Latest Features...

Pyrenean Mountain Dog Puppies

Bundles of furry fun!

Saturday 30 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

As I mentioned before, there is a good reason why I have been writing a bit less on Bitwise over the past few weeks - well, nine good reasons, actually!

My beloved Pyrenean Mountain Dog, Bethan, gave birth to nine fabulously beautiful puppies this April. They are growing at a phenomenal rate and they are taking up a huge amount of my time. Hence, not so much time to write in Bitwise... Anyway, here's a picture of one of the pups. She's called (...)

more...

Foundation Game Design with Flash

Book Review

Friday 29 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

Foundation Game Design with Flash - $39.99 /£31.49
By Rex van der Spuy
Friends of Ed: http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430218210
Computer Manuals: http://www.compman.co.uk/
ISBN-10: 1-4302-1821-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-1821-0

So you want to design a game and you want to do it in Flash? This, then, is (or may be) the book you need. First let's clarify what this book is and what it isn't. It is a book for people who want to both design and code a two-dimensional graphical game using Adobe's Flash CS3 or CS4 IDE and (...)

more...

Amethyst Flash Platform IDE, beta 5

Flex, AIR and ActionScript in Visual Studio

Tuesday 26 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

My company, SapphireSteel Software, today released the fifth beta of our Visual Studio IDE for programming Adobe Flash Platform applications.

This beta adds refactoring plus a whole bunch of other goodies. For more information and to download a copy go to our web site: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Amethyst-Beta-5-Flex-Refactoring.

more...

Flex on Rails

Book Review

Wednesday 20 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

Flex on Rails $31.49 / £31.99
(Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 3 and Rails 2)
by Tony Hillerson and Daniel Wanja
Addison-Wesley
ISBN-10: 0321543378
ISBN-13: 978-0321543370
http://www.flexonrails.com/book.html

The default ‘front end' for Ruby On Rails applications takes the form of dynamically created web pages defined using HTML. In fact, it is not that difficult to create much slicker front ends rendered in Adobe Flash. This book explains how to get Flash talking to Rails with the help of (...)

more...

Snap Art 2 - review

Photoshop plugin

Saturday 16 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

Snap Art 2 - $199
(upgrade price $99 for registered users of Snap Art 1)
Alien Skin Software
http://www.alienskin.com/snapart/

Snap Art 2 is a Photoshop-compatible plugin which can help you turn photographs into (apparently) ‘hand-drawn' or ‘hand-painted' artwork. We reviewed Snap Art 1 a couple of years ago. The recently released Snap Art 2 is essentially “the same but better”. The set of (...)

more...

Pyrenean Mountain Dog Pups

The softest type of software...

Sunday 3 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

I’ve been using my old Hewlett-Packard laptop recently, sitting here on the table in my kitchen. It’s been a while since I used it and its 16Gb disk is no longer quite as massive as once it seemed. How time flies!

It doesn't seem so long ago that I was sitting here in the kitchen with the same HP portable to look after my new pup, Bethan. At that time 16Gb seemed massive. In fact, that was about four years ago and now Bethan (a beautiful Pyrenean Mountain Dog or ‘Great Pyrenees') is sitting here (...)

more...

Flex 3 In Action

Book Review

Friday 1 May 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

Flex 3 In Action $49.99
Tariq Ahmed with Jon Hirschi and Faisal Abid
Manning: http://www.manning.com/ahmed/
ISBN: 1933988746
576 Pages

There is a boom in Flex 3 books at the moment. Flex is Adobe's framework for developing rich internet applications, typically using Flash graphics for creating the user interface elements. Tariq Ahmed's book is (according to the publisher) “an easy-to-follow, hands-on Flex tutorial. (...)

more...

The Hunt For Gollum

Gobsmacked is the only word for it!!!

Thursday 30 April 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

Fan films, like ‘fan fiction’, are not things I generally seek out for my entertainment. A film based on The Lord Of The Rings and which proclaims itself to be “a film by fans for fans” sounds like something that I would avoid like a plague of Orcs.

So I confess that I am surprised, amazed, dumbfounded and, yes, gobsmacked by the trailer I have just watched for a fan-made movie called ‘The Hunt For Gollum'. When I read that this film had been made on a budget of £3,000 (about $4,500), and that instead of filming in the epic grandeur (...)

more...

UK Prime Minister’s Site Votes Him Out

The perils of online engagement

Wednesday 29 April 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is determined to come to grips with the online world. But to date his exploits online have not been entirely happy ones.

First there was the scandal over a couple of his spin doctors plotting to smear members of the Conservative opposition party. Then there was his less than enthralling attempt to launch new policies on YouTube (The Times says that comments to that video were subsequently disabled). And now... (...)

more...

Free Screen Recorder - BB Flashback Express

Commercial quality for free!

Wednesday 22 April 2009 by Huw Collingbourne

Blueberry Software has just announced a new free version of its entry-level screen recording tool, BB Flashback Express.

Previously priced at $39, BB Flashback Express is a high quality screen recorder which can also automate uploading of movies to YouTube and other online video sharing sites. This comes hard on the heels of Techsmith's free Jing tool and, since it does not suffer from Jing's limitations, it (...)

more...

Latest Features...

Pyrenean Mountain Dog Puppies

Foundation Game Design with Flash

Amethyst Flash Platform IDE, beta 5

Flex on Rails

Snap Art 2 - review

Pyrenean Mountain Dog Pups

Flex 3 In Action

The Hunt For Gollum

UK Prime Minister’s Site Votes Him Out

Free Screen Recorder - BB Flashback Express

More...

Free 425 Page Ruby eBook

Dog Tired...

The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 with ActionScript

Derek Draper and how NOT to blog

The UK Government versus The Bloggers

Bokeh Review

Amethyst Adobe Flex/ActionScript IDE Beta 4

Adventures in ActionScript - part two

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Bible

Adventures in ActionScript - part one

Most recent forum messages