Gareth Shapiro | London Based Flex / Air / Actionscript Freelance Developer & Trainer

All AS3 programmers have had to cope with situations where what they can see on the screen is different to what their code is telling them. Within Air, Flex and Flash applications the two main contributors to this are; the Flash Player is single threaded, apart from a few exceptions in Air, and internally is based around a frame rate.

Have you ever tried to measure something you have just added to the Display List and even though you can see it on the screen your measurement, something like width or height, is coming back as 0? How about when you are preloading, does your preloader get stuck at 10% and then jump to 100% at the end?

The new Renault Wind is a snazzy looking coupé-roadster. When you feel like letting the sunshine in the top comes down, folds away and the whole trick is completed in 12 seconds.

To promote the new car Renault held a competition to win one based around this theme and the 12 Second Strip was born.

You did read correctly. That does say "Hack" and "The Government" in one sentence.

People often misuse the word hack. It originally meant "to solve a problem" and a group of developers, designers and statisticians got together in London over the weekend to solve the "What cool things can you build with publicly accessible government data?" question.

Being a Flash and Flex programmer naturally I thought it might be good idea to do an interactive data visualisation of some sort.

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.

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....

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.