bwpdsigns.com

Does that mean this blog is dead? Probably. Can it be brought back to life? Possibly. Should it be brought back to live? Why not. Does anyone care other than myself? Probably not. Though I’m sure there’s plenty of comment spammers out there thinking the more blogs on the net the better.

2010 Recap.

Looking at the last post from last year, it seemed like I was stumbling over what to focus on and what to learn. I spent quite a bit of time looking at many of the things that I listed, did I master any of them? Hardly. I did make a considerable amount of progress in all areas though. ActionScripting is still my primary skill, HTML / CSS are foundation skills, Javascript is a necessary evil and these days, you can’t expect to be in this field without it. iOS, Android, PHP and so on. Dabbled, made progress and well that’s about it. Quite a bit of time learning about them, quite a bit of time experimenting, nothing really to show for it. Would I sell myself as an iOS, Android or PHP dev… nope.

Looking forward to 2011.

I’m off to a great start so far in 2011, I’m starting a new job the 31st and can’t wait. Focusing on ActionScript at the new gig, though I think there may be a bit more opportunity to be a bit more well rounded at this one. We’ll see.

Sites?

So what’s the status of various sites I have? Good question. Here’s the plan, hopefully someday it will actually work out that they are all maintained.

• bwpdsigns.com – Hopefully I’ll make an effort to blog more about tech I’m working with. There are so many great tutorial and tech sites out there it’s hard to think I’d have anything to contribute. Then again there are equally as many bad sites out there.
• pauluscreative.com – The future home of everything related to the freelance work that I do. Right now it’s in an extremely early stage of development. It’s live but, there’s no content.
• bryanpaulus.com – My old portfolio site and probably one of my earliest examples of a complete XML driven flash site. Painfully out of date.

This doesn’t even start to account for the sites related to my wife’s business. Maybe my goal for 2011 should be to finally get all these sites updated and launched.

Now the challenge is to make sure this isn’t the only post of 2011.

In a time when the market is both full of opportunity and challenges, the question continues to be where will tech turn next? As a developer you should always be striving to not only expand upon what you know but also picking up new tools to add to your skill set. Now the question is what should I do next?

Flash:
Definitely not a dead technology, not seeing any signs of declining or is it? There’s plenty of talk about the future of Flash as it relates to AJAX, HTML 5 and CSS 3 but how fast will these technologies knock down the current king of rich content on the web. I’m not going to go to far with this because there are far better sources of discussion on the topic.

As it relates to me, I’ve been on a path of full focused Flash / ActionScript development over the past several years. While I definitely advanced my skills considerable, my concerns are at this point is being a straight up Flash Developer really a path to longevity in this field. Obviously this is my primary focus since currently my day job is 100% Flash and ActionScript. It will continue to be as well, but I’m more concerned with adding to my skill set so I’ll bring this discussion back to that.

iPhone:
iPhone development doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Even if rumors aren’t true, the field will only grow, especially if when the language expands to future devices, such as the rumored tablet / slate device. This is an area I’ve dabbled with. I have my app idea, its just a matter of focusing on it.

The question here is how does one decide that this is an area I want to explore? It’s great hearing that people are making big bucks on apps that just happen to break through on the store. Is that a reality? With the number of apps on the store, I’m pretty sure that unless happen to have a moment of genius, there will be less stories of weekend warriors making 6 figures off a game they programmed in their spare time.

Still this is definitely an area to be focusing on and one that I’ll be attempting to dive back into. I’d be silly not to.

Android:
Like iPhone, Android is just waiting for it’s moment, it’s off to a slow start compared to iPhone I think but it’s going to have a strong following and many opportunities. iPhone generates a buzz and has companies scrambling to get their app together for that. Clients hear iPhone and want to know how to get into that market, whether they should be there or not. It may happen that Android could do this also.

webOS (Palm):
The Pre is a cool phone. Honestly if want to get into a growing market maybe this would be a great place to focus. Will it get to the point of the iPhone app store? Not likely. Something to look into? Sure, why not, you may just happen to find yourself in a position that you have a skill that may have a limited demand.

Server Side:
I keep coming back to the idea that I should be focusing on learning some sort of server side language, PHP, JSP, .NET, but I never seem to put much focus into it. I keep hoping one will click and I’ll learn enough that I’ll feel comfortable selling my services in one of these areas. Currently I’m exploring PHP with the Zend Framework and will probably dabble with it more in the near future. Is there a market for professional PHP development?

HTML/CSS/AJAX/jQuery:
My roots are HTML & CSS and these are skills that I’ll continue to expand on. There is quite a bit going on in the HTML realm and plenty to keep learning. HTML 5 may change the rules and cause a bit of a shake up. Throw in CSS 3, AJAX and jQuery, that’s a full year of things to learn. I see plenty of my free time coming back to basics and brushing up on how people are using the new HTML 5 tags. This is an area that’s not going anywhere.

In Conclusion:
Did you read all of that? Really? Thanks. Basically this post is more for me than for anyone else. Isn’t that what blogs are for anyway? To babble as if your the center of the universe?

The list above shakes out this way, Flash (it’s my job, it pays my bills and it’s still quite fun), HTML (basic foundation of all web developers skills), iPhone (why not try to tap into this market, plus I work for an ad agency, thinking our clients won’t want iPhone apps is not setting myself up for job security), Android, Server-Side.

WebOS is something I’ll look into just to see what’s involved. Also, if you’re an app creator why limit yourself to just one market. If you have an iPhone app, port it to Android and webOS if it’s not overly involved.

So it took all of about 5 minutes to increase the width of this site. Sure some of the graphics are actually repeating instead of being a nice full width but in general I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. It only took 4+ months for me to do.

I’m tweaking my CSS to make this site a bit wider, I need to update some images and so on but all in all it’s a pretty quick fix. Look for that to happen sometime soon.

RadioShack Mother’s Day Banner wins Beanie Award
RadioShack’s “Mother’s Day” Rich Media Unit
Chief Creative Officer: Pete Favat
Creative Directors: Stephen Potter and Paul Schauder
Art Director: Chris Geraghty
Copywriter: Matt Kaiser
Designer: Ben Daly
Producers: Skadi Gidionsen, Marcie Hartman
Backend Developer: Greg North
Flash Developers: Greg North, Bryan Paulus
UI Developers: Ben Daly and Bryan Paulus
Information Architect: Jennifer Dolan
Quality Assurance Manager: Bryan Raffetto
Account Service: Sarah Amitay, Caitlin Smith
Check it out:

PointRoll’s Beanie Award

It all starts with the shell. Seriously, a good site shell can make or break a project. It needs to be a combination of structure and flexibility, simple yet complex enough to keep the project from falling apart. Okay maybe that’s a bit much but truth be told the base structure of the site can really have an impact on the way a site performs.
I ran into this on many occasions. When I set out to in the initial stages of the build for Endlessdrama.com it became obvious that if the structure wasn’t though out well we’d never get through the project. Three developers with varying levels of experience tackling a high profile site.
As anyone that’s dabbled with Flash for more then 5 minutes can tell you there’s about a million and a half ways to accomplish the same thing. Solutions as simple or as complex as you could possibly imagine. When facing the fact that we had to have a site live in just over 2 weeks it became very important that even with a tight schedule we needed to thing things through.
We’d build a few sites in house before, I started to ask around and received varying feedback on the builds, it wasn’t sounding like I’d be able to leverage anything we’d built previously. Which was both a blessing and curse. A blessing because I’d be able to think through and design my own shell.
Bringing this back to the point and not be a dramatic story teller here’s what I did. I took a look around, didn’t find anything that seemed promising, found again that there were a 100 different ways to approach this. Being a fan of reusable code, I planned out a few different approaches using various object models. I planned before coding, thought about what the core functionality of every shell for any kind of site would be and went from there.
In the end deadlines caused me to have to stray from the generic abstract shell in order to keep our designer happy. The site turned out great and still had a really solid foundation that should allow me to go back and continue to abstract a bit more. I haven’t had a ton of time to rework the code much but when I do I’ll let you know.

While I’ve been working with Flash for several years now Flex is something I’ve been wishing I had a reason to work with. Up until this point I’ve just assumed that you’d use the Flex Builder to produce Flex Apps with but it seems that Eclipse may offer a better coding environment. So my day has been spent downloading and installing Eclipse, various plug ins and Flex Builder trials. I haven’t had a ton of time to work with any but all I know if I’m coming up with plenty of questions.
Is there any advantage to Flex Builder over Eclipse with the Flex Plug-in?
How do you purchase the Flex Plug-in? I can’t find it anywhere on the Adobe site?
Do you need to have the Flex SDK for FDT to work? It seems to be the only way I can get it to work so far.
:::UPDATE:::
After about an hour or so of toying around and lots of google searches, I have Eclipse working with the Flex Plug-in and FDT. I also have MTASC running. I haven’t had much time to actually try to use Eclipse at this point but I’m not really in the middle of any Flash work at the moment so. I’ll let you know when I do get to do some experiments.

I’d almost be willing to bet that you couldn’t have a discussion about Flash these days without the topic of Papervision3d coming up. It’s on everyone list of things to “get up to speed on”. There’s a wealth of tutorials out there and I’ve seen some great examples of it running on a few different sites. It’s incredible when combined with physics engines…
Anyway, here’s my addition to the growing list of “random rotating planes”. Why is mine cool? It’s not, I’m just excited that I was able to pull my materials in from my portfolio site’s XML file.
Here’s the URL, I’m going to have to dabble with getting flash embedded in MT next…
http://bwpdsigns.com/labs/papervision/test1/3dXML.html

Books
I’ve picked up several Flash and ActionScript related books in the past few weeks look for a review or two in the near future
Experiments
I’m starting to see some trends coming from out creative department, I’ll post a few experiments / prototypes that I’ve been working on as soon as they are worthy.
Future Projects
There are some amazing things coming down the pipe here at work, obviously I can’t discuss them but once they go live I’ll be sure to post a link to see what we’re working on.
Yeah it was a short teaser of an update but I’m doing the best I can.

We just released a new site at work to promote ESPN Fantasy Baseball. Endlessdrama.com features TV soap stars, Baseball Players and ESPN Experts.
The site turned out great, I’m excited to have been a part of it. As one of the Flash Developers on the project I’ll talk more about my role and the process of building the site later.
Be sure to take a look at ESPN Fantasy Baseball – Endlessdrama.com