10 May 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on May 10th, 2008 @ 08:19:39 pm, using 356 words, 183 views
On the 26th of May I’ll be running the Bupa London 10,000 charity event beginning and ending in St James Park, London. This is just a shout out to say I’ve set up a sponsorship page, so if you know me, you’ve found this blog useful in the past, or you just feel like helping a good cause please click the link below and donate anything you can.
Donate to the SHINE trust here.
I thought long and hard about which charity to choose, and I’m a strong believer in education being a primary facilitator in the creation of a more sustainable environment. In short, saving people’s lives is an incredibly noble cause, but we don’t want them to survive only to live in misery or poverty. Education can improve these things because someone who receives education will not only stand a better chance of making a good life for themselves and their family, but they are less likely to make the wrong decisions in the first place. The men and women at SHINE are dedicated to this cause, so I’d like to help just a little.
I got hold of a Nike+ kit about 10 months ago and I cannot recommend it enough if, like me, you’re in front of a computer for most of your day. And unlike the gym, it’s not boring! I was the kid at school who completely avoided any physical education, preferring to take in a GameBoy and play up the asthma. But what Nike and Apple have managed to do is nothing short of brilliant, bringing geekiness and health together in one nice little gadget. If you aren’t familiar with Nike+, it’s a chip for your shoe, combined with a chip for your iPod; together they record distance, pace, total time, provide audio feedback and upload data to a website to plot graphs of your runs. There’s also a social side, personal and group challenges, forums, iTunes mix’s and workout plans. All in all, even if you think you are never going to run more than a few paces, think again, you will surprise yourself if you give it enough time. 
25 April 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on April 25th, 2008 @ 10:28:52 am, using 80 words, 435 views
My colleague Rick Williams just found an excellent game called Echochrome which is coming soon to PS3 and PSP. It is very reminiscent of Escher’s work, the difference here is that you must complete the illusion yourself by rotating the 3D-space to allow the inhabitants of the world to complete the puzzles.
Below is a video of the engine that forms the basis of this game… it’s called Objective Locative Environment System:
02 April 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on April 2nd, 2008 @ 11:38:20 am, using 119 words, 443 views
Quick warning regarding loading images using the Loader class in Flash Player 9…
Image files that are saved with a CMYK profile will appear with inverted colours, this includes JPEGs. It might sound a random thing to encounter but it can happen if you are allowing users to upload images. So it’s probably best to re-save the images on the server using an RGB profile and also check for things like a high DPI, which is likely to also be the case with CMYK images that have been designed for print originally.
Should you want to do this in Flash after loading the CMYK image here’s an excellent resource to get you started:
http://www.nicknettleton.com/zine/php/cmyk-rgb-and-php
01 April 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on April 1st, 2008 @ 09:26:36 am, using 214 words, 498 views
I’m a big fan of Unity3D, great for cross-platform 3D games. So I was glad to find out from my colleague James that Unity is coming to iPhone, a platform I have also invested a good amount of my time in recently.
Typically Flash has formed the basis of my work over the last 7 or 8 years, but I’m finding now that the technologies are all so similar, it’s just syntax (and more often than not those are nigh-on the same). We are also more able to apply our learnings in say Papervision, to OpenGL ES for iPhone or Unity without too much of a learning curve, and more importantly, we have many more options for spreading our ideas across a wide variety of media without incurring the enormous costs that multi-skilling in those areas could have meant before.
On a similar note we now have a new version of Director to play with, which adds yet another possibility to the mix. Previously bandwidth and the cost of being online put a spanner in the works, now it looks like it is time to realise some of the things we used to suggest.
So it’s a very exciting time and hopefully I’ll have more to say (and share) regarding these technologies so stay tuned.
28 March 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on March 28th, 2008 @ 04:46:30 pm, using 166 words, 1151 views
Quote:
“Move Media Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight To Create The Most Flexible, High Quality Streaming Video Platform”
Here’s a strange one. Move Networks is offering a HD video player “powered by Silverlight” that comes in the form of a Firefox extension. Once installed you are redirected to a page that shows a HD video, but a look at the source shows the video player header and controls/progress bar are all made in Flash, it just overlays a block, streaming in a QMX file (doesn’t open in Windows Media Player when renamed asx).
It seems a lot of effort to go to, cross communicating between Flash, JavaScript, Silverlight and Firefox, when you could have made the whole player using just one technology. I don’t get the point of the Firefox extension in the first place, the video controls require Flash Player anyway, and if they had used Silverlight for them you’d need that plugin so why bother with this extension at all?
Try it here.
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