Chris Paterson

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This project is a constant work in progress and was my primary focus at SodaHead.com.  It is a client for user polls that is completely customizable.  It’s written in all Actionscript 3 using a JSON service to connect to the polls.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was cleaning out some old files and I stumbled across this! BluebYrd was a parody on my life at the time because I had blue hair for a bit, before I had to get a real job and actually deal with people! I took a basic Flash course (total 6 hours) introduction. I went home each night and cranked away at creating this animation, which I never finished. But seeing where I am today, I thought it is funny to see where I was when I started. It’s encouraging!

Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing the SWX format:

SWX is the native data format for the Flash Platform.

SWX RPC is a remote procedure call protocol encoded in SWX. It’s simple enough that you can get up and running with it in about five minutes. SWX RPC is perfect for building mashups (with easy-to-use APIs for Flickr, Twitter, and others), mobile applications (Flash Lite 2.0 and 2.1), and other data-driven Flash sites and applications.

The idea is that no longer will you use remoting, xml, loadvars or whatever method you have been using to load dynamic data into your Flash projects; instead you will just load a swf that already has all of the data you need. The swf is dynamically generated through a database or any data source you can provide via a server side script. The push is very strong towards using existing open data sources like Flikr or Technorati currently, but there are much greater implementations! I believe the project is still in it’s early phase but there is a pretty robust php version of the software.

Aran (the developer) states that he was inspired by his Mac and the simplicity of it. He’s right, I came back after the session at Adobe Max 2007 and installed both a local version of the software with a functioning apache server, php, mysql database and a version on my server all within 20 minutes. It took me longer to download then it did to set up!

SWX is not unlike a format that we currently use at Disney called JavaSWF. Which is a somewhat abandoned open source project created by a developer working in our division. He has recently moved on however… I’m excited about this new format for the potential it provides. Our latest version of JavaSWF publishes to Flash 6, which seems to be fine because we are only accessing primitive objects, arrays and name value pairs. The problem arises as Disney moves it’s framework to AS3, where the virtual machine in the Flash Player basically runs either AS3 or AS2/AS1. There are ways to communicate between the two virtual machines within the player but it requires another procedure (localConnection()). It may not seem like a big deal to create one extra step in loading but when you have millions of visitors a month on a website it certainly slows down the overall performance!

I look forward to seeing the progress of this open source solution for dynamic data integration in Flash! Definitely check out SWX and try it out! You’ll be amazed!