Yep the peeps at engadget.com  are holding a competition to design a tee-shirt using thier logo. The prize? A Sony Ericsson W800 Walkman phone seen below

Pretty goovy huh? Well the details are HERE. Get your thinking caps on cause this one could be good. Im entering.
Also at the request of my Girl freind I have added the ol "next and previous" links to the head of the single pages.
night all!
 

I have recently become more aware of the need for error reporting and its advantages. I realise that alot of smaller applications made in flash dont really justify error reporting but alot of the ones I have worked on did. As always these sorts of things never really were given the proper attention they desirved due to time and budget constraints. The client wanting bottom dollar prices combined with brilliant sales people who can sell features that dont exist leaves error reporting at the bottom of the todo list. Sad I know. I am also amazed at the lack of use out in the forums/ examples etc of the try command. ie:
try {
// statements
//Try to do something
} catch (Error) {
// statements
//Mabey show a visual feed back on the Error and try an alternate answer
} finally {
// statements
//log the error to a database, send an email or the likes.
}

This is something I now try to do on alot of the data loading and submitting. It just allows the application to have that level of backup and notification of errors. Comes down to good coding practices I guess and we all have our moments with that. I have been considering writing a component to exploit this and have some sort of automatic error reporting. Might be one to put in the todo basket (along with talking to sales people)

With the launch of my employers latest product (not a flash one but .Net) I have also come to appreciate the joys of a full and through testing cycle. Thank goodness the flash developers are doing the same as it sounds like 8ball is pretty solid. Previous jobs (well one really) for a past employer have come back to haunt me with things that could have been really resolved with a thourgh testing cycle. Once again as web applications go it doesnt always fit in the scope of the product but I think it runs deeper than that. I come from a film and advertising course, and sort of fell into the developer role. I think maybe alot of other flash developers have done similar and never had any/much formal training or even know of coding practices and design patterns. I was in that boat but am trying really had to educate myself.

Maybe its time that these issues were given more attention in the community as with the arrival of 8Ball Rich internet applications will certainly spring up more and more. This could lead to make or break for flash and the RIA public opinion as these sorts of things become more of a publicly used interface to more complex systems. 

Once again only my two cents which with current exchange rate = US 1c .

Yep sorry very little flash this post. Sunday is over (almost) and its back to work tomorow. But first just a little round up of the weekend. First up the all blacks won against the Ozzies in what tured out to be a real nail bitter. Good game to watch and thanks to the ozzies for trying .

Have had this weekend to work on the floor on my mustang and yeah now it is finally finished. Now just the front rails rear rails boot ……..to go.

Also nice to see the boys who are developing FDT are releasing some copies out to developers for free if they have been active in the open source world. 

If you are a user of WordPress blog, I seriously recomend THIS plugin. It changes the seriously drab look of the admin section into somthing inspired from OSX. make it have more of an application feel to. Man I wish I had more spare time to do cool stuff like this. 

 Lastly watched Sin City tonight. MAn that was strange but pretty cool at the same time. Its a sunday so I wont go into the film student analysis but its on my watch if you are looking for something to do with a lazy afternoon/evening.

Alright, Ill plug a little flash info. I recently found a problem when loading a large amount of xml into a xml parser I was working on. It takes 3d object and using my works software (righthemisphere.com) saves out scene and object data to xml. I lazily used on onLoadComplete with a loaded clip and was expecting everything to work but forgot this is triggered when the movie has finished loading not when the xml data was converted and ready to use. So just a reminder….because I forgot (duh huh) onLoadComplete is when the moive etc has finished loading not when the data and functions are available to the rest of the app. Remeber about onLoadInit and its uses.chances are you should always use onLoadInit 90% of the time.

Oh and the very last word I promise. This blog is now aggrigasted by the macromedia news agregator. YaY 

Small dissapointment in flash 8, the lack of overides in the functions. Its a nice feature in .Net which I use often. Nevermind.

Finding time to work on my site is hard and I have way to many things to do anyway, but I have been trucking on with the flash site side of things. Have a few more classes to implement then I can look to adding some sort of portfolio and the obligitory "about us" section. Off to watch my uncles companies Rocketship laden with thier satelite launch tomorow night so I will hopefully send a moblog from my phone with a piccie. It will be broadcast live to a local pub which is hosting the function. Should be free beers . 

Enough already sleep now, night night all!

Yep its that time again folks and this site is an ode to those who go against the grain to create interactive sites without flash. Its a really nice piece of work so congrats.
Check it out HERE . Its a sweet desing and some cool Dhtml in there.

 Also note a cool Css site which you can submit your own desing for. Click on the links on the side (depends on which desing you goto) and you will change the css sheet for the page. And someone has made an OS in php. havent installed it and last I looked you can log onto the demo using the passwords provided but check out the screen shots. Just interesting to know whats going on in the comunity.