After talking ideas through on Skype for years with different friends, work colleges and clients, me and Chris finally got around to creating an app that seems a life time in the making, we have been talking about it for years, but over the last few months we grabbed a bit of time and got our heads together and created Sketchshare

Sketchshare is a multi purpose collaborative sketching tool that can be used by up to 4 iPads simultaneously. With Voice chat built in, you can discuss, brainstorm, storyboard, edit and doodle in realtime. See a video of the app in action here http://abitofcode.com/demo.html

We mainly created this app for ourselves to overcome a problem in relaying ideas to each other ( as we live quite far apart ), but in solving the problem and creating this app, in the beta testing stages we found that most people shared our vision and quickly realised how they could incorporate this into their own workflow with their clients etc.

Super happy its finally out, and i would love to hear your feedback, good or bad, we have had some amazing comments back already and a lot of them are from people not even using it in multiuser mode which is crazy as thats its main goal.

If you like what you see then please support the indie dev cause and you can purchase it here, upon using it if you still like it then please drop us a rating on the app store.

Any good or bad feedback though please let us know here, like i said good or bad it still helps us create a better app going forward in the future.

I wrote this bit of code for a project that ended up getting canned around two and a half years ago, and i meant to put the code out back then, but better late then never.

The transition classes in the source code all work with any type of display object in Flash, so you could have text, image or videos etc, the basic example i have thrown together pulls together a random transition with random settings and uses this to play in and then play out the current transition before running again.

All of the code is very simple to follow and the classes are setup in such a way that many more transitions could be added to the code very easily, you just need to sub class the Transition class and off you go.

If anyone finds this useful or puts it to any good use then please let me know how you get on with it.

view transition manager example
download source code
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Using the new Flash 11 incubator player release i have done a quick test of some 3D GPU accelerated ribbons using the Away3D engine.

The Away3D engine seems the simplest way of interfacing with molehill at the moment i would say, and it didn’t take more than a couple of hours to get my head round using it and creating these ribbons. They are quite optimised as i am updating vertex positions on a single plane for each ribbon rather than creating new planes for each segment which increases the draw calls significantly and resulting in not a lot of ribbons running at once.

To get this to work you will need to get the latest incubator beta Flash player 11 installed, the Away3D engine and lastly i have used the Tweenmax engine for some simple tweens with the ribbon position targets.

The code at the moment is a bit of mess as i was just playing around with different movement variables and effects with the ribbons, but hopefully it will act as a good place to learn how to use the new molehill capabilities and when i have a bit of time i will update the source code with comments and clean it up a bit too.

The source code is available for download on the link below.

view 3D GPU ribbons v3
view 3D GPU ribbons v2
view 3D GPU ribbons v1
download source code
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I was lucky enough to work alongside the talented team at Stardotstar to build this pilot project for The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

My main role in the project was to program all of the interactivity for the project, which included a lot of video stream matching which is always tricky in Flash and then also a beautiful music visualisation of the orchestra playing in the final section of the project.

What was a nice surprise is that this project picked up quite a few awards :

BIMA 2009
Winner: Offline – CD Rom, DVD or Interactive TV.
Winner: Sound Design.

Big Chip 2010
Winner: Best E-Learning Project

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With the arrival of Flash CS5.5 Computer Arts wanted me to create a tutorial showcasing some of the new features available for Flash on iOS devices.

The result was to create an on the go mini journal application that you could use to take photos and record audio clips with.

It also shown how device orientation can be used to good effect with the standard portrait mode being used for adding content and then when moved round to landscape mode the interface slides over into a viewing mode.

Once the files are on the Computer Arts website ill link through to the files.

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In this tutorial I show how to achieve the great Wonder Wall effect.

To achieve this I cover a lot of 3D mesh creation and basic 3D texturing in Flash.

I don’t think the files are on the Computer Arts site yet so i have linked to the raw tutorials files on my site at the moment here

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In this Computer Arts tutorial, I cover how to use your Webcam as a motion detection device and create a little table tennis ‘keep the ball up game’.

Once the files are on the Computer Arts website ill link through to the files.

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Year of Thread is a small Liverpool based fashion company who approached me to come up with some designs for them and also build the site.

This gave me a chance to try out a good and easy to use shopping system called Shopify.

This worked out very good for Year of Thread as the backend in Shopify is all orientated to how shops work and breaks down everything in an easy to understand way, after that it was all about working very closely with Year of Thread to bring across their unique style into some that could work online.

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Netcars is very quickly becoming one of the main competitors to Autotrader, and I was over the moon when they approached me to rebrand and reproduce the whole of their online presence. The result was around 9 months of on and off design work which lead to a site with a lot of content and a lot of personality.

We was all very keen on getting distinct styles working in lots of different sections of the site. A very fun job to do, but not without its challenges with the amount of information to deal with in all of the sections.

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I was approached by Fresh to produce this interactive voting wall for Santander which would be shown at London’s Earl’s Court 2 on a 5x2m screen.

The whole conference was based around momentum and had a lot of graphical items produced in Photoshop and motion graphics piece’s had been put together with lots of stunning light beams moving around, so the main challenge of the project was that the voting wall needed to reflect the same feel and graphical style and work at a fluid 30fps+ so Flash was not going to cut it this time.

After having a play with Openframewors I quickly got the app built and it could handle around 100+ fluid moving light beams across the screen using some nice OpenGL blending equations to finish the effect off, plus a custom built particle engine to add a bit more depth, and then finally a screen saving which with a quick math equation produced a never ending loop of ribbons until the voting wall was interacted with.

To get the votes onto the wall there had been some touch screen kiosk’s setup by my good friends Mr Adam Palmer, which with a bit of Flash magic of my own I created a socket server to have them talk directly into the Openframeworks app.

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