Goodbye 2009. Hello 2010.

Posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 @ 17:31 CET

Nearly two weeks after the new year its about time for a roundup post I suppose... *sigh* If you're wondering why its been quiet...

Anyways. 2009 was a great year for I and I.

I started off the year getting forced onto a snowboard by some friends right before Christmas 2008. Well I say forced but it was more of a gentle prodding. And I became addicted. Completely and utterly. It was crack to my Whitney.

I suppose it still is.

So after 8 years in Oslo I finally managed to get around to play in the snow and actually enjoy winter. Whoda thunk it. So while that was going on during the evenings after work - you can ride until 10pm on weekdays up at Tryvann which kicks ass - during the day I spent my time learning a new language. I spoke a dialect from my uni days but it had been years since I'd written any C so I needed a refresher course. I needed a bible.

That language was Objective-C and I immediately fell in love with it and Xcode, which beats the pants off any other IDE I've ever used. Eclipse and anything built on top of it simply can't compete - I suppose the closest would be Visual Studio but its been a really long time since I used that. Actually the last code editor that I embraced to this extent would probably be FlashDevelop. Ahh, FlashDevelop. I miss you.

Come to Mac, please. I'll wait for you.

Anyways, I started to play with building iPhone apps and it was fun! Is fun! Reminded me of the early days of Flash when anything was possible and free and great, when unicorns roamed the cotton-candy fields along with ponies and other cute animals. Maybe I'm being nostalgic but for some reason lately its just not been the same, but I'm sure that will pass.

So iPhone apps! The first one I built was for the city bikes in Oslo and amazingly it reached the #2 spot on the Norwegian app store, and #1 in the Utilities category. It got great reviews in Aftenposten (Norway's largest paper), Macworld and Twitter until it died. But that's another story.

Summer came around and so did one of the most fun projects I've had the privilege to work on. While Chris and Paul were making the Flash on the Beach Connect website, Håvard G designed and I developed the iPhone app for FOTB'09. Its always a pleasure to add life to a beautiful design.

Otherwise there's been lots of small proof of concept apps and prototypes for work - building these is one of the things I love most about my job.

In other news, our local user group, Flash User Group Norway really grew last year and is doing really well with a core group thats grown from 10 to about 15. Our December meetup had over 30 people which was fantastic! I also held a few talks there last year:

Mashup my Bike - on mashups and that
Bunny Love - on hacking a Nabaztag
Sharing is Caring - on SharedObject goodies
From AS3 to iPhone - Quick Intro (Keynote, PDF)

I also held a talk at FlashBrighton in November which was great fun, though a bit nerve-wracking at first since the audience held the likes of Niqui, Seb and Aral - all of whom I'd seen talk several times at Flash on the Beach. Luckily I think it went over pretty well :)

Although at first I planned on staying in Oslo for summer I ended up going as far north as I've been in Norway - not very far north - for some white water rafting at Sjoa, a trip to Dubrovnik to celebrate a dual-30th birthday of some friends, a week in Ibiza and a few days in Malaga visiting some childhood friends. As well as a few trips to Brighton...

Ah Brighton. Lovely city by the sea where many a fantastic time has been had. The place where this year I spent my first Xmas without family. The city where my love resides.

Home...

Yes, home. After 9 years in Oslo I'm finally packing it up and moving over to Blighty to a fantastic flat in Hove with a cat and a lovely garden. In March. About 7 weeks.

2010 is going to be exciting!

- paulo

The reason why its quiet around here...

Posted on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 @ 16:56 CET

I think the main reason this blog has been kept pretty silent, well apart from not really having time to do it, or the skills to put time aside for it is that its a homebrew thing I wrote many moons back.

Back when I thought doing back-end stuff with Perl was cool and fun (well its still cool I suppose but not as much fun) I figured hey I can write a blog engine and came up with this thing. Which is fine, and its worked pretty much flawlessly since 2004 but there are a few features I really want to have like categories that I really can't be bothered to implement.

Feast your eyes on the suck that is the admin interface:

I built the Flash-based admin interface back in Flash 6 with Remoting pulling data using AMF::Perl which never made it out of alpha. The interface is laughably bad but hey, it worked right? And I was the only one using it. But seeing how much Wordpress kicks its ass its time to give up the fight, pack it up and try to merge my database.

So hopefully I'll find an easy way to do that and get Wordpress on here sometime soon :)

- paulo

QUOTE: On World Building

Posted on Tuesday, November 03, 2009 @ 20:57 CET

Make things that make people's lives better or more beautiful. It's good for your karma, and the world needs you. If you do nice things for the world, the world will find a way to pay you back.

Absolutely agree. This is part of Jonathan Harris' World Building in a Crazy World vignettes. A good read.

- paulo

Flash on the Beach iPhone app version 1.1.1 update

Posted on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 @ 11:05 CET

On Thursday last week, one day after the app being released on the App Store we found a major bug in the Flash on the Beach iPhone app.

We didn't find this bug until Chris and Paul finished the map bit of the new Connect site, which is launching very soon. Basically when you choose to update your location from the iPhone we send your current GPS position (latitude/longitude) up to the BackNetwork. However, a nasty bug was recording the location as being in the middle of Brighton no matter where you were on the planet. So you and all your friends would be in the same place, effectively rendering this extremely cool feature completely useless.

Shit.

You see the iPhone Simulator that comes along with Xcode lets you run and test your apps on your PC. However, it fakes the GPS behaviour by locating you somewhere in Cupertino, CA no matter where you are. So to avoid this I added a small check that when running the app in the simulator it would say that you were in the middle of Brighton. Since all the other places are in Brighton this made testing the app faster.

The check was as follows:

#ifdef TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR
savedCoordinates.latitude = 50.824581;
savedCoordinates.longitude = -0.138692;
#endif

Of course it should be if TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR, not ifdef since the TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR variable is defined on both the iPhone and simulator, but set to false on the iPhone since its not the simulator.

Doh!

A super simple, stupid bug (that I will never, ever forget) that is extremely easy to fix and submit an update. So we submitted on Friday, September 11, with the conference only 10 days away. The first version took 14 days before it was approved...

Shit.

Seemingly up a creak and paddle-less, Chris sent an email pleading our case to the Apple App Review Team™ who out of the goodness of their hearts responded with:

Thank you for contacting the iPhone Developer Program regarding expediting the review of Flash on the Beach '09. We have made a one-time exception and have completed the review of this critical update.

OMFG!

So a massive thank you to the review team that saved my ass. Having to explain why that feature didn't work would have royally sucked in addition to being just a little embarrassing. There's also a tiny schedule change - Rob Chiu and Jeremy Thorp switching slots.

Anyways, go get the 1.1.1 update right away! :)

- paulo

Flash on the Beach iPhone app now on the AppStore

Posted on Wednesday, September 09, 2009 @ 11:08 CET

John just tweeted about it so the cat is out of the bag! The official Flash on the Beach iPhone app is now available on the iTunes AppStore. Its free, so what are you waiting for - go and get it! :)

After working on this for the past few weeks its great to finally see it out in the wild. Props go out to Håvard Gjelseth for the fantastic design!

- paulo

Schedule for Flash on the Beach '09

Posted on Wednesday, September 09, 2009 @ 10:35 CET

So in what has become a yearly pilgrimage to Brighton, Flash on the Beach '09 will be upon us in 11 days! As I did in 2007 and 2008 here's my tentative schedule for the 4 days:

Sunday - September 20

Down and dirty with the low level bytes - Lee Brimelow

Monday - September 21

Adobe Keynote - Richard Galvan

Casual Game Architecture: How to finish coding a game without despising it - Keith Peters

Lead the Hand and the Arm will Follow: Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4 - Rich Shupe

Who's A Bright Spark Then! - Mike Jones

Big Spaceship : Fun Begets Quality - Joshua Hirsch

Telling Stories - Hillman Curtis

Epiphany - Joel Gethin Lewis

Tuesday - September 22

Elevator Pitch - 3 Minute Wonders

Either The Secret Life of a Flash Freelancer - Peter Elst or Quick as a Flash - Grant Skinner

Leaving the Sandbox - Joa Ebert

Either Application Frameworks: The good, the bad, and the ugly - Richard Lord or Hacking the Newsroom - Jeremy Thorp

A three-way! Either Numbers in Art - Joel Baumann, More than bending pixels - Paul Burnett or We make our own tools, and then they shape us - Karsten Schmidt

Unconventional Web Applications - Contrast

Choose Your Own Adventure - Craig Swann

Wednesday - September 23

Either Kling Klang - Andre Michelle or PLAY with Vectors! - Koen de Weggheleire

Connecting the Dots - Mario Klingemann or Can play well with others - Stacey Mulcahy

Union and MegaPhone - Colin Moock or Work / Play - Seb Lee-Delisle

The Death of the Creative Director - Laura Jordan-Bambach or the Jam Throwdown which was great fun last year

Research Realtime graphics with Flash 10 - Ralph Hauwert

Space - Joshua Davis

The fact that I can't pick a session for some of the time slots is yet another great testament to the conference and its fantastic speaker lineup. I'd tell you to get tickets but its sold out, but if you're going maybe I'll see you there!

Now if only there was a way to have this information with me on the go. Guess I'll print it out and keep it in my pocket :)

- paulo

Politi.no gets a re-redesign

Posted on Tuesday, September 01, 2009 @ 10:56 CET

Yesterday our beloved police force launched their new website, which clocked in at a mere 28.5 million NOK for development costs. As you can tell its quite remarkable and my colleague Haakon wrote a great post about it (in norwegian).

A quick view source shows that they have separate domains hosting their CSS (politicss.no) and another one to host their JavaScript (politijs.no). I'm not sure how the developers conned the cops to purchase those, but kudos! Impressive indeed.

I do want my 7 kroners back (we're about 4 million people or thereabouts I think). How dare they spend my tax money on this crap.

However being the upstanding, respectable citizen I am I felt it was my civic duty, nay, obligation to do what I could to fix perform some quick touches here and there to fix the many issues with the new site. After spending several seconds furrowing my brow while inspecting and investigating the structure and site design I got to work and came up with this which I'm sure you'll agree is far superior to the former.

My question is who do I send my NOK 10.000.000 bill to?

- paulo

Keep moving or die

Posted on Monday, August 31, 2009 @ 15:45 CET

Great quote from an Art of the Title Sequence interview with Jim Capobianco on the end credits of Wall-E:

Always move.

Don't sit around waiting for approval or something to happen. I have found there is always something to do on your project. Even if it is the smallest thing it keeps the momentum going and momentum is everything. By always moving it gets you that much closer to getting the project done and you stay ahead of the people who feel it is there job to judge and can put a stop to what you are trying to say before you've had a chance to say it.

Like a shark keep moving or die.

How very true.

- paulo

Support SV on Twitter

Posted on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 @ 10:06 CET

Earlier Hedgard Hugaas (@hedgard on Twitter) tweeted that he had created a Twitter-ribbon or Twibbon to show your support for Sosialistisk Venstreparti on Twitter.

It had a few issues so I cleaned it up a little - although a designer could probably do something better. You can see the difference below:

Before:

After:

Feel free to grab the PNG and photoshop it yourself :)

- paulo

Bysykkel approved!!!

Posted on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 @ 21:24 CET

And so one of the coolest moments ever came to pass and Bysykkel was approved and accepted into the iTunes App Store. Indescribable feeling.

Get the app from iTunes here or visit the main site here.

And I truly think it warranted three exclamation points. I'm just saying :) It was exactly 8 days after we submitted so way to go Apple app review team. And it was also a zero-day OS 3.0 app, released an hour and a half after OS 3.0 was , which is just waaay to fucking cool.

Thanks go out to the great people that collaborated on this app, Snorre Milde, Paul Holliday and Chris Pelsor. You guys rock! :)

Update: (18/06 10:30)

For the time being its also listed in the Top 10 list of Utilities, #6 baby :)