I decided enough was enough and I found a desk to rent in another company’s small office in the Tobacco Factory in Southville, Bristol. There were a couple of other freelancers there and a few employees. It was a great move and I enjoyed the change immensely. However, after a year I felt that I needed to move on to pastures new, meet more people and find further opportunities. I first discovered Spike Design when it was hosting a Bristol Jelly co-working event that I attended.

(From the website) Spike Design is a creative business incubation unit based in Spike Island, the largest of its kind in the South West. With low-cost desk space, excellent facilities and tailored support, this unique space offers the environment and opportunity for young companies to grow.

When I first moved to Spike Design in November 2010 it was quite a different place to what it is now. An agency had just folded and they had dominated the space. There was a huge vacuum where the 30+ employees had been and I happened to join at the same time as a few other individuals. Some of us decided to locate ourselves in this empty area. I think there were ten or fifteen freelancers in the whole of Spike Design at this point. Spike Island is an old tea-packing warehouse, Spike Design is just one corner of one floor of this massive building, we definitely did not make the place feel very busy. However, over the last twelve months our community has blossomed and grown and we now number nearly forty individuals. Tenants are very diverse in nature, from plant importers, product designers and editors, to photographers, script-writers, marketers and illustrators. There seems to be a slight lean towards digital with numerous designers, developers and a couple of small agencies all working in this field.

My favourite things about Spike:-

• A Sense of Community. Although I don’t actually work with most of the people I am around every day I feel like we are part of something. I have made some good friends here, we hang out outside and inside of work, have lunch together and help each other out.
• Business Cross-Pollination. Spike Design is, after all, a business incubation centre and I have seen the dream alive and kicking: photographers taking pictures of the product designer’s products whose websites are then built by the web developers. Editors helping with wording, marketers helping with other tenants messaging. It seems to be happening more and more in the time I have been there and it is a great example of the benefits of a place like this.
• Scalability. The size of the space and the way the desk system works allows for easy scalability. If your business is growing and you need another desk, it’s very simple to get this extra space for a minimal fee and a month-to-month commitment. Then, if you decide you need more or you need to shrink again, it’s simple and financially painless to do so. This is a great help if you are a small business.

• The Cafe. Spike Cafe serves coffee, pastries, cake, drinks and well-made meals. There are different specials every day and there are benches outside for when the weather is good.
• Friday Breakfast Club. Every second Friday we get together for coffee and pastries in our glass meeting room. It’s a great way to meet new tenants and other people you don’t happen to see during your usual day-to-day activities.

• Table Tennis. There is a table tennis table and lots of people to play of all abilities. We occasionally have a tournament in which the elusive Golden Bat is passed on from mantle to mantle. For me, table tennis is probably my favourite sport and also the ultimate work break, so this is a huge pull.

• The Exhibition Space. Every two or three months a new exhibition takes place in the expansive Spike Island Galleries. As Spike Design tenants we receive a tour of the latest exhibition by the curator of the gallery. It’s a great way to gain some insight into the current works in the space.

 
So….. there you have it. It’s been a poignant year for me and I wanted to try and document this influential part of it. I hope it sheds some light on what goes on here at Spike Design and encourages you, should you be looking, to join a great co-working space in Bristol.

http://jessewarden.com/2011/10/five-lies-they-tell-you-in-software.html

To generate a getter and/or a setter create a variable in the declaration section of your class. Make sure to prefix it with an underscore _ and also make it private. Simply put the cursor in the variable and press Cmd-1 (on a Mac). FDT will then generate the statements for you. For instance, in the below statement, if I put the cursor on the _alertText_str variable here:-

private var _alertText_str:String;

And press Cmd-1, FDT will generate:-

public function get alertText_str() : String {
return _alertText_str;
}
public function set alertText_str(alertText_str : String) : void {
_alertText_str = alertText_str;
}

Thanks to @dougal07 for showing me this.

Simply put the cursor over the object you want to trace and press Cmd-0 (on a Mac). FDT will then generate the trace statement for you. For instance, in the below statement, if I put the cursor on the width property of the _questionBoxStyle object and press Cmd-0, the following will happen:-

_questionBoxStyle.width = _questionBoxWidth;
trace('_questionBoxStyle.width: ' + (_questionBoxStyle.width));

//creating but not throwing the error
var er:Error =new Error("BREAK");
// see where issue is happening, but continue running
trace("getStackTrace(): "+er.getStackTrace());

I found this useful trick here – http://troyworks.com/blog/2010/03/14/debug-actionscript-better-with-getstacktrace-trace-trick/ – much thanks to Troy Gardner.

FOTB 2010

I recently returned from the Brighton based conference Flash on the Beach. It was my second year of attendance and once again I had an amazing experience. It has been a tough year for the Flash world and this definitely was a strong theme over the four days of talks and workshops. I caught a number of sessions related to establishing and understanding what has happened and how to adapt to the changes in the industry. I’m going to run through some of the highs and lows of this years conference and try and capture my thoughts and feelings about what was ultimately a really valuable time for me.

Highs

- Grant skinner kicked off Monday morning after the keynote. His talk was excellent as usual. He covered numerous projects that he has done that started out as experiments or play. He talked about how his adhd-like nature can lead him to distraction from client work sometimes and how he has harnessed this to create many interesting side projects, often feeding back into the client work and leading onto greater things. It was a fascinating and funny talk and a pleasure to watch. He went on to provide methods on how to invoke time to be able to do this, to take twenty minutes a day and devote it to coding fun, to “Find the time” and “Learn to love to learn”. He talks a bit about this theme on a recent post that can be found here. It is so easy to slip into the habit of neglecting to ‘play’ and this was a real reminder of the tangible benefits and enjoyment that can be drawn from doing so. Some of the examples of projects of this type included Androideroids, Regexr, Perfectr (as yet unreleased), Kaleidoscope and his Playing Records experiment.

- Lee Brimelow‘s talk entitled My Head Hurts was very insightful, pragmatic and encouraging and left me feeling positive about Flash’s future. Lee is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe. He made some interesting points and observations about the resulting fallout (and misinformation) generated by Steve Job’s ‘Thoughts on Flash’ blog.

- Seb Lee-Delisle‘s talk, ‘What the Flux?’ was probably my favourite of the conference and covered similar subject matter to Lee Brimelow’s. Seb decided to talk to some major players in the open web community to gain some perspective on how flash is viewed from outside our own community. What he discovered was quite sobering stuff and did not leave me feeling overly warm and fuzzy inside. There is obviously some venom felt towards the Flash community, and it was interesting to hear Seb say that it’s partially our own fault for the weaker aspects of the content we have produced over the years. The talk was great because it managed to trawl though so many complicated issues and summarise it all into really useful information and comment. The overall conclusion was that we all needed to keep on learning new tech, keep adapting and keep being passionate. It was a great call to arms and kick up the backside and definitely a talk worth watching, Flash developer or not, if you can find a link to it online. It ended in an on-stage game of Family Fortunes that he had built using an iPad and Wii-mote controllers. I also had the pleasure of talking to him at the bar afterwards and discussing his talk further. What an lovely guy he is.

- Iain Lobb‘s game design talk, ‘Zero to Game Designer in 60 Minutes’, was excellent. The venue was packed and many were unable to get in. He used a demo-suite created using his latest game-engine to illustrate the many subtle nuances that come together to make a pleasing gaming experience. You can play with his demo here. It enables you to play with camera movement, character movement, physics, feedback, enemy behaviour and many other components of gaming. One particular insight I loved was the explanation of how Mario games feel so ‘right’: Mario has three times as much gravity applied to him on the way down as he does on the way up.

- Seeing the work of artist/coder Robert Hodgin, the man behind the iTunes Visualiser!

- Bumping into the FDT team on Brighton Pier and chatting to them about their great product face to face.

- Having after-party drinks at the Dome Bar right at the conference. £1 drinks and plenty of room for everyone = much better!

- Stefan Sagmeister‘s manatee blowjob joke, oh, and his talk in general. Again, the theme was one of experimenting and play (in the context of sabbaticals). Inspiring stuff.

- Having at least one strand of every talk session being signed for the deaf audience.

- Leaving the conference feeling inspired, engaged, reinvigorated and ready to do more (this is probably the thing I like most about FOTB).

Lows (actually these were very hard to come up with…)

- Although I found it all quite amazing, I think I saw too much generative art this year.

- For me, there was a lack of talks containing tangible, valuable, help and advice such as gotchas, code examples or best practices.

___________

So all in all it was an excellent and valuable time. I will definitely be back again for more. Thanks to everyone involved for making it so good and to all the people I met and hung out with. It was a pleasure.

HTML5 vs Flash – at a Flash conference – Good to see the usual sensationalism of the HTML5 vs Flash argument dissipating into a more intelligent discussion about using the right tools for the right job – http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-san-francisco/html5-vs-flash-at-a-flash-conference

Web Multimedia – 6 reasons why Flash isn’t going away – A refreshing read for Flash devs, many valid points made – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180776/Web_multimedia_6_reasons_why_Flash_isn_t_going_away?taxonomyId=167&pageNumber=1

iPhone apps: British designers on the key to creating a hit – Some excellent insight and interviews from British App makers in this Guardian article – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/04/technology-software-iphone-app

Workers at a pyramid in Giza.

Sunset through the Glade, Glastonbury 2010.

Dorset barn dance.

Sunset at said barn dance.

Basically at compile time I was getting this error – The definition is in circular inheritance – I had a library symbol linked to a class com.foo.ToolbarPH. This class was a subclass of the superclass com.foo.Toolbar. My mistake was that I hadn’t noticed that the library symbol main class in the object properties had been autonamed to Toolbar and this is what was throwing the error and causing the problems. Solution – rename the class in the library properties. Simple.