Alias

A lot of people ask me why flash development is so expensive and difficult these days. One reason that I’d point to is the increased complexity of modern flash websites as compared to the stuff we were doing ten years ago.

I think this is best summed up in the  Wikipedia article on the Inversion of Control (IoC) design pattern:

” The price paid for that additional flexibility is greatly increased complexity and the fact that the program is no longer deterministic: it’s no longer possible to tell what functions will be called just by looking at the code; one needs to consider the code and the environment to be able to determine the order of events. The code is also much harder to write and reason about, and computations that are naturally sequential (A needs to happen before B, such as User name must be provided before the login can be successful) can be much harder to write and understand.”

I think most people who’ve come onto any reasonably large AS2/AS3 project which is already in progress and had to get their head around a large body of code will know this.

Complexity = Cost.

What are we going to do about it?

I’ve just finished a flash build for China Now, which is a festival aimed at promoting Chinese culture in the UK. There’s a nifty drop down menu and a shiny apple-dock style homepage. Completed on time, with a minimum of fuss.

Credits:

Art Direction – Pete Hamblin
Creative Tech – Alias Cummins
Project Management – Lizzie Cooper, Gustav Radstrom

Well, the talk went well last night (apart from the venue being double booked with a pole dancing class) – we had a good turnout, and people seemed to enjoy the presentation.

I’ll do fire next time, I promise…

So – first off, new work up on FINITESTATEAUTOMATA.ORG

And here’s the source code:
Vapour.zip

Feel free to post questions to the OSFlash mailing list, if I can help I will.

Video should be up on LFPUG soon too.

Thanks for coming everyone!

So, I’m doing a talk at the LFPUG on the 22nd February. That’s in about a week…

If you don’t go, I promise not to hold it against you and secretly hate you for years, or add your name to my “people to kill” list.

Promise.

So, things have been quiet here for a while. I’ve been really busy at work, and haven’t been very involved in the community for the past while – I’ve been concentrating more on doing experimental stuff, like my VJing work and more art based work. I’ve been working with performance artist Hellen Burrough on some video art, which is still WIP, and doing interactive and installation work with Finite State Automata, which I’m pretty excited about.

However, I am planning to present at LFPUG in the next couple of months, so keep an eye out for that. I’m also planning on keeping a regular portfolio of work, as I’ve been doing lots of stuff at Republic which I’m quite proud of.

The latest version of ASUnit has a new cross platform XUL application for creating your classes and automatically creating classes for your unit tests and test suites – this version solves a lot of . issues and strangeness that occurred with the JSFL command version, which I generally found a bit mystifying. XUL is pretty interesting as technology, once you get it working. I must admit, though – everytime I see that

xmlns=”http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul”

tag, I just want to scream NEEEEEEEEEERRRRRDS!

But that’s just me.