April 19, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Philter (Phil Chung) joins gskinner.com

If you are contemplating the development of a complex Flash application or eLearning solution, operate a design firm, or wish you had access to professional expertise when you find yourself in a jam, you may want to read on…

Phil Chung AKA Philter (PhilterBlog) has just joined gskinner.com full-time, creating one of the most technically capable Flash development teams in North America. Phil lends his superb understanding of e-learning implementation and Flash development to my extensive knowledge of Flash application architecture, development and business logic.

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April 18, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Experiment: Proximity Fireflies

Firefly communication through bioluminescence is a beautiful thing to watch, and I felt it could be easily modeled using my ProximityManager class, and a simple tolerance/potential system. I tried to make this system mimic the real interaction of Fireflies in nature, and was inspired by an article I found about an artist’s video of Fireflies in a Malaysian rain forest.

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April 14, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Experiment: Crystallization simulation

While I’m busy posting examples of tolerance based “organic” systems, I thought I would post one of the first ones I created. It’s about 2 years old, but I think it’s still pretty neat to watch. Click once or twice anywhere in the black area below, then sit back and watch the crystallization process (give it a couple of seconds).

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April 14, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Experiment: 6kb ecosimulation in Flash

I’ve always been interested in mimicing organic systems in Flash, and tolerance based behaviours in particular. When I built out my ProximityManager class, the first thing I thought of building with it was a simple aquatic ecosystem, here’s my first attempt….

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April 12, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Experiment: Grid Based Proximity

Often, in games or visual experiments, you have to track the proximity of a large number of MCs relative to one another, and carry out actions when they are within a certain distance of one another.

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April 9, 2004 by Grant Skinner

E-mail problems

I recently had a hard drive failure, and have lost a month of email archives. If you sent me email between Feb 26 and Apr 5, and haven’t received a reply, please resend. Thanks.

April 5, 2004 by Grant Skinner

FlashInTheCan Source Code/Session Notes

I just finished off my session for FlashInTheCan titled “Implementing Multiple Undo/Redo in Flash Applications”. I think the session went really well, and I have posted my notes and the source code for the presentation.

I’ll write in more detail about the conference and my 3 day workshop when I get home, but I have to say FitC has been lots of fun and very well organized… kudos to all the staff and volunteers for putting together such a stellar conference.

March 30, 2004 by Grant Skinner

Enterprise Development coming to London, UK

I’m really happy to announce that I will be instructing my Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development course will be running in London on May 24-26. It is being organized in cooperation with the extremely capable Aral Balkan of Bits and Pixels. This is a highly comprehensive 3 day workshop dealing with:

the new developer features of Flash MX 2004

code standards and efficiency

Object-Oriented Programming and theory

Object-Oriented analyis and design

Design patterns

Team coordination

Usability and user-experience

Application architecture

Development process

You can get full information on the course, and register online at https://secure.bitsandpixels.co.uk/training/grant/.

If you have any questions about the workshop, feel free to email me (contact button above), or comment below.