Bitwise Magazine

I’m on The Flex Show this week

Listen in

Wednesday 9 March 2011

I recorded an interview for the Flex Show recently and it’s gone online today.

the Flex Show is a regular podcast about Adobe Flash Platform development using the Flex framework. I'm talking about Amethyst which is the Flash IDE for Visual Studio, developed by my company, SapphireSteel Software. I recall that I'd had a very hard and exhausting day when I recorded this interview so I hope it's coherent! Anyway, you can decide for yourself by listening in here: http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/3/9/Huw-Collingbourne-on-Amethyst-The-Flex-Show-Episode-135.

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Kindle, Bookmarks and Frustration

Can’t this be easier?

Monday 7 March 2011

Just following on from my last Blog post...

I've finally cracked it! Those pesky Go To links in Kindle eBooks. They are simple to do once you know how. But find out the trick was not so easy. I spent a lot of time around web forums on which people were complaining that they couldn't get their Table Of Contents links to work when readers clicked the Go menu. From what I've read, it seems that some people can't get those links to work and others can. Unfortunately, I was in the former group. There are a few tricks to this - for one thing, don't edit the original document, edit the copy that Mobipocket Creator (an eBook generator) makes; and for another thing, set up the Groups (the links and anchors) before building the final book. Look, this is a bit complicated to explain. If you are a Kindle author or think you'd like to be (...)

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Getting Started With Kindle

The joys (?) of e-publishing

Friday 4 March 2011

I’m going to have at least two books published this year.

One of them, a programming book called The Book Of Ruby, will be published in the traditional way – as a paperback. The other, a novel called Killers In Mascara, will be published as an eBook for Amazon's Kindle. Here is my book in Word, in the background, and in the Kindle Previewer in the foreground. Even plain text loses some of its original formatting on Kindle. One of the challenges is to make a book look reasonably professional given the very basic formatting supported by Kindle I've worked in magazine publishing for most of my life: I've written columns, tutorials, interviews and reviews for programming magazines, newspapers, women's magazines, pop music magazines and more besides. At various times I have also edited and published magazines. Even so, the world of book (...)

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Adventures In ActionScript

ByteArrays and beyond

Wednesday 2 March 2011

If you are a regular reader of Flash&Flex Developer’s Magazine you may be familiar with the ActionScript programming columns which I write for it.

If you aren't, I'd recommend that you download this month's copy. Not only for my article but also because this magazine is a first rate resource for Flash platform programmers and, best of all, it's free! The series I am writing in FFD magazine goes further into the nitty-gritty details of writing an adventure game. I've previously written a couple of articles on this topic in Bitwise. The FFD series will go into far greater depth, however, and introduces topics that will be of interest to ActionScript coders even if you don't happen to be as game-obsessed as I am! My Adventures In ActionScript column this month is devoted to the mysteries of serialization to allow you to save and restore custom object types to and from disk. Other features include articles about creating custom (...)

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The Rails 3 Way

Book Review

Friday 18 February 2011

The Rails 3 Way (2nd Edition)
$49.99 / £36.99
By Obie Fernandez
Addison-Wesley: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780321601667
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=187947
ISBN-10: 0-321-60166-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-60166-7

According to the publisher, “The Rails 3 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 3.” While it is debatable whether or not this is the “only” book that can live up to this claim, it is certainly a very useful book for any serious Rails 3 developer. The book takes a systematic approach to using Rails 3. It begins with the necessary tasks of getting your Rails environment installed and configured and it then moves on to an in-depth discussion of fundamental features of Rails 3 such as controllers, Active Record and migrations. Later chapters describe specialist areas such as Ajax on Rails, session management and authentication. There are also some useful appendices providing Active Model and Active (...)

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MindManager 9

Mind mapping and brainstorming tool

Monday 14 February 2011

MindManager 9 $349
Mindjet: http://www.mindjet.com
For Windows or Mac
Free Trial available

I used to be very sceptical about the use of ‘mind mapping' tools. It was my distinct prejudice that drawing boxes on a screen and joining them together with lines was not a sensible way to organize ideas or plan a project. Well, I've had a change of heart. This change began after reviewing version 7 of Mindjet's MindManager. For me, the breakthrough really came when I stopped worrying about the theory and just started using the software. With MindManager you can brainstorm ideas and plan projects in the form of hierarchical trees or branching networks with topics and subtopics grouped together. The first project of any substance that I used it on was a programming problem. I was trying to make sense of a certain flow of programming logic in a complex project. There were two (...)

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Amethyst Reviewed in VS Magazine

Also WebORB

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Adobe Flash Platform development integrated with .NET...

Amethyst is my company's Flash and Flex IDE for Visual Studio and it has taken up a very large part of my life so it's good to read such a positive review! Read the review in Visual Studio Magazine.

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Vue 9 Infinite

The latest update to this professional grade scenery creator

Thursday 13 January 2011

Vue 9 Infinite – From $995
e-on Software
http://www.e-onsoftware.com

Doesn't time fly! It doesn't seem like twelve years since I first used e-on Software's Vue but, on checking, I find that it was in 1998 that I received a copy of a product which was then called Vue d'Esprit. Back then, it was a fairly simple 3D landscape generator that was often characterised as being a cheap and cheerful alternative to MetaCreations' better-known Bryce. A great deal has changed since then. MetaCreations no longer exists, Bryce is now owned by Daz 3D and might be characterised as a cheap and cheerful alternative to Vue. Meanwhile Vue itself has grown enormously in power and sophistication. You only need to glance through the names of a few of the big films that feature landscapes created with Vue to realise that this is now most certainly a big-league product. (...)

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Adobe Flex and .NET in Visual Studio

Amethyst 1.2 and WebORB

Tuesday 14 December 2010

Applications that use Microsoft’s .NET at the ‘back end’ and Adobe’s Flex at the ‘front end’ have the best of both worlds. Flex is a development framework for Flash which is installed just about everywhere (well, on 96% or so of computers anyway). For .NET developers, the ability to design, edit and debug Flex and .NET programs inside Visual Studio is a killer combination.

This is the story of an IDE. Over the past three years, I've been working on the development of a hugely complex project aimed at welding together two unrelated technologies – Flash and .NET – inside Visual Studio. This week we've released a product that consolidates our efforts in a uniquely powerful environment that provides a full suite of tools to design, edit and debug .NET and Flash Platform client/server applications in a single Visual Studio solution. This is just one part of the story... With Amethyst Professional, you can debug from C# to ActionScript and back again! When I began working on Amethyst, my company's Flash Platform IDE, about three years ago, one of our ambitions was to enable the seamless development of mixed-language (C#/ActionScript) and (...)

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CSS Pocket Guide

Book Review

Friday 10 December 2010

CSS Pocket Guide $13.49
By Chris Casciano
ISBN-10: 0-321-73227-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-73227-9
Peachpit Press: http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321732278

I like short books. I like small books. I like books that stick to the subject, get to the point and don't waste my time with waffle. Which is why the CSS Pocket Guide is my kind of book. It's small (it really does fit in the pocket of my jacket) and covers all the essential details of styling web pages with CSS in well under 300 pages. The book is divided into 14 chapters. The first two chapters briefly describe the basics of CSS (what are style sheets, what does ‘cascading' mean and so on) and CSS support in various Web browsers. The remaining chapters are devoted to the specifics of CSS: selectors, measurements, the box model, positioning and floats and so on. The pages are nicely laid out with small diagrams to show various positioning effects and lots of little code (...)

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Cooking for Geeks

Book Review

Wednesday 1 December 2010

Cooking for Geeks
Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food $34.99/£26.99
By Jeff Potter
O’Reilly Media http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805890

At first sight I'd assumed this was going to be a book full of recipes for kleftikos, dolmades and moussakas. Only when I looked more closely did I realise that the cooking on offer is not for Greeks with an ‘r' but for Geeks without. You might think that the whole idea of geeks who cook is a bit of a contradiction. Geeks, almost by definition, don't cook. They slave over hot keyboards while boxes of take-away pizzas and decaying fast food lie forgotten in odd corners. Or then again, maybe not. After all, I cook and I guess some people would say that I have a pretty good claim to geekdom. So, I suppose this book must be written for people just like me! Written by Jeff Potter who studied (a curious combination) of computer science and visual art, Cooking For Geeks aims to (...)

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I Am Spartacus - The Twitter Accountant’s Joke Craze

Are these really the best anti-terrorism measures we have?

Friday 12 November 2010

It all started with a tweet from an accountant called Paul Chambers. Having missed a flight from Doncaster to Belfast in January he vented his frustration via Twitter with these now famous words:

"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" Not being a tweeter of any great degree of fame, he no doubt expected his comment to vanish into oblivion along with most of the other millions of tweets made by people every day. Alas, not so! By some inexplicable means his tweet came to the attention of the authorities and a prosecution against Chambers was launched. According to the Guardian Newspaper: 'Chambers was controversially prosecuted under a law aimed at nuisance calls – originally to protect "female telephonists at the Post Office" in the 1930s – rather than specific bomb hoax legislation, which requires stronger evidence of intent.' In spite of the fact that the 27 year (...)

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HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications

Book Review

Wednesday 10 November 2010

HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications: Visualizing the Web $39.95 / £24.99
by Matthew David
ISBN: 9780240813288
Focal Press: http://www.focalpress.com/HTML5.aspx
Computer manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=178897

Everybody's talking about HTML5 all of a sudden. It's going to revolutionise the Web (apparently) and anyone who is anyone wants a slice of the action. Google supports it. Microsoft is backing it. Adobe's developing tools for it. But what the heck is it? Currently HTML5 is still work in progress. In principle it will eventually make web sites inherently interactive with integrated animation, video and drag-and-drop capabilities. If you want to be ahead of the game, this book promises to “show you – not just tell you – what HTML5 can do for your web sites.” In spite of the “show, not tell” angle, I would have to say that this is far from being a richly visual book. There are, to be true, quite a number of colour screenshots showing things such as (...)

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Her Majesty’s Twitters

The Royal Internet

Sunday 7 November 2010

I read today that Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, will launch her Facebook page this week.

This is not her first Internet venture, however. She already has her own YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalChannel where you can watch her performing a variety of fascinating Royal functions such as presiding at state banquets and visiting cat and dog homes. And she is a regular tweeter on Twitter (though one supposes that possibly some of her various attendants of ladies in waiting might occasionally help out with this). I was interested to note that the Royal Twitter feed has almost 70,000 followers. But how many Twitter feeds does Her Majesty herself follow? Answer: 0. As I still vaguely entertain the hope that Her Majesty may one day see fit to bestow upon me some trifling title, honour, estate or knighthood for my services to trash journalism, I shall resist (...)

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Programming Ruby 1.9 (3rd edition)

Book Review

Sunday 31 October 2010

Programming Ruby 1.9 (3rd edition): The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide $49.95
by Dave Thomas, with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt
The Pragmatic Bookshelf
http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9

If you are an experienced Ruby programmer, you will undoubtedly have read, or browsed, some version of Dave Thomas's Programming Ruby, popularly known as the ‘Pickaxe Book' thanks to the image on its cover. The first edition, which was based on Ruby 1.6, is available free online. The second edition, was expanded by over 200 pages to cover the features of Ruby 1.8. And the 3rd edition, which has gained another hundred or so pages (960 pages in total), is devoted to Ruby 1.9. The book is so well-known and highly regarded among Ruby aficionados that it would be superfluous for me to recommend it to experienced Ruby coders. Suffice to say, it provides such compendious documentation of the Ruby languages that, to all intents and purposes, it may be regarded as the definitive (...)

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Headless Corpses, Hallucinogenic Horseflies and Keyboard Fluff

Thrilling adventures in computer cleaning

Saturday 23 October 2010

I don’t generally plug other publications on Bitwise. However, for IT Expert I’m prepared to make an exception. And all in the name of fluff!

IT Expert is a print magazine that can also be read online here: http://www.itexpertmag.com. Maybe I'm biased but I happen to think that the best bit is the ongoing saga of ‘Dirtection Inc.' – the story of a crime-solving computer keyboard fluff specialist. OK, so I suppose I'd better admit to a personal interest in Direction Inc., since I'm the person who writes it. Anyway, the first series starts here: “If it hadn't been for the piece of fluff, the whole business with the horseflies, the vicar and the postmistress might have turned out very differently...” You can read through all eight thrill-packed episodes online. And if you can stand even more excitement, a new series of just started: “In the dealing room of an international bank it is not be (...)

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DVD Ripper Free Offer

But only for a limited period

Friday 22 October 2010

To celebrate Halloween, Digiarty Software is giving away copies of its WinX DVD Ripper Platinum.

The company says this release has "significantly improved functions" and will be available free away for the very first time. But you'll need to act fast. The giveaway lasts until Oct 28, 2010. Download a copy from http://www.winxdvd.com/giveaway/ For Windows users: Click the “for Windows download” button to get WinX DVD Ripper Platinum. Register code: AA-TDUPTDYO-MIBQER For Mac users: Click the “for Mac download” button to get the Mac DVD Ripper. Register code: WINXDRM-FREE-GIVEAWAY

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Piracy, Kindle and Cheap eBooks

Why buy when you can download free?

Thursday 14 October 2010

Interesting article in The Daily Telegraph newspaper this morning.

Adrian Hon (whose career path alone would be enough to fill a book - "Founder and Chief Creative at Six to Start, an online games company; he originally trained as a neuroscientist at Cambridge and Oxford. He takes a strong interest in the controversies surrounding intellectual copyright.") says that: “If book publishers want to see the next decade in any reasonable health, then it's absolutely imperative that they rethink their pricing strategies and business models right now.” In essence he argues that the eBook revolution is already with us but conventional publishers have been far too sluggish to respond. Their books cost too much and the Kindle-savvy public is turning to piracy to get the books they want quickly and cheaply (or for free). “Most publishers (...)

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E-on Software Vue 9 Due November

World Building 3D graphics package

Tuesday 12 October 2010

e-on software today announced the formal unveiling of its upcoming Vue 9 product line - scheduled for release during the first half of November, 2010.

Among other significant advances, the company says that the new release will introduce 'revolutionary anti-flickering algorithms specifically engineered for the rendering of large, ultra-detailed natural environments'. More information on the e-on software site: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/about/?page=PRIndex&date=October%2012,%202010

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Advanced Game Design with Flash

Book Review

Friday 8 October 2010

Advanced Game Design with Flash $44.99 / £35.49
By Rex van der Spuy
Friends Of ED: http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430227397
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=129482
Author’s web site: http://www.kittykatattack.com
ISBN-10: 1-4302-2739-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-2739-7

When a book on game design begins with a chapter on Verlet and Euler integration, it's a pretty fair guess that it is not aimed at beginners. Advanced Game Design with Flash lives up to its title. It assumes that the reader will already have mastered the basics and is eager to move onto some of the more challenging areas of ActionScript games programming. While there are all kinds of games that you could create using Flash - everything from a text-based adventure game to interactive logic puzzles - this book concentrates primarily on two types of game: space-shooters and platform games rendered in two-dimensional graphics. The author takes a fairly strict approach to the conventions of program design. He recommends a modular approach which separates game logic from the data storage (...)

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