Gareth Shapiro London Based Flex/AS3 Freelance Web Developer

Like many companies BlackBerry have undertaken sophisticated analysis of the types of people that buy their products and also identified some that don't yet but are likely candidates for the future. This is of course invaluable information to those responsible for developing marketing campaigns and strategies. It is the way that BlackBerry has gone about distributing the information internally that is different.

Isn't it great when digital work lasts longer than 5 min? I recently updated a piece I did exactly a year ago for The Economist's annual World In project.

Underwired are a London based ECRM strategy and execution agency.

Recently they produced their first Flash site but being specialists in digital relationship marketing, retention and email marketing and not Actionscript, it was not running as well as it should. I restructured their site so that it would load quickly while maintaining the clever HTML/Javascript/PHP code they had written to maintain some search engine readable HTML on each page.

Christmas seems to come around so quickly. One minute you are enjoying long summer days in the park and the next thing you know you are building Flash based shopping cart applications for Christmas promotions. Where does the time go?

The first part of this week was spent in Brighton attending the 2009 edition of Flash on the Beach. I had heard good things about it and I was not disappointed. I have come away feeling injected with inspiration, something that had been replaced by fatigue after some demanding deadlines recently. This is filed under 'Work'. I am not sure it should be, it was way too much fun.

If you have been following the posts on this blog you will know about a ”proof of concept” prototype I built for The Economist earlier in the year. This post is about the refinement of that work into online interactive content now published on The Economist website.

Due to business details behind this website I am unable to say for exactly which luxury fashion brand this work was for. It's a shame really because they are well known in UK and Europe for their dresses, suits, sunglasses and especially men and woman's perfume ranges.

On the plus side I had an amazing time working on this website with some really cool people. The Project Manager, Amell Benzerfa, on the job agreed to say some words about my work that I can share with you here....

The Economist put forward the idea that an interactive chart to display some of their data over different time spans would be a great piece of content for their website. What better technology is there for web based interactive charting than Flex? Especially when there are brilliant third party libraries of code developed to achieve just that, such as Flare.

At the end of 2008 I worked on a Flash project for The Economist called 'The World in 2009'. There was a graphic designer who was responsible for producing a world map vector and I wired it all up.

As you can imagine this artwork was intricate. Each country had a border and a background colour that were separate objects, some text fields for labels, and as you would expect also grouped into continents. The designer was using Adobe Illustrator to create the vector shapes and importing these into Flash and sending me the .fla

The process was not very smooth. There were changes to the artwork of course, Illustrator does not create MovieClips in the same way that you would manually and also when dealing with such an complex piece, old fashioned user error creeps in.

The World in 2009 is the 23rd edition of The Economist's annual collection of predictions for the year ahead—with views from journalists, politicians and business people.

This year's edition has two interactive online pieces looking at Countries and Industries in 2009. I was responsible for all the Actionscript and PHP coding.