By Kevin Thomas on August 7, 2010
No one likes repetitive work, it’s not only boring but is a good way to introduce errors into your code. The best way to eliminate bugs from your code is to not write any code 
When I first started using frameworks, PureMVC and Caingorm my working processes was to spend a chunk of time setting up the environment, creating the basic framework files, often these were copied from a previous project and renamed, I toyed with the idea of creating a startup project but this also involved copying and renaming files to get started, not an ideal situation.
Over time I found several projects that would create all the startup files you need to use one of these frameworks but they never seemed quite right for me.
This is where ANT comes in, not only is it a great tool for deploying projects but after installing it in Flash Builder (it comes pre installed if you’ve installed Flash Builder on top of Eclipse) you have pretty much all the tools you need to build your own tool to quickly start a project.
Continue reading “Actionscript Ant Tool”
Posted in Flash | Tagged Ant, Automation, Flex |
By Kevin Thomas on February 7, 2010
- as this was the only page getting any hits from my old site I decided to update and include it here, it’s kinda design based -
I first came across this bass back in November 2000 I opened Guitarist Magazine and there it was, I immediately fell in love with this weird looking bass it had a style like nothing else on the market but I’d just finished uni and was skint; so even if I could have found one I wouldn’t have been able to afford it 
At that time when I walked into music shops there seemed to be two kinds of basses, traditional Jazz/Precision style basses (so many clones!) or sleek modern styled basses like the one owned at the time; a lovely looking green Yamaha RBX 760. There didn’t seem to be any risk takers building basses during the late 90′s or if there were no one was stocking them. Although there are quite a few out there now I’d quite like, if only I could justify it to my girlfriend!
I love the design, it’s a contradiction of styles that just works for me. Although you could say it’s based on a traditional Jazz bass the design differs in many ways. It’s fun without looking cheesy, it has a design heritage dating back to the 60′s but it still looks fresh. Continue reading “Yamaha SBV500 and SBV550″
Posted in Audio | Tagged Audio, Bass Guitar, Design, music, SBV, Yamaha |
By Kevin Thomas on November 1, 2009
I’ve been playing with a band recently and since we’ve started getting some gigs I’ve knocked together a little website (and some flyers), it was a bit of a rush and I’d like to re-do it using SASS before too long.
http://www.thiscausticlife.co.uk/
Posted in Web Design | Tagged Blueprint, HTML, music, wordpress |
By Kevin Thomas on October 16, 2009
I attended a presentation on using Sass and Compass at work recently. It’s amazing technology and makes coding in CSS quick and simple. I’ve been having a bit of a play and managed this site theme on the commute to work over a few days.
OK, so it’s not perfect, I’m no designer but it’s amazing how quickly you can get something working using these technologies. One of the real beautys of Sass is that the source files are so readable, so although created quickly it doesn’t feel hacked together, this means it’s easy to revisit the code and add to it later.
One of the most confusing aspects of these technologies is that they all call themselves frameworks!?
Sass is in itself almost a new language, based on CSS and Haml, it takes care of all the annoying aspects of CSS, readability, nesting rules, and most important of all variables.
You can now have variables in your CSS code, no more defining things throughout your style sheets and the headaches that result when these change. You simply define some constants at the top of the page for any reusable values. But thats not all, you can define functions as well! In Sass they are called ‘Mixins’, calling a Mixin returns a predefined chuck of code.
You create a Sass file and then compile it to CSS using ruby via the command prompt.
Well if you want to do things the hard way you do, this is where Compass comes in. Compass is another framework, that makes writing CSS even simpler, it comes with a lot of extra functionality onto of that already provided by Sass. As well as a lot of predefined CSS code to include in projects (such as a Sass version of the Blueprint CSS framework) it has ruby commands to make the process of working with Sass simpler.
I’ve been using Blueprint for some time, the ruby scripts that come with Blueprint are great but nothing compared to using Sass and Compass.
Posted in Web Design | Tagged Blueprint, Compass, CSS, HTML, Sass, Web Design |
By Kevin Thomas on October 12, 2009
Playing around with a 3D model we had at work in Flex. Getting the nodes from the collada file and creating some interactions. Takes a little time to load the model and related assets. Click on the buildings to interact with the map.
Demo
Posted in Demos | Tagged 3D, Flex, papervision |
By Kevin Thomas on September 27, 2009
Another go at a sudoku game, built in flex with a codeignitor backend. Seems to be throwing up the occasional error at the moment just dismiss all and it should be fine.
Been thinking about this for ages so will hopefully get some time to work on finishing this soonish.
Uses CodeIgniter and JSON for managing the server interaction.
Demo
Posted in Sudoku | Tagged CodeIgniter, Flex, JSON |
By Kevin Thomas on August 24, 2009
I’ve been doing a lot of 3D work recently, so was very grateful to get to do some training with Carlos Ulloa the guy who invented it!
Posted in Training | Tagged 3D, papervision, Training |
