Flash on the Beach 2011: pre-conference

So every year I like to double my excitement for Flash on the Beach by preparing my lecture schedule in advance. It’s also really useful to use as reference at the conference itself – to remind me which of the three tracks I preferred when I actually had the time to sit down and read the overviews, and also if you need to find me you’ll know where I’m most likely to be.

So here’s my preferred schedule so far – there’s still a couple of unknowns but it’s looking pretty well rounded already…

More

So. It’s about bloody time I wrote another blog post don’t you think?

It’s been far too long I know – and for that I apologise. It’s almost exactly a year to the day since I started working full-time for ThinkJam, an agency almost completely dedicated to the movie industry…and it’s been quite a ride already.

Within the first three months I was strolling down a premiere red carpet next to Bruce Willis, which was both thoroughly exciting and completely surreal. And now after 12 months I’m working on some of the most exciting Flash projects I’ve ever worked on. All in all, it’s been one hell of a year.

Even though I haven’t been posting to my blog recently, I’ve been storing away ideas for blog posts in the hope to get back to it soon. So you’re likely to see an influx of new posts very soon, including help with Android Wi-fi hotspots, Facebook application tips and a whole bunch of useful new AS3 classes – watch this space.

Also, before I go I think it’s probably worth mentioning that I’ll be attending the wonderful Flash on the Beach conference again this September. Hopefully I’ll get to see some of you there – drop me a line if you fancy a pint.

Cheers! TBOH

A Quick Announcement

You’ve probably noticed over the last year that I’ve not been posting much on TBOH. This was simply down to not having the time to play, experiment and share. The recession hit a few of my clients hard and this of course had quite a knock-on effect on me. I was finding that I was constantly having to chase down non-paying or late-paying clients, which was becoming a full-time job in itself. Cutting a long story short, I woke up one morning and realised that I hadn’t designed or developed anything for over six months purely due to excessive admin – and I decided there and then that this couldn’t go on.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Ferris Bueller

So 2 months ago I accepted a full-time position with a fantastic digital agency called ThinkJam, and began the process of slowly dissolving my company. On October 1st Plagro officially closed its offices to new business.

Although I will continue to maintain the websites of existing Plagro clients on a freelance basis, I now intend to take a break from the stresses of running a business and concentrate purely on development for a while. ThinkJam are a fantastic company with some extremely impressive clients. Even after only 2 months I feel very comfortable working for them and have already noticed a massive improvement in both my development skills and my own general well-being. They’re a great agency and I think I’m going to be very happy with them.

So what does this mean for TBOH?

Well, it means that I now have a lot more time for personal projects. I’m currently spending my spare time working with a few APIs that I’ve been meaning to play with for some time now and I’ll post any findings as I go along. I will also be revisiting the Tweeter class very soon – I’ve been working on a series of classes that I’m currently calling TweetEvent that will allow for greater searchability of Twitter (hashtags and users included)…and I will post it up as soon as it’s vaguely usable.

As I’m developing on a full-time basis again you’re also likely to notice an increase in short posts – I would like to keep up the momentum of simple problem solving posts both for my own reference and as a way of helping others who encounter the same time-wasting issues.

So…onwards and upwards…

Merry Christmas!

Apologies for not updating the site for a couple of months, I’ve had quite a hectic last quarter. Lots of exciting new AS3 bits that I hope to put online in the early part of 2010, an entirely new plagro.com (some of the code will be posted here) will hopefully go live in the first quarter and also I’ll be posting a few jquery/javascript nuggets that I’ve come across in the last couple of months as soon as I get chance.

So all there is to do now is to wish you all a very Merry Christmas…and a very happy new year. Have a good one!

The Hippy

Big hugs from TBOH

Welcome you lovely people you.

This site is the playground of the The Burned Out Hippy, head honcho of the web design and multimedia company Plagro.com. It serves no other purpose than to act as a place where I can store my most recent Flash ActionScript experiments and everyday musings about Adobe Flash and the web. I will be posting code whenever an experiment is complete so that you can have a play with it yourselves, but I’m afraid it is unlikely that I will have the time to offer support.

I can’t guarantee that the experiments here will be original ideas as most of the time I’m just trying to get things to work.  Nor can I guarantee that the code is “best practice” or will work 100% of the time as I am primarily a designer, not a developer.

But if you find any of the code here useful, you are welcome to use any of my work in exchange for a simple link credit (I don’t even mind if it’s a hidden link, as long as its HTML) to either this website or www.plagro.com. Links are worth their weight in gold. Presuming of course you could weigh links. Which you can’t.

In the pipeline at the moment are a couple of Twitter classes (based around the Twitter API) that should allow designers to add single and/or multiple twitter feeds to their flash websites. I’m also working on a bit of code which is aimed at being a very basic version of Jonathan Harris’ wonderful We Feel Fine using AS3 with Twitter…no movement, just a class that makes it easy to pull out emotions and keywords from the public timeline of Twitter. Watch this space.

As you will see as time progresses, my current aim is to simplify rather than be 100% original. I believe that in order to reach the ultimate goal of originality, you need to be able to pull efficiently on your previous experiences. I often get locked into chunks of code that take me a lifetime to debug and cause me real headaches, even though I know that I’ve produced similar pieces of code in the past. It’s disheartening and often I lose track of my goal because of it. My background is in Computer Science, but I realised quite early on that I would much rather spend my time designing rather than knee deep in complex algorithms. So the ultimate aim of my experiments is to make my life easier and to allow me a little more creative freedom. If it helps you achieve the same, bonus.

Hope you enjoy your stay

Big man hugs,

TBOH