Labs

I will be giving a presentation this Friday, August 21st, at the Chicago Portfolio School. I will cover a lot of the same material as my recent appearance at the Denver Art Museum, including Big Spaceship's approach, culture, techniques, philosophy, and process.

The event on Friday begins at 5:30 and is free! More info about the event can be found here.

Charlie discovered the idea of the super formula. Since it sounded super, Charlie proposed a challenge, a coder challenge, a super coder challenge. The challenge was straightforward – create a super formula editor that creates a super shape. The other parameters being that the shape must spin in 3D (well at least look like it), the shape must be composed of at least 10,000 particles, the shape must be editable and it must be made in Flash. The winner determined by the fastest FPS, as judged by Mr Doobs stats class.

Just wanted to post a thank you note to those who came out to DelveUI and came to see my talk. I felt like there was some small spark of an understanding that designers and programmers in this industry don't have to relegate themselves to "Standards" or "Flash" camps... a subject I'll probably write on at some greater length at some point.

Slides coming soon.

I will be speaking at the Denver Art Museum on Wednesday, August 5th as a part of the AIGA Colorado speaker series.

In an attempt to learn about CoreData to maintain persistent data on the iPhone I followed this tutorial. (I recommend following it and then opening up some of the provided examples from Apple that illustrate the use of CoreData.) Indeed it has a good deal of descriptions on how it all fits together and gave me great insight on how to implement a persistent Model.

However, once I completed the tutorial to a point where I was able to build and run, the app was crashing and I was perplexed as to why. So I started with what the Debugger was telling me.

Something has been going on in the Ship's kitchen during the past few weeks. After we got a new rack for our knives they had just been randomly dangling around in the beginning, enjoying their existence as cutting utensils. Nobody knows when it started exactly, but like crop circles in a corn field, the blades suddenly started getting a life of their own. On each trip for some caffeine there would be a new formation.

What apparently started off as tidying up the workspace quickly evolved into a silent battle of knives. The great thing was that no body ever talked about the arrangements and the interaction was completely anonymous. It is still unclear who contributed, but about halfway through people started documenting everything on camera. My thanks go out to all the nameless knife shufflers. Hit the more link for the pictures.

The usual flash sites that we build contain tons of huge graphics, animations, dynamic motion, videos, timeline transitions as well as tons of code, utilizing huge open source libraries like papervision 3d, tweening engines and so on.

We want everyone to be able to use their preferred design/dev environment to ensure a fast way to produce innovative high quality work. That includes using the Flash IDE and still being able to use Flex/Flash Builder as a developer.

In Part I of our distribution learnings we learned important lessons like the importance of mapping our certificate request to the same name in the iPhone Developer Portal, the differences between Agents and Admins and Developers (oh my!) and the answer to the all important question: "What should I set my bundle identifier to?"

Now in Chapter II of understanding iPhone distribution we'll uncover provisioning for ad-hoc applications and prepping an application for final deployment on iTunes Connect.

When I first started dabbling with Objective-C and iPhone development I found the entire learning process cumbersome and frustrating. In fact, many days I still do. Often Apple’s documentation seems dated, complex or difficult to find. The hangover of the NDA from the early era of iPhone development still lingers – there is a dizzying amount of information to consume and understand before you can develop for this phone.

I’d like to start sharing some of the learnings I’ve had along the way. Not every solution I’ve come up with is perfectly in tune with the patterns the Objective-C community or Apple recommends. I’m coming at iPhone dev from the angle of a self-taught programmer, someone who cut their teeth on JavaScript and ActionScript and now has stumbled onto something a little more complicated. Hopefully these articles will help me and the community at large to better document and understand this exciting new territory.

If you missed Flash on Tap, you missed out. I had a blast in Boston meeting and drinking with the community. Let me tell you, the infrared5 people know how to throw a party. My presentation covered Big Spaceship's process on a day-to-day level -- the 10 fundamentals that get us through what seem like crazy deadlines. I've posted the slides on SlideShare for your downloading pleasure.

UPDATE: Or you can just watch 'em here!