I’ve recently discovered the joys of the Gaia Framework for Flash. It’s an awe inspiring framework designed to allow Flash designers or developers to rapidly develop really complex applications very easily. One of the best things about it is an adherence to accepted best programming standards. An application built in Gaia kind of takes care of itself. My current project features hundreds of videos and pages. Gaia managed to make short work of organising them all into something that not only solved the problem but also kept everything neat and tidy. I could preload / cache / transition and bookmark, pages, video, content, elements, everything! It implements swfObject, swfFit, swfAddress and Greensock automatically putting every library you could need at your finger tips.
It also makes you think about how you could use it in other projects. It is just made for presentations.

Next time somebody asks me for a Powerpoint presentation done in Flash. I’ll be using the Gaia Framework.

If you were putting together a presentation in Gaia you could build your slides first and bring them all together before the client has time to approve them. Leaving you free to do the alterations rather than finding yourself torn between finishing the application and polishing the content.

One of the best features of Gaia is the XML Scaffolding feature. You write an XML schema describing your application, import the XML into the Gaia panel in the Flash IDE and press the button. Hey Presto! All your Flash files, AS3 classes, symbols, swf, pre loaders, AS imports etc, all get built automatically.

I’ve had a few issues with open Flash files crashing the Flash IDE during a Gaia export but this has never really bothered me. It just encourages me to avoid putting code on any timelines. It’s all open source and free to use. The support and documentation on the website are second to none. Steven Sacks has done an amazing job.

Pithy words of wisdom, often appear mundane. So I’m going to be quick. The secret of successful coding is sleep.

I recently found myself in the hazardous situation of having too much work booked at the same time. My post-summer holiday bank balance allowed me to become seduced by the dark side. I counted that twilight world after 1:00AM as a friend. In reality the hours between 1:00 AM and 5:30 AM are cruel and the full of mischief. Time becomes distorted, decisions become unreliable. The walls between illusion and reality become a thin and fragile membrane through which errors of judgment can seep. When coding this can be dangerous. Sometimes it results in the odd harmless typo, here and there; easy enough to correct. Sometimes, it can lead to a full fledged haemorrhage.

It strikes me that our culture doesn’t much like sleep. I spent a few minutes trying to find pro-sleep quotations on Google and yet from the greatest minds and thinkers throughout history, it seems that sleep is rarely given the credit it deserves. Most references appear to offer the opinion that the fool / peasant sleeps while the genius works through the night. I remember hearing a labour politician talking admiringly about Tony Blair’s work ethic, indicating how impressed we should all be in the meagre two hours sleep Tony allowed himself when he was Prime Minister. Is this a good thing? Oh the irony, of John Prescott sleeping like a baby during a health debate at the Labour Party conference in 2005.

We all accept that healthy minds and bodies depend on a good night’s sleep and yet how often we feel compelled to push ourselves beyond comfort into late nights and fatigue.

Whether it be a result of capitalism or some kind of “propaganda without portfolio”, the reality is obvious. We cannot think clearly without sleep. Not only does our productivity and efficiency drop to very low levels as the night wears on but we are often robbed of the following day as well.

I almost lost a good client, not because I couldn’t do the work or deliver it on time, but because I was too knackered to programme properly.

So the next time you find yourself burning the midnight oil remember that a lot more than a deadline may be at stake. One all-nighter can ruin a week and if you are unlucky enough like me to have spent a week from hell vainly trying to repair the damage caused by decisions made during such a session, be warned, you may loose a lot more than sleep if you persist in burning the candle at both ends.