Just released the new site for Allens Of Mayfair. The shop has been in business since 1830, and with such a marvellous heritage, it was always going to be a challenge to retain the old-school intimacy of the shop with the modern design principles of e-commerce, but we are very pleased with the result.

The site was built in close collaboration with the mighty Stuart Johnston, the lead developer and director of Johnston North. His vast experience in usability came to the fore during the project – leading to dropping many of the so-called “features” of Magento, the e-commerce engine chosen to build the backend of the site.
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Eddie Izzard is running 1000 miles across the UK in aid of Sport Relief. As someone who once walked 400 miles for charity, I declare this to be a near-insane undertaking, but worthy of MASSIVE admiration. But what really matters is we get folk to donate money… As Eddie said himself, in response to some asking if he was “Forrest Gump-ing it” – “Forrest Gump didn’t know why he was running. I do. So please donate at [ Sport Relief ].

We decided to jump in and make it a bit more fun to follow Eddie by creating a Twitter / Twitpic / Google Maps mashup to follow him and hopefully over the next week or so start adding some sightings etc. via the twitter account @eddieizrunning. Lots to come!

Check it out – eddieizrunning.com

We are delighted that Tipping Point Film Fund (or TPFF as it is affectionately known) had a successful launch yesterday.

Deborah Burton, one of the head honchos, met Steve Jones during Walk Ireland ‘05 when SJ was walking the length of Ireland with his one of his famous mates, Ronan Keating. Fast-forward to 2009, and the incredible force of ‘Deb’ along with other some very inspiring characters decided to set up TPFF, and called us. It has been a pleasure to work for them, and the resulting site is chock-full of nifty stuff, but is ultimately a useful vehicle for them to voice their great cause – with plenty of style.

Built on a highly customised and bespoke WordPress backend, it is easy to update and control, meaning the reins of power are firmly in the clients’ hands.

A final feather in the cap came when they decided to use one of Steve’s tracks for their viral video – ‘Stars and Satellites’ (which can be downloaded for free at the Sayonara Deadweight Site).

You can also follow TPFF on Twitter

Sometimes nasty and seemingly inexplicable bugs just get on your case.

You have a Flash app… its sweet, all working on every browser, every platform… until the client calls up and says “its crashing on Firefox Windows”. You do not believe the client. How can that be? Its Flash. Its supposed to be consistent across all browsers. But no… we have suffered DEEP nightmares with browser-specific issues in Flash recently.

This one is a quick fix.

If you are suffering crashes with your Flash app in Firefox Windows, or you have a textfield that is not responding to the PC input of the “@” symbol… but only to where the symbol would be on a Mac – ie. SHIFT-2, then check to see if your Flash app’s HTML container has the “wmode” parameter explicitly set. If it IS set, remove it. In our case, this fixed the app, and saved our day from a hellish and probably soul-destroying bug-hunt.

We are using SWFObject to embed the app. Here is the culprit:

Not working

var flashVars = { vars: "notShown" };

var flashParams = {
menu: "false",
allowScriptAccess: "sameDomain",
scale: "noscale",
wmode:"opaque" };

swfobject.embedSWF("app.swf", "flashContent", "950", "600", "9.0.0", "/assets/swf/expressInstall.swf",  flashVars, flashParams, {id:"appID"});

Working

var flashVars = { vars: "notShown" };

var flashParams = {
menu: "false",
allowScriptAccess: "sameDomain",
scale: "noscale" };
*** NOTE - wmode param removed ***

swfobject.embedSWF("app.swf", "flashContent", "950", "600", "9.0.0", "/assets/swf/expressInstall.swf",  flashVars, flashParams, {id:"appID"});

We have been working for five months on a medium-scale app for a large multi-national company. As we approached the beta phase, requests for new functionality started coming, but with 25,000 lines of ActionScript, it was already taking over 45 seconds for the app to compile from the Flash IDE. I made the call to migrate the project over to Flex, and this will be the basis of the discussion as to why every ActionScripter still using Flash as their compiler and IDE should move to Flex Builder.

Over a short series of articles, I hope to shed some light on the reasons. To sum them up:

1. Every time you save a class, your app compiles in the background – meaning you NEVER need to wait for that “Exporting SWF Movie” dialogue box ever again. This alone is enough once you get into a big app…
2. SVN support – in layman’s terms, great version control. You work on a class, and when you are happy, you save (”commit”) a new revised version with comments as to what you’ve done. When your app reaches a stable state, you can save it all as a safe working version and press on. You can always compare old versions and retrieve them if need be.
3. Profiling your apps – if you’ve been used to relying on “trace” statements to debug your apps, you will not believe the precision with which you can dig into the performance of your apps. As well as realtime memory graphs, there are many excellent tools available. For example – loitering objects – take two snapshots of your app’s memory usage over time as it runs, and you can compare the two, seeing not only what objects are still hanging around, but where they came from in the first place – astonishing!
4. Testing in the browser – you get a much better feel for how things will really work
5. Creating Flex libraries – for many Flash devs, this is a bit of a nightmare at the beginning, as we’ve been used to setting one preference to give all projects access to whatever classes we like. Its a bit more complex in Flex, but once you’ve compiled your most useful classes, its a breeze to export and use them, and all makes sense

The aforementioned app is built in PureMVC, and is due pretty soon, so I don’t imagine I’ll have a chance to publish anything before then… but I do hope it will help people through the “banging head off wall” phase that I went through on the early days of trying to make the app work in Flex Builder.