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.

After Effects and Flash

BBC North from Patrick Wall on Vimeo.

Industry leading recruitment services agency SMRS wanted to present themselves as a multi-faceted full service agency in an engaging and interactive way. The 3D cubes represent a brand extension to their existing 2D logo, suggestive of added depth.

Concept, Design, Cinema 4D, After Effects and Flash.

Canterbury

The popular New Zealand sports wear manufacturer wanted an interactive “web-shop”, where visitors could browse the collection, explore a variety of interactive elements such as antique globes, rugby balls, magazines, sewing machines and mirrors.

Farnell

This multi-million pound electronics company wanted an interactive, up-dateable presentation tool with multi-lingual support. Using Flash, AS3, XML and Greensock the tool went through a number of successful iterations, including a version with multi-lingual support for ten languages.

World Walks For Water

A deceptively complex interactive animation which allows users to select an avatar and add their voice / support to an annual campaign to raise awareness of the world’s current water and sanitation crisis. The animation features 359,161 unique avatars walking / carrying water in a steady progress across the screen.

Flash, AS3, Keyframe animation

eSourcing

This intro is all that remains of an interactive eLearning application based on a Mission Impossible theme. The user is asked a myriad of questions which in turn enable “Agent Jones” to climb a cliff face in order to rendezvous with a Helicopter rescue.

Flash, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop

Next

This recruitment site for the high street clothing retail Next won an RBA Creative Award for Best Website and a Drum Award for best recruitment website in 2009. While the current site looks very different from the site as it was launched in 2009 it still retains many of the Flash elements and design decisions made during my time.

Flash, AS2, After Effects, Video production and post production.

Sky – Customer Centres

As Multimedia Manager at SMRS my involvement in the production of this media rich recriuitment website stretched from the initial creative process through to video production and post production.

Flash, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Combustion, Motion and HTML

Sky – Join Our Web Team

A recruitment website aimed at technology graduates. A hugely successful website which was high commended at the 2009 Drum awards.

Flash, Combustion, After Effects

Podland – Fun with Flash

This Flash site, was designed, animated and coded purely as an experiment is Flash development, all the motion was hand scripted, before the days of Tweener, Fuse or Greensock.

Specialist UK Restorations

Specialist UK Restorations are a successful building repair and restoration company in Ormskirk and Leeds. Aware that their industry has a reputation for fly-by-night operators, they were keen to put their workforce and premises front of house in this Joomla based media rich website build.

Design, Joomla installation and administration. Flash elements, photography and video.

Egniol

An HTML website built in Joomla! Featuring an animated drop down navigation system, context sensitive dynamic news modules and a Flash homepage element.

Photoshop design. Full Joomla installation and administration. CSS design and build.

Total Brickwork Solutions

Joomla website and corporate branding for a successful Yorkshire based construction company. TBS want to make an impact when their new website is launched in the next few months.

Brand identity, Logo design, website design and build, Joomla installation and administration. Email administration.

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.

Firstly, your Flash movie should be no larger than 1MB and ideally exported for Flash Player 5 although Swiffy supports most of the AS2 specification. For those of you who don’t remember, you can do a great deal with Flash 5 and AS2. Probably a great deal more than Safari on the iPhone will allow us to do.

Under the hood, Swiffy processes the SWF file and generates a JSON file. A client-side JavaScript runtime loads that JSON file and renders it using HTML, SVG and CSS which is supported by Webkit-based browsers such as Safari running on Apple devices.

When you process your swf, Swiffy outputs an html page that you can place on your page using an iFrame. I know, I know an iFrame! However we’re only using our iFrame to serve alternative content to less than 5% of our visitors. There’s nothing for Google to index so it makes very little difference to the end user. I’ve added an alternative version to the header of this page, making the animation, podman cursor follower and all, viewable to iPhone users, for what it’s worth. It’s pretty clunky, probably only making 8 frames a second on my iPhone, but it’s a pretty complex multilayered animation, with lots of bitmaps and transparency. While the animation in the header of this page may not have been designed for WebKit, it could probably be optimised quite easily. A little trial and error goes a long way. Maybe I’ll follow this article up with a sequel.

I've always loved those old Victorian posters for Houdini etc.