirlwind trip through the last few days and weeks of my Flex journey. Here’s hoping it will continue to be an enjoyable one.

22
Jul
08

Gaia Flash Framework - My Experience

By Jason Langdon 23 Comments
Categories: Flash Tags: , , , , , , .

I’ve been a bit busy over the last few months. Here’s what I’ve been up to…

I’ve moved to the UK
I’ve travelled home again for a family reunion
I’ve read a good portion of Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0
I’ve drunk more Guinness than I care to (or can) remember in Ireland
I’ve sold a car
I’ve worked on my first AS3 site
I’ve used the Gaia Flash Framework

The last point is obviously what I’d like to delve in to a bit more.

For those of you that aren’t aware (like myself about 3 months ago) what the Gaia Flash Framework is, you can find out more at Steven Sacks comprehensive website - http://www.gaiaflashframework.com. I only stumbled upon the Framework as a result of someone else (can’t remember who it was now, but thanks!) posting about it on their blog.

In essence it’s a Framework that takes a lot of the leg work out of creating page based Flash sites. By Page based I mean sites that have a fairly standard navigation hierarchy. It can be used for more complex projects, though I found I struggled against the Framework more than it helped me some of the time.

The project I decided to use it on was for the SBS Australia Documentary website - mY Generation

The main issues I came up against in using the Framework for this site were the following:

  • I couldn’t have two pages loaded on the screen from separate branches at the same time. So If I wanted a video from one section to remain visible on screen while the user navigated to the “TELL A FRIEND” section I couldn’t do this due to the way pages have to unload if there not part of the parent page node
  • Using the transition engine, although powerful, quickly became very convoluted and confusing when testing the preloading of pages and assets. Though I suspect I found this as the Framework wasn’t quite suited to this type of project
  • The file size of the entire project was larger than I would’ve preferred as each page had to have it’s own swf associated with it. This meant not easily being able to share assets like fonts amongst pages. This was partially addressed in later versions of the Framework, so I will have to see if I can utilise this functionality next time around.
  • Later on in the project new releases of the Framework became available that significantly changed the implementation of some of the Frameworks features. This made it very difficult for me to upgrade and get the benefit of the bug fixes that were made

On the up side, it’s author Steven Sacks mustn’t spend a great deal of time sleeping as he seems to hold down a full time job whilst at the same time rapidly releasing new versions of the Framework and responding with very lengthy and informative posts on the forum. The documentation is also very good, though there were a few things missing which threw me for a loop (though most users probably wouldn’t have experienced the same issues as I was pushing the boundary’s of what the Framework was capable of). The documentation also gets updated very frequently with issues that users are experiencing in the forums.

I didn’t get to use the SEO capabilities of the Framework, but am finishing up my “new” (it’s been 2 years in the making) website now and am contemplating porting it all across to Gaia just for this 1 feature.

So check out the Framework, check out the SBS site, and let us know if you’ve had any experience with Gaia.

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