Gareth Shapiro London Based Flex/AS3 Freelance Web Developer

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.

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 I have come away feeling injected with inspiration, something that had been replaced by fatigue after some demanding deadlines recently.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.

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.

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.