Ported the Guardian's audio, video and slideshow widgets to AS3. Integrated Omniture analytics logging. Worked with Brightcove to build a custom player able to display video and ad content at multiple resolutions across the Guardian site. Helped the Java team incorporate versioned SWF artifacts into their main build process using Ant, Maven and SVN.

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Helped San Francisco agency Viscira create a Flash-based product presentation for pharmaceutical company Amgen. Researched and advised best practices for serving HD video over the internet. Liaised with studio staff to combine multiple visual elements into a web-friendly package. The finished result combined video footage, 3D animation and motion graphics into a coherent interactive design.

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Helped San Francisco agency Viscira build a Jeopardy-style quiz game for pharmaceutical company Tarceva. This required plenty of hands-on work developing and integrating an AS3 client with a LAMP web app. Also spent time structuring a Scrum-based workflow to help producers coordinate designers, copywriters and interactive developers to meet oft changing client requirements.

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Built an AS3 library that wraps up the Guardian Open Platform API and makes it available to Flash and Flex projects. Set up Ant scripts to manage build a SWC, generate ASDoc documentation and run a series of FlexUnit tests. Shared the result on Google code for all to use.

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Having arrived in SF for a few months, I split my first weekend between O'Reillys esteemed Irish Bar and the FlashCamp over at Adobe Town Hall. In possession of a fresh promo copy of Flash CS4, myself and Pi Bot decided to get acquainted with the Pixel Bender Toolkit.

Rubbish editor aside, the general flow of writing Pixel Bender kernels comes easily.  At heart, you're writing a blob of C code that gets fired once for every pixel in your destination image.  Having fathomed that my code would be evaluating every pixel in turn, it occurred to me a nice introductory exercise might be to build a cellular automaton. This in mind, I decided to tip my hat to Wright and Eno have a crack at the good old Game of Life.

Aside from learning how to plumb in kernels to AS3 projects using an directive, this challenge was over very quickly. An internet search revealed that someone else had got there first. Hump.

Inspiration came a little later whilst catching up with Paul and the gang over corned beef quesadillas at O'Reilly's.  What if the simulation ran backwards so that the cells converged in a fixed pattern? Sunday never provided enough time to find out, but subsequent twiddling with pre-generation to a bitmap cache produced a masked image rotator type thing, complete with elliptical Hofstadter references. Not everyone's pint of Guinness, but kept me amused all the same.

Helped build a Facebook BMX game commissioned by Sky Sports, Sport England and British Cycling. Developed a multi-player engine in record time by combining a custom SmartFox installation with a lightweight API for AS3 developers.

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