Aled's Cyfle Blog

Moving on...

2008-03-01T10:45:00.003+00:00

Just thought I'd write one last post on this blog before its shut down completely.

I realise it's been almost a year since I last posted everything, but I didn't finish things off right. Here's the latest (and last):

I work at Cube now, as their Lead Developer. I got the post after finishing a placement there via Cyfle.
We at Cube just launched a beta version of Sesh.tv - a Welsh-language video-sharing site where the best films might be shown on S4C.
Orball, one of the projects fellow D10'ers made, won the interactive media award at Ffresh. The project I worked on, The House, was also nominated.
I now blog/keep a tumblog at lemwn.com - if anyone still reads this, I'm now over there.

Thanks, and goodbye.

The crazy insane last week

2007-03-26T15:37:00.000+00:00

We've all just finished the course, and are all moving on to pastures new. I just want to thank all the guys at Cyfle; all the tutors; but especially to Gareth, who's been fantastic. It's a shame really that this is the last Dimension 10 for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I'd like to finish off this blog by mentioning some notible events of the last week:

1. Our graduation showcase went well on Wednesday, and we had many many industry people over to look at our work. To showcase the work for the night (and for the next year), we bought tenzeroseven.net; which has a profile of each of us which shows our work. James designed it, I built it.

2. I finished my portfolio (at last) with examples of all the work I had done in the past 6 months.

3. We visited @Wales, a business incubator for you digital startups, which was very interesting; and got a visit from Richie Pugh, the Nesta Project Manager for Wales, who told us about their insight out scheme.

I might blog here a little more, but for all intents and purposes, i'm finished. I'll probably blog to tell y'all where I'm blogging next, and maybe (if I don't blog elsewhere) blog about the next six months internship I have at cube.

Thanks for listening!

Being nosy...

2007-03-19T09:35:00.000+00:00

I came across twitter a few months back while reading modernlifeisrubbish, and could instantly see its appeal for other people. I'd never really use it because I'm too lazy, but tom marban today found a little mashup called twittervision. It's a combination of the twitter data and a Google map to create a nice and visual way of following people's location and activities around the world.

I could look at this for hours.

Being Unique...

2007-03-12T12:56:00.000+00:00

Last week, we got a visit from Jon Stethridge, Managing Director of Unique Media and Unique Media TV, which I think are two different sections of the same company. They're an established design and communications agency from the Bristol area over the border in England.

They've become specialized over the years to provide video streaming services. He came to give us a short workshop on the process of shooting, cutting and encoding video for the web.

When we finished our impromptu group chat about various aspects of the web - politics, web2 and social networking etc., we got down to business.

As I have a degree in Film and TV studies, I expected to know everything he was about to explain to us, but my expectations were quashed slightly due to the realisation that shooting and cutting film for the web is a totally different affair.

It's a little obvious when you think about it... keep long shots to a minimum (only once to establish the situation). Keep to tighter shots when filming (not shooting) a person, and avoid excessing or unnecessary zooms, pans, crabs etc.

The reason for these limitations are nothing to do with things like screen sizes or their refresh rate or a computer's processing power, but rather with encoding the video to keep its size to a minimum. The more pixels that change in every frame, the higher the file size. We were also told not to use dissolves in any video shot for the web for this reason... in the short sequence of a dissolve, every pixel in the video is a different colour, meaning that every pixel has to be encoded, resulting in a higher file size.

This, I suppose, applies to all digital film formats. It certainly was a very useful resource for when I go to Cube, who do a lot of encoding as part of their work.

Post D10 placement

2007-03-07T09:23:00.000+00:00

Theres only 2 and a half weeks left until the end of the course!

However it's still a very busy time... we have another module to complete for our post-graduate diploma which is offered with the course. We've also got to finish our documentation for our recent projects, and organise our graduation show which is two weeks today!

The show is in Cardiff Bay's City Canteen Bar, but before that we've all got to design our own portfolio site, and James and I are to design and develop a gateway site to all of our various portfolios.

After the course finished, I've been offered a place on another (similar) course with Cyfle (it's already started, with Ioan, Owen and Rianne being the other trainees). It's lucky that both courses end the same time, because I'll be skipping the training aspects of the course and heading off into a 6-month internship at Cube Interactive, based in the bay.

I'm excited with this, as I've met the guys already and seen what work they do... they've mainly been providing interactive services to some of S4C's programmes, which includes not only websites, but also flash video technologies. In fact, last year they provided online video streaming services to many of the top summer festivals in Wales. They also have some interesting happenings going on over there over the next couple of months (hush! hush!)

Work Experience

2007-03-04T17:23:00.000+00:00

I spent the last two weeks at Merlin, a PR, Marketing and Events management company, based in Cardiff Bay. While it doesn't actually sound like the company does much with interactive media and web design, they provide their clients with the whole package, which includes all kinds of interactive elements.

I was in the studio with the other designers, and I must admit that the way they work is unusual (from my point of view anyway). There's about 6 people in the studio who produce all design materials for the various account managers.

Unfortunately it was a slow first week (and me being ill didn't help either), so I didn't get much to do. However, by the end of the first week I started to get involved with CSS-ifying a website Merlin had built before for the Dovey Group, Cardiff-based property developers.

In addition to this, I asked if I could keep myself busy with designing and developing a concept re-design of the current Merlin website (a 6 year old design). Its purpose wasn't to replace their current design, but to serve as a portfolio piece for myself.

I'd like to thank Paul, James and the rest of the Merlin team for the experience and support during my placement.

My conceptual site and my work on the Dovey site will be up on my portfolio site. I'll be posting about that when its finished!

Greenfields + Blueteeth

2007-02-24T15:13:00.000+00:00

During our manic 6-weeks of non-stop work, we had a break for a couple of guys from Greenfield Media to come over and speak to us about their work with an emerging market... Bluetooth Broadcasting.

Rob and Geraint gave a presentation of the work they've done in the past few years - notably in the National Eisteddfod and the Wales Rally GB. It was interesting to find out that its been an experimental ride for them so far.

They started off by sending simple text messages to people with bluetooth on, often on a very small scale (for instance - in a tent in the eisteddfod). They also explained of the difficulties they had at larger venues, such as Cardiff Arms Park - where they had technical problems that would mean that people got the same messages over and over again. Recently, they said, they've been experimenting with sending larger files and short animated adverts.

What made the presentation even easier to digest was they turned it from simply a talk, to more of an experience. They told us at the beginning to turn the bluetooth feature on on our mobile phones, and during the presentation, we'd get humorous interruptions by the ringtones going off - showing that a bluetooth message had arrived from the Greenfield laptop.

And, bluetooth broadcasting being a relatively young field (with only about 5 companies in the UK doing it), it can only grow in popularity. The possibilites are pretty much endless, and it'll be interesting to see where Greenfield will play its part.

Another level of RSS for updated pages

2007-02-23T09:22:00.004+00:00

With the rise and rise of RSS, I find myself subscribing to more and more feeds. This is great for knowing when people update their blogs, but not for when they update other areas of their website.

I don't visit the websites in my feed list until I see a blog entry that takes my interest and I either need to read more, view images/flash movies that aren't in the RSS entry, or doesn't publish the links. This means that I very rarely visit websites that have good content/articles/work that aren't published in other, non-syndicated areas on the site.

Maybe its me who should make more effort to visit these websites, but after cutting my feed list down from about 500 feeds to 150 of my favorites, I still won't be able to find the time to visit all these websites to check up on their latest developments in non-syndicated areas.

Does anyone know of a way to receive notification of when a website has been updated - preferably through my feed aggregator? Or should websites ensure that every page can be syndicated - providing a simple notification and a link to the updated page?

Mygo-ing to Kazakhstan?

2007-02-19T22:01:00.000+00:00

Last Thursday was the deadline for our 5-man Interactive TV brief, because on Friday morning we had the video-conference-presentation of the game with the Mygo team in Malaysia (who were 8 hours ahead and about to start celebrations for the Chinese New Year).

We had finished in time, and it was working fine. I was, however, uncertain to how the game would be received. Turns out I didn't need to worry - they were very impressed. They had minor issues with certain elements of the gameplay, and they were only small issues if the game were to go live.

Mygo are expanding their interactive TV game service to countries in the middle east, which include Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia, and they're willing for our game to go live (after making a few changes) in those countries! Not a bad accolade at all.

Our game can be played online, but won't be a massive success for one reason... we built it for TV, and there would be only one instance of the game being viewed by all who watch the channel. If many people were to open multiple instances of the game, the results of the vote would be inaccurate. Feel free to have a go anyway.

Also, with the nature of the game being for mobile phones, you can't interact with the game in a normal "online" way. We've had to create a separate interface that acts as a mobile phone emulator, so if you want to vote or guess the answer, you'd have to use that.

The House interactive game

Mobile phone emulator (opens in a new window)

10 handy online resources

2007-02-19T21:24:00.000+00:00

In my time at the D10 office I've found many useful resources that I've used a few times, or haven't yet used. I'm going to list them here (in no particular order), more for my safe-keeping than for any readers, but I hope they'll come in useful for everyone:

Cite Bite
The web has become an invaluable source of knowledge, with almost unlimited citation sources. Cite Bite makes citing a helluva lot easier. Submit the quote and the web page where it was cited, and you get a link that you can use. When opened, the link takes you to the quote in that page, and highlights it. Simple and brilliant.
Smashing Magazine
Simply a blog/resource site that I consider to be superb, because it saves me from having to search the web for the best thats out there!
I Love Jack Daniels
While I'm not a fan of JD, I love this guy's writing. I'm uncertain whether its the Jack Daniels that makes the content as good as it is, but I've learned a lot from it. And there are cheat-sheets galore to make sure that you don't forget the basics of everything.
Browser Shots
Browser Shots is a website that creates screenshots of any webpage in different browsers. Never had a mac but wondered if your site still looked good on Safari? This is the site for you
Video Jug
My new favourite teacher. Videos that explain pretty much everything. Its a brilliant concept because its an audio-visual alternative to reading long, hard-to-understand written tutorials.
Bite Size standards
As it says, bite size standards are a collection of short and concise articles on how you can improve the experience of a website for your visitors.
Screenfluent
Inspiration, inspiration, inspiration of the highest standard.
Developers' Home: Detecting mobile phones
Mobile phone development, I'm certain, will soar and become more important within the next few years. But with so many different models and manufacturers, detecting which mobile can do what and deal with whatever technologies is more difficult than with the normal, larger screen browsers. This comprehensive guide gets you to grip with the different ways of detecting the mobile platform that could access your website.
Before and After Magazine
"How to design cool stuff" - not far wrong there really. Despite being a subscription-based website, they do provide various design articles that are free to download in PDF form.
Uncle Mark's Gift guides
A nice and unique idea here. Mark Hurst of Good Experience writes an annual guide to the best gadgets around and also includes handy tips for life. A very interesting read if you have some free time.

Climate Justice

2007-02-13T23:00:00.000+00:00

About a week ago, we finished Phase 1 of a little side-project we at D10 have been working on... a website for a student-led campaign for Contraction and Convergence.

I was quite involved in it, mainly for hacking away at the Wordpress engine that we used to power it. I also did a lot of the CSS and Javascript programming (thanks JQuery) that's seen on it.

I'm very pleased with the website, which (according to project co-ordinator and host, James) has had over 1GB in traffic since its launch! Pretty good stuff, then.

It's located proudly at climatejustice.org.uk. Hopefully in the near future, as the campaign gains ground, it will be used by many people to co-ordinate an earth-changing campaign.

I'm quite surprised with how easily it all came together in the end - the real pain came with choosing which forum software to use... I think we made a very wise choice with Vanilla.

The site's got some nice touches:

Clicking the sitemap link at the top of any page takes you to the generic sitemap we placed at the bottom of each page, but to highlight where it is, we added a little nifty piece of javascript to highlight it.
Besides each blog entry, there's a little image with a plus sign on it, and when you hover your mouse over it, it shows a couple of buttons to share the blog post with social bookmarking websites (unfortunately, IE6 messes it up - what a shocker!)
The rounded corners at the top of the page utilizes a JQuery plugin written by Dave Melthin - it doesn't use any images - its all code!

However, the most impressive thing on the website is Tom's game: Emission:Impossible - absolutely superb work. Beautiful... Play it and get on the high score!

Phase 1 was basically getting something up for them to be able to show off at their launch - not everything is implemented, and its far from perfect, but we'll have more time to tweak and complete Phase 2 after we finish our other 2 projects.

Inline images within your HTML page

2007-01-31T20:11:00.000+00:00

I've been working on a Mac ever since starting at Dimension 10, and recently bought a MacBook (woohoo!). I've also been using Bloglines for years as my feed reader.

A few months back I installed Jon Hicks's Bloglines skin, which provides a much nicer interface to the usual bloglines design for Firefox, Camino, Safari, Omniweb and Opera browsers. The skin is built for Mac, though it apparently should work on other platforms too.

Last week I installed the skin on my MacBook (woohoo!), and before installing it I took a sneak-peek at the CSS. What I saw surprised me - the images used in the CSS for various elements had the data encoded into the file. This made the page redundant from any outside sources, and made installing a lot easier with only 1 file.

Since then it's been puzzling me how to do it. I know why people do it, in this case at least... You don't have to download extra images. This means that self-contained web apps such as Loggr and GTD TiddlyWiki - apps in web-browsers that you can download to your computer - could contain images without having to link to them anywhere.

I searched and searched, and finally came across a few good resources. Images in these instances were encoded in base64-encoded binary, which is text that's readable by machines. Ever viewed the source of an e-mail seen a lot of unreadable characters? It's likely to be an attachment, and if its an image, the likelihood is that it's base64-encoded binary.

There's a really good explanation at Wikipedia on the subject, and an online image converter at Greywyvern.

I gathered a couple of important notes on the subject from Wikipedia that I think I should outline here:

Internet Explorer (as is predictable) deals with this kind of data unpredictably. It's the later versions (6 & 7) that have no support for it.
The browser will limit the amount of data processed, which could result in a broken image if the data is more than the limit. Opera has a file-size limit of 4kb.
It's downloaded every time a page is loaded/reloaded, meaning it cannot be cached
It results in a larger file size

However, in my opinion, you shouldn't use Internet Explorer or have large images in your site anyway. With broadband speeds, downloading the data over and over again won't be a problem for the user, but might be a problem for your bandwidth; and though it would make the file size a little larger, you'd be downloading the image itself anyway, with the same data in that image.

I've always fancied a go at coding a self-contained web-app. Knowing this gives me inspiration and ideas. Hmmm, we'll see.

Mind Mapping heaven

2007-01-29T09:36:00.000+00:00

I've discovered that in this kind of work, planning a project well is crucial. An important part of this is brainstorming and writing it down on a piece of paper.

I get frustrated when I realise that I've written something on one side of the paper that needs to be linked to the other, and even though I know I shouldn't worry about it, I often start again, which wastes valuable time.

I had briefly searched the web to find any software that would do it for me, and all I could find was shareware software that produced, at best, unattractive and confusing mind maps.

But now through Lifehacker, I've found bubbl.us - a service that provides a flash interface for you to build a mind map of your own, save it, and load it up again later. Brilliant! The only drawback as far as I can see so far is that it has no printing facility other than Flash's built-in functions, which makes it a little harder to document what you've built.

I can see myself using this on every project from now on, yipee!

Quick update - Malaysian brief

2007-01-24T00:31:00.000+00:00

It's hard to find time to blog between handling two official Cyfle project briefs and one unofficial brief, so this is just a quick update on our Mygo interactive TV brief.

Communication is difficult between the two teams. When we get to work, the team in Kuala Lumpur are clocking off. When they get to work, we go home. It means that we're basically a day in limbo every time we post something on our secret forum or email them.

I say every time we post something on the forum - we didn't get round to it until today. The concept we're going for (and hoping the Mygo team will go for too), is a simple, democratic, multi-user hangman/anagram (hangagram?) game, set on a backdrop of an eerie, B movie-styled interface (it's all a mystery, eh?). Take a look at our first treatment:

Hopefully the team will like enough so that we can start developing it. Problem is: How can you develop something for someone else when you haven't got a clue how they do it? I understand that they'd be reluctant to release any pre-made code to us, so I hope we can achieve a good product from whatever information and guidelines they give us.

S4/C rebranding

2007-01-17T13:56:00.000+00:00

I just thought I'd post my thoughts on the new rebranding S4C have just undergone. I think its relative, since I and Carol did a non-live site for their sgrin magazine.

I must admit I'm not sure what to make of it - the logo obviously symbolises the channel's "moving forward to the future" attitude - the '/' becoming synonymous with the world wide web, and you could think it symbolises "Sianel 4 dros Cymru", or Channel 4 over wales (it works better in Welsh).

Their new website was launched earlier this week, and while its a refreshing take on their old website, I think it still lacks something to make it stand out and be different. If they could sort out some accessibility issues and incorrect translations, I'd be very happy.

View their idents on Youtube, and read more about it on digitalspy.

Interactive TV in Malaysia

2007-01-17T00:35:00.000+00:00

As I just posted, we've recently been given two briefs. Both have a production period of just under 5 weeks by now, and both overlap each other. By having 2 briefs, we must manage our time carefully. We've been quite lucky this time, though.

As with our 2-man briefs, we could choose who we wanted to work with for our 5-man brief, which was a collaboration with Mygo, a games and interactive TV development company based in Malaysia. However, we decided that, in order to save hassle and potential friction, we asked Gareth the supervisor to split us up. He did, randomly, and we've all ended up in groups of 5, four of which work together in pairs for the 2-man brief. Unfortunately, there had to be a split, and happened with Gareth and Shamim.

So, our 5-man team consists of Shamim, Zoe, Lindsey, James and myself. Both groups have an even split of designers and developers. Next up, which brief went to which group? Only one brief from Malaysia was the interactive TV one, and it was our team (not the self-proclaimed "A Team" :P) that were the lucky ones. All very exciting.

Our brief: To develop a game that could be used on an interactive game channel in Malaysia. Super! Mygo's experienced team of developers will help us, and apparently, if our concept and execution is good enough, it might go live. IN MALAYSIA! Cool or what?!

Video conferencing

Today we had our first of many video conferences with the team in Malaysia - a surreal experience. There's an 8 hour time difference with us in Cardiff and the team over there, so we had the conference in the morning (over here), and in the evening (over there).

see more at James's blog

I say video conferencing... there was a little problem. The "A" team went in first and it worked fine. For 10 minutes, that is. Then the webcam went blank and the video feed was lost. At our end, we could see their team, but they couldn't see our end. I'm sure the "A" team had ~~something~~ nothing to do with a plot to sabotage our conference (just kiddin' guys!).

Anyway, when it came to our meeting, it was a little bizarre. I felt like we were spies, knowing that they couldn't see us, but we could see them. A little unusual also was the time delay - it seems like it happens even on the internet superhighway. We pitched 3 of our initial concepts: a bagh chall game, a penalty shoot-out game, and a mystery treasure hunt game. We found out the bagh chall game was a dead end when we realised that the game had to allow for any amount of users to play at any one time - using their mobile phones.

I was then appointed the contact person between our team in Cardiff and the Mygo team, and tonight (Malaysia's morning) we sent them a more detailed treatment of our lasting two concepts (both of which they liked). I'll write more about our treatments another time, its getting late, and I have a meeting tomorrow!

New Year and People First

2007-01-17T00:10:00.000+00:00

A nice break: Lovely Christmas, awesome New Year, a lot of alcohol, a lot of hangovers, and 2 new briefs.

I hadn't realised how long it's been since I last updated my blog... I've been slacking - and it was one of my New Year resolutions to blog more!

Its been a busy week and a half since we got back to Cyfle - and this is likely to be the quietest part of the rest of the course. Oh well...

A few days after restarting work, we got the first of our 2 briefs. This one was the 2-man brief, which I'm working on with James. We all got to decide which brief we'd like, and we got a brief to develop a website for Vale People First.

Vale People First is the Vale of Glamorgan group of a global voluntary organisation of people who have learning disabilities. They meet to discuss issues they have in their day to day lives, do a lot of fundraising, and promote self-advocacy in the community. We met Liz Davidson, the VPF co-ordinator and the committee last Wednesday to discuss ideas.

They want a website with a diary, short biographies of all their members, a page to show their photos, and pages to explain to everyone what they do. This brief is going to be exciting because we'll be implementing a variety of different things to get the site complete. Among the technologies are: A bespoke control panel that all members can log in and write diary entries, a Flickr mashup to display their photos, and Flash video.

After our first initial meeting, James and I got right down to business and drew out pretty much everything we needed to do before going into production... and we're meeting the guys again tomorrow to discuss our designs and (hopefully) get them signed off.

So good are we that we've even started our own blog about the process of this brief - sketches, meeting notes, treatments, the lot! It even includes video posts (did I hear you say Wow!)

Check it out at http://vpfwdj.blogspot.com/

I'm diggin' it

2006-12-24T14:37:00.000+00:00

I never really got digg. I just couldn't read a single page of it because of its clustered design, unrelated/pointless comments, and mass of topics.

However, since reading this post by digg founder Kevin Rose about new features in digg, I'm converted. The tweaks in the design make it much easier to use, and now I can customise which content I want to see - meaning it's be a clustered design of the things I want to know about.

They also have new features on video diggin' and podcast diggin', which give much greater flexibility and makes viewing video's and listening to podcasts much easier.

Seriously, take a look at their video - it'll convert even scrouge!

It's Christmas!

2006-12-18T01:04:00.000+00:00

Well, not quite yet. There's still a week in D10 to go before we get some holidays, but I thought I'd send out a little Christmas cheer of my own... an e-card!

As I posted earlier, we were given a challenge to create a christmas card... and here's mine. Happy Holidays!

You don't seem to have flash (or you're reading this post from an rss aggregator)

A new approach to web-based WYSIWYG editors

2006-12-18T00:11:00.000+00:00

I've built a few tailor-made Content Management Systems for websites in the past, and one thing I've realised is that it's impossible to control the way the CMS user inputs content. Most simply cut and paste from Word, which makes awful, untidy, invalid code, and on top of that, they're likely to forget that you need to write concisely (in order to maintain attention). Accessibility is most likely out of the question unless they get plenty of training and theory explaining its importance.

There are several tools you can use to simulate a word-processor within a web browser, but they're often supported by one browser and generate poor quality code.

The best tool I've found for this purpose is TinyMCE. It's a powerful application that can be customised easily when setting up. It's the editor used by Wordpress, and with some work, it will generate valid XHTML code. It also has a plugin architecture with many great plugins to do various tasks.

I recently read an article on 456bereastreet.com that touched this subject and talked about the What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) editor. A good article that I'd recommend reading if you're involved with CMS's or with blogs. The way its different from WYSIWYG is that its intention is to concentrate on "the structure and meaning" rather than the visual aspects.

I reckon that when users start to get serious about following the disability guidelines, this editor will explode in popularity. It already provides a strong basis for all other editors out there, as it concentrates on what will become the most important aspects of websites - semantics, usability and accessibility.

I'm going to keep a close eye on its developments.

I want one of these...

2006-12-12T10:03:00.000+00:00

37signals have rounded up some of the coolest inventions of 2006, which include a fun-looking snow scooper, some weird light that appears to be able to wrap around you, and a GPS key-locator.

However, by far the most impressive invention listed is Janjaap Ruijssenaars's floating air mattress, which uses repelling magnets to float. Your's at a snap price of $1.5m. Once I heard about this, it reminded me of an idea I had to reduce the energy needed to run cars.

If cars were to float, then you'd only need maybe one or 2 wheels to power and steer them (mind you, I flunked physics at school). The fact the magnets would repel the bulk of the car would effectively make its weight less, requiring less fuel. You would of course need to line the streets of the world with magnets to make it work, but I thought it was a good idea anyway.

Unfortunately, the cars would probably flip over due to the magnets - as would this bed, if it wasn't for cables at all four corners keeping it in its place.

Belly's gonna get you!

2006-12-11T13:56:00.000+00:00

Well, maybe not, but with Christmas on its way, mince pies, cakes, chocolate and general high-calorie consumption (with me anyway), I thought I'd mention one of the most innovative uses of the internet I've seen in years. And it's in a Web2.0 vain.

traineo is a community aimed at fitness & weight loss, and you create a profile and monitor your progression to a healthier you. The genius of this is that other people can see your information, and help you by motivating you. There aren't many website dedicated to your fitness available (at least, not for free!), so I can see this thing really taking off - it even as a live counter of the total amount of calories burned by its members!

I heard about it through Techcrunch, and though I haven't signed up to it yet, I'm really excited about it.

As the Techcrunch article mentioned, its not a social networking site in the sense where the goal is to get as many 'friends' as you can get, but to interact with a tight group of buddies to motivate each other.

This is going on my new years resolutions list!

Flash & Christmas Card...

2006-12-11T11:33:00.000+00:00

These past two weeks we've been working on an Adobe Flash industry brief, and I've been partnered up with Lindsey.

Our brief has been set by Atticus Design & Media, and it's to create an interactive game for BP's alternativenergy initiative - an initiative to lower carbon emissions released while generating power (which accounts for around 40% of all CO₂ emmissions).

We've decided to build a game that follows a journey that a Panda named Peko embarks on, helping out BP to lower carbon emissions and learn about renewable energy. Why a Panda? Because they're an endangered species.
On a slightly different note, we've been given the challenge to create a digital christmas card (again, built in flash), so that the favourite one can be used by Cyfle (I think this is why we're doing it - previous trainees have done something similar in previous years).

I've gone for a traditional-ish theme, and while it's still in development, I thought I'd give a sneak peek at what I'm working on:

Branding...

2006-12-11T11:14:00.000+00:00

Last Friday we had a presentation called Branding Essentials with Victoria Jones from Design Wales.

As you can guess, it was about branding - what is it, why it's so important, and what processes are applied when going about it. I thought the presentation was excellent, yet obviously focused towards the work of Design Wales.

I had come across Design Wales's website many years ago, and I didn't have a clue what the hell it was. It's a WAG-funded design-support agency for businesses in Wales. What this means is that it will give support and advice to any business about anything relating to design - be it branding, advertising, websites etc. What makes this scheme unique is that it's free. They also have a directory of Wales-based designers that you can search through (which has come in handy for all of us D10 trainees when thinking about where we'd like to go on our two-week placement), and they'll hook businesses up with designers. This means that if you're a designer, Design Wales might get some work for you! Unfortunately, you must be a registered business - no students or freelancers allowed.

Still, they're work has improved businesses in Wales - as was shown to us in the presentation.

We were shown several case studies of different businesses (mainly in the food sector), and got shown how the branding of one company made their business jump about 29 months ahead of their business plan - echoing the importance of branding.

We received many little pamphlets about Design Wales's work, but the coolest pamphlets we received were two trend guides with suggestions of design trends for this coming Winter and Spring.

Flash training...

2006-11-30T12:17:00.000+00:00

This week we've been learning to use Adobe Flash with Neil Jenkins. He's been teaching us all we'll need to know for our Flash industry brief.

While I've had previous experience with Flash, I hadn't used it for a long time, and this serves as a nice refresher course.

One thing I didn't know Flash had the ability to do was to simulate download speeds of a movie on different connection speeds - you can test from a fast T1 connection down to a retro 14kbps modem connection. It also has a feature called a Bandwidth profiler which gives you various handy statistics relating to the load times and status of the movie - I love this!

We have been working on a flash mp3 player that loads music in from a URL and plays it. I decided to extend it a little, and build the Cyfle AMP, or Camp for short. At the moment it uses hard-coded variables to display various information, but it could easily be modified to import an XML file and parse the data from there. It's far from perfect - it hasn't got a volume control (though I'm not sure how important that is - wouldn't users just use their speakers to control the volume?), and there is a bug with the slider bar.

When flash imports an MP3 file, it can't tell how long a song is - only how much it has loaded so far. This works great when you stream it, because you can (as I have) applied a loading bar to show how much has been preloaded. You can't code it so that a positional slider will accurately show you how much of the song has been played. My solution to this was to fade in such a slider once the file had finished loading, and this is where I ran into a bug. I can't quite work out what went wrong, but it isn't working (it appears when it shouldn't sometimes, it doesn't disappear when it should, etc.).

Anyway, here's my MP3 player:

...that is, if you have flash (and aren't looking at it from an rss aggregator)

If you're interested in the music, you can click on the links in the flash player to take you to the websites where I got them - they were free to download, so I can't see a problem in allowing them to be played in this player.