I’m hoping to launch it sometime next month. The CMS is pretty near completion, and then on to the rest of the frontend!

I myself and very very excited about next year, as for me it is a real turn point. Next year I finish school and am off to college, finally doing subjects that I’m actually interested in, which the exception of maths (Business Studies, Computing, Maths and Photography), at a college which is close to home, which is nice seeing as my current school is a quite a drive. Before that can happen, I have to take my GCSEs which is a pain, but in a few months they’ll be over and I can finally get back to updating this blog more regularly.

Talking about my blog reminds me that I’ve take the chance to draw up a few comps of what my new site is going to look like, and here’s a preview of the homepage.

I hope you like it. I was aiming for a very clean, but interesting look. I don’t know how long it will take me to get this live as my HTML is very rusty, but this is a good chance to get it back on top form. I plan to use ExpressionEngine as my CMS as it’s very customizable, and suits my needs better than the other CMSs I looked at.

I also have a book review in the works on Unity Game Development Essentials, which should be up within the next week or so. I have to say though, this book is really good and very easy to understand. After than I intend to hopefully write a few tutorials for sites like Activetuts and sell a few things on FlashDen.net to get a bit of extra cash.

Finally there’s the case of my portfolio. I’m shelving this for the time being as I there’s so much else I want to learn like C# + Silverlight, Cinema4D, Better AS3, Obj-C and the list goes on, so once I’ve got my new blog up, with a basic works section I will get to grips with some of these and then see how it goes from there. I feel I’ve lost focus over the past few months with school, fitness and a few other things, but this new year is a great time to get back on the ball and catch up.

So I hope you all have a great time over this celebratory period and are looking forward to the new decade as much as I am! I feel this decade is going to be the most important one of my life.

Speak next year :p

Harry.

It is a bit different from last weeks as it has more vocals and is less of a progressive track and more of a general trance/techno feel to it.

Enjoy. ]]> http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/2009/08/14/weekly-song-los-angeles-cex/feed/ 0 http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/2009/07/04/intresting-things-of-09/ http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/2009/07/04/intresting-things-of-09/#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:25:08 +0000 Harry http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/?p=720 Continue reading →]]>

Over the past few months I have acumilated quite a few interesting links in my ‘Favorite’ section on Twitter. So I thought instead of being an anti-social nerd, I could share them out to my readers. So here we go!

1. Open-source ActionScript libraries for creating Flash games : http://bit.ly/3BqFjr (via @mesh)
2. A showcase of some of the best PV3D projects out there : http://www.papervisionshowcase.com/ (via @c4rlo5)
3. Very interesting blog about games & flash to add to your reader: http://www.stephencalenderblog.com/ (via @mesh and @bartekd)
4. Amazing stop-motion video! How do they do this? http://bit.ly/wwALI (via @michaeledge)
5. ARhrrrr – An augmented reality shooter prototype http://post.ly/seY (via @rickwilliams)
6. 43 iPhone Development Resources http://bit.ly/jn3ra (via @creattica)
7. Stefano Dembro’s Robots http://www.stefanodembro.com/index.php?l=item&q=Papalote (via @joshspear)
8. Version 1.0 of today’s most popular applications, a visual tour http://bit.ly/b4Mkx (via @PSDTUTS)
9. Nice video of Flash builder 4 Developer Productivity new Features shown by David Zuckerman http://bit.ly/2XIafH (via @swfgeek)
10. Plug-in Media’s Big & Small Papervision site blends 3D with 2D very smoothly. A cut above, very nice job indeed. http://bit.ly/EXWge (via @richardleggett)

So there you go, my top 10 links for a while! I hope they are useful to you.

Harry.

Some of you may have read my twitter updates about technical trouble with my PC, and I thought I would post the solution here.

After many hours trying to figure out why my computer was coming up with the error:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

I still had no solution. The Windows XP CD install just hung on ‘Searching for previous Windows XP Installations…’ and the Windows Setup recovery tool just hung as well after selecting which Windows installation I wanted it to fix.

I then had to get on to Dell support, which is never very pleasant. After running the Dell diagnostics CD, it reported the error:

"Error Code: 0F00:0650.
Msg: IDE Failed: The self-test failed the read portion"

They then sent me 2 new hard drives, which for some reason we double the size of the original After installing these and trying to install XP again it still didn’t work. I ran the Dell diagnostics again, it reported the same error. I was stuck.

Then I went into the BIOS settings and turned RAID control off on the 2 hard drivers. You do this by selecting the drive, and changing it status from ‘Raid on’ to ‘On’. This seemed to solved the problem. I am now thinking that it was not really necessary to get 2 now hard drives as well! It so happened that my warranty had run out 10 days earlier so I had to pay for these! >(

I know this isn’t related to the web, but seeing as I couldn’t find a solution I thought I would post it here.

Now, over the past 10 years there have been many new and exciting technologies appear which help us create and develop more advance apps. Over the past 3 – 4 years, companies and individuals have been taking a different approach on the research they have been doing. Instead of creating new technologies (languages, software, etc..) to solve a problem, they have been using existing products in different roles. The two best examples of this is Adobe Alchemy and the Microsoft Research project, Singularity. If you don’t know what either of these are them a) be ashamed and b) keep reading. 

Adobe Alchemy.

This is a project Adobe developed that lets you take any C/C++ library/code and use it in Actionscript. Now, if you know anything about C/C++, then you will be aware that the number of libraries and open source tools out there vastly exceeds that of Flash’s, so there is something for everyones need, and now the need to write you own is going to be almost completely redundant in the future. You may have seen some of the extreamly cool projects being developed out there, like Doom in Flash (don’t open this at work, you’ll never close it). Although this isn’t perfect, it is still quite an achievement. In time, the desktop will become the web. Going back to the original topic of this post, role reversal, who would of thought a few years ago, that the same type of code that powers the worlds most famous operating system would be able to run on the web? Now, I hope you see what I am getting at. Instead of Adobe creating a whole new language, they just took an existing language, original designed to be a low level language and made tools that let people use it in another way, which was completely unrelated to its original purpose. 

One way to look at this is that nothing new has been created here, nothing has moved forward. You could say that things have moved sideways or expanded in a different direction to what has been happening in the past few years. Using the same thing, just in a different way. 

Singularity.

Microsoft Windows is developed using a mix of Assembly, C and C++ (the well know ones all are), and anyone who has done some serious development with these languages know that it is very easy to go wrong and that you, as a developer, have to watch you back. C/C++ are unsafe languages which means there is a lot of room for error, but they are also extremely fast, so it’s the best choice for an OS. Now though, people at Microsoft Research have been developing their own OS, Singularity, which is developed using minimal Assembly and C (for the boot code, as you have no choice) and then using a modification of the C# language as their main programming language. Seeing where I’m going here? A high level language that is used as part of the .NET framework and for developing Windows Applications, is being used to write an operating system! Now, this isn’t going to replace the current version of Windows we are using now, or any time soon, as for now it is just a proof of concept. This is amazing though, as now you get all the safety of C# (well, Spec#) in an OS. This means auto garbage collection, array bounds checking, which means a lot less chance of a buffer overflow and the whole system would be so much more stable, but not as fast as the original Windows. The modification of C# they are using is called Sing# which is a superset of Spec#. The difference between Sing# and C# is that Sing# has support for channels and low-level programming language constructs that are needed for system programming.

You can read an overview of the Singularity Project here, and you can download it from CodePlex here. 

The Final Word.

Now, these two projects are the best I could think of to prove my point, which I hope you understand. The fact that no technology is limited to one purpose and that instead of creating new languages/software, there is always the option to bend an existing one to shape your needs. 5 years ago, who would of thought that this could be possible? It will be interesting to see what happens in the future….

-Harry. 

Over the past few years there have been some seriously successful and creative sites pop up. Ranging from the ones like YouTube who base themselves on a simple idea and stick to it. Others like WordPress who started off as a simple extension to another CMS, then grew to a fully featured system with a plugin and theme database and on top of all, use by millions all over the world! Along side these sites there have been millions of sites/creations who fail trying to achive the same effect as the two previously mentioned. Now I’m not going to mention any names here, mainly because I don’t know that many and of course, it’s just not nice to say someone’s creation is a failure.

Now, this brings me to my main point, how do you come up with a killer idea?

The answer?
There is no simple one. (Annoying, I know )

I have been thinking about this for quite a while now, and the need for even greater talent is felt more than ever.

With what seems like all the simple, brilliant ones taken, and people coming up with new ones all the time, how do you create something unique? Now the way you do this depends on what sort of service you want to create? Whether it is a way to integrate 3rd party APIs together in one easy place (e.g. linking Twitter, Facebook, WordPress together) or if you want to create something completly different (e.g. Digg – unique back in the day, but now there are a lot of reps).

I tend not to limit myself to any one type. The way I do it is list all my different services I use, what my work flow is between them, and then I think how I could make it easier and/or simpler to do this. Or if there is anything major I wish these services had to offer, then it would be work building my own, with this feature and others included. Think Blogger to Kontain. Kontain is the same as blogger, with a lot of features added in or changed.

This is the basics of it, but you can go into a lot of detail and complexity on this, so there is really no limit to what sorta stuff you can come up with. This is my prefered way of coming up with a new idea, but it depends how you think and the way you work (visual, pratical, etc….).

I look forward to seeing all the progess that is make in the next few years and hopefully I’ll be at the front of it

Harry.

This piece uses a render from Cinema 4D and the adds a little Photoshop magic.

Harry.

When people find out that Harry Northover is just fifteen years old, they are astonished. At such a young age, Harry has proven time and again through his blog and tutorials that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to web design, Flash media, Photoshop, and even making music with his MacBook. What makes people like this tick? Read on for some ways to capture the entrepreneurial spirit.

Inquiring Mind

When a new technology or application becomes available, you have to jump on it and learn all that you can about it. Learning about something when it first comes out gives you the opportunity to manipulate the hardware and software as you see fit. Once you have learned how it all works, the sky’s the limit as to what you can do.

Adventurous Spirit

Trekking through uncharted territory can be difficult, but if you maintain an adventurous spirit, chances are you will find far more than you initially set out looking for to begin with. Taking the time to explore different ways of using programs and truly taking ownership of the possibilities is another characteristic of successful entrepreneurs.

No Obstacle is Too Large

Figuring out solutions to problems is part and parcel to the young entrepreneur. Whether it is rewriting some code to customize a web page or making an entire flash-enabled page, taking the challenge head on is the only way to get the job done. The size of any undertaking should never be the main determining factor when taking on a task.

When There are No Resources, Make Some

The entrepreneurial spirit cannot be satiated by the status quo; entrepreneurs are always seeking to find access to the newest and latest equipment and technologies to continue moving forward. If this isn’t possible, they find ways to use their skills to raise money to continue working on their next project or to purchase new equipment.

The basic lesson here is to never let anything get in the way and not to give up. If you continue working toward your goals, anything truly is possible when you set your mind to it.

This twitter message caught my eye as it sums up every that I want to try and do in the new year. It’s even more of an inspiration as it comes from my biggest role model  

So, in this post, I thought I would sum up what I hope to achieve in 2009. Sorry, I haven’t posted in a while, I am back at school now, so not much time .

• Complete the redesign of this blog in Flash
• Finally get round to doing my portfolio/labs
• Get as good at AE as I am at Flash. (No smart comments ) 
• Improve my Matte Painting techniques. 
• Get myself invited to more studios. He he  

So, there you go, there’s not that many aims, but I will probably get distracted by other things, I’m thinking iPhone dev here But being the future, we can only guess what happens this year. 

So, good luck this year, whether you are going to need it or not

Harry.

So there you go, not that exciting.

Harry.

But, there’s no good staying in the past, there’s no future in it. So on we go into 2009 and with any luck it will be even better than 2008. I’ve got one major project coming up which will be revealed in a future post, and in the wider community there have been some terrific advancements in the Flash world. My favorite has to be seeing Quake run in Flash (and now Doom 1 as well) but seeing CS4 released and the progress Adobe has made is brilliant.

Throughout the year I have seen and experinced what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Thanks to all my readers for supporting this blog, and I can’t wait till 2009 to see what experinces and events it holds!

Merry Christmas,
-Harry Northover

This post is all about my setup and what I’m designing on. I have been meaning to write this for a while and it gives a break to all those who need it from the usual tech demos that have plagued this blog for a while . Don’t worry, they will still be here.

Hardware.

So there you go, that is my setup complete with Christmas decorations, and now for the specs. *digs out manual* . What do you reckon, look like all the other professional design agencies?

Right now the hardware is out of the way here is a list of the software I’m currently running.

So there you go, the basics of my setup. If you want to know anything else please feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a post. This is mainly because I have been busy at school. The teachers seem to feel the need to give us an immensely hard time before christmas  

Anyway, as it was my birthday I managed to persuade my parents to get me the new MacBook. After playing around with it for a couple of hours I’m converted! I love the Macs. They are so much more cleaner and more satisfying to use. I still have my main workhorse as a Windows, which is a Dell XPS 710. 

There’s no need to post pictures as there are plently flooding the web already, but this means I can start experimenting with the iPhone SDK which is something I have wanted to do for a long time, seeing as I have the iPhone 3G. 

Finally, I will be trying to post some tech demos as there haven’t been any for a while

Harry.

My Illustrations in Print:

Last weekend I took a trip into town and brought myself some photoframes. I then printed of some of my artwork and put it in these frames. Here are the results. Sorry for the low quality pictures, the iPhone isn’t cut out for HD.

With Christmas coming up, if you want to buy a copy of any of the above, then just let me know. I need the money.

Harry.

I have just updated to WordPress 2.7 Beta 3, and all is good! The new dashboard is by far one of the best improvements. Check it out!

Harry.

After having a discussion with my IT teacher about the GCSE course, my views on the course have changed severely and I wondered if anyone out there had come across this at all?

The main thing is that the whole course is about the documentation. You could write a text document as the final product, but write about it and how you created it loads and get full marks. This really annoys me as the writing (documentation) part of it is rubbish. It is so boring, telling the world via word how you managed to launch Dreamweaver and create a table for the layout, how impressiveJ. The whole thing about Flash, 3D and everything I am interested about is that fact that I can just go at like a bull in a china shop and just experiment, see what happens, expect the unexpected (most of that randomness comes from accidental errors). No be stuck behind writing about how to use Away3D.

The course, in my view, only covers one aspect of IT. So, all it is really testing you on is how to write up the documentation on a project. They don’t care what the final product looks like, acts like or things like usability levels etc. Now the boring ones (and probably the thinkers out there) will be saying, “Well, you write about it so they know you understand what you are doing”. This seems pretty stupid seeing that they don’t actually care about what you are doing in the first place.

Maybe it’s just me, but the whole thing seems a little pointless (only in some aspects). I don’t really know if professional studios document their process a lot, or not much. I am assuming they do so that maintenance is a lot easier. Imaging a complicated flex app, like the new eco:Drive app (great article in .net) . Passing this over to someone with no knowledge of how the app works or what is uses, or requires. This is where I can see documenting the process comes in handy, but the focus is on the output of the main product. With the IT GCSE, they don’t care about the finally product.

Now that’s out of my system. I feel so much better, now to top it off, anyone fancy buying me a MacBook? J He he.

Harry.

me@harrynorthover.com

So, there you go! All contact infomation should of been change on the site.

Harry.

As this is my first demo, it’s not the most exciting or amazing peice or work, but I think it is, in terms of the code.

What this demo does is just create a cube and rotate it in the ENTER_FRAME event.

There is quite a lot of code, but here it is:

package com.harrynorthover.primitives {

	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;
	import flash.ui.Keyboard;
	import flash.utils.Timer;
	import flash.events.TimerEvent;

	/**
	 * ...
	 * @author Harry Northover
	 */
	public class Cube extends MovieClip {

		private var points:Array = new Array();
		private var shapes:Array = new Array();

		// 3D Properties.
		public var distanceArray = new Array();
		// Lens distance.
		private var fl:Number = 400;

		//Center of the stage.
		private var vpX:Number = stage.stageWidth / 2;
		private var vpY:Number = stage.stageHeight / 2;

		// Render offsets, here you can move the 3D object.
		private var xOffset:Number = 0;
		private var zOffset:Number = fl;
		private var yOffset:Number = 0;

		// Variables used to rotate the cube in the X and Y axis.
		private var angleY:Number = 0.01;
		private var angleX:Number = 0.01;
		private var angleZ:Number = 0.01;

		// Math properties - uh...
		private var cosY:Number = Math.cos(angleY);
		private var sinY:Number = Math.sin(angleY);
		private var cosX:Number = Math.cos(angleX);
		private var sinX:Number = Math.sin(angleX);
		private var cosZ:Number = Math.cos(angleZ);
		private var sinZ:Number = Math.sin(angleZ);

		// Variables to store the distance from each point in the shape, in each axis.
		private var dx:Number = 0;
		private var dy:Number = 0;
		private var dz:Number = 0;

		//Variables that will hold the projection for each point cordinate.
		private var x1:Number = 0;
		private var y1:Number = 0;
		private var z1:Number = 0;

		// Loop variables
		private var w:uint = 0;
		private var j:uint = 0;
		private var i:uint = 0;

		public function Cube() {
			GenerateCube();
			this.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, render);
		}
		private function GenerateCube():void {
			// Here we define the vertex by setting its x, y and z positions.
			points.push( { x: -50, y: -50, z: -50 } );
			points.push( { x:50, y: -50, z: -50 } );
			points.push( { x:50, y: 50, z: -50 } );
			points.push( { x:-50, y: 50, z: -50 } );
			points.push( { x:-50, y: -50, z: 50 } );
			points.push( { x:50, y: -50, z: 50 } );
			points.push( { x:50, y: 50, z: 50 } );
			points.push( { x: -50, y: 50, z: 50 } );
			//Then, if we want to draw more than a point, we need to define shapes with those points
			//Each shape (6) will have 4 vertex, the order is important when we want to use the draw api to fill it.
			shapes.push([0, 1, 2, 3]);
			shapes.push([4, 5, 6, 7]);
			shapes.push([0, 4, 7, 3]);
			shapes.push([0, 1, 5, 4]);
			shapes.push([1, 5, 6, 2]);
			shapes.push([3, 7, 6, 2]);
		}
		private function render(e:Event):void {
			//trace(stage.frameRate.toString());
			distanceArray = [];
			this.graphics.clear();
			dx = 0;
			dy = 0;
			dz = 0;
			// Loop to look inside each shape to dop some calculations on the 4 points
			for (j = 0; j < shapes.length; j++) {
				for (i = 0; i < shapes[j].length; i++) {

					x1 = cosY * (sinZ * ( points[shapes[j][i]].y ) + cosZ * (points[shapes[j][i]].x)) - sinY * (points[shapes[j][i]].z);
					y1 = sinX*(cosY*(points[shapes[j][i]].z)+sinY*(sinZ*(points[shapes[j][i]].y)+cosZ*(points[shapes[j][i]].x)))+cosX*(cosZ*(points[shapes[j][i]].y)-sinZ*(points[shapes[j][i]].x));
					z1 = cosX * (cosY * (points[shapes[j][i]].z) + sinY * (sinZ * (points[shapes[j][i]].y) + cosZ * (points[shapes[j][i]].x))) - sinX * (cosZ * (points[shapes[j][i]].y) - sinZ * (points[shapes[j][i]].x));
					//trace(x1);
					//trace(y1);
					//trace(z1);
					// Now store the new cordinates...
					points[shapes[j][i]].x = x1;
					points[shapes[j][i]].y = y1;
					points[shapes[j][i]].z = z1;

					// Now we add the point coordinate to the relative distace var.
					dx += x1;
					dy += y1;
					dz += z1;

					xOffset = 20;
					yOffset = 20;
					zOffset = 20;

					//trace(dx);
					//trace(dy);
					//trace(dz);

					// Next, is the way to get the X and Y points to draw in the stage, taking car about offsets and distance from the camera in the Z axis.
					// Each point will be scaled acording to the distance to the camera. I am using the _x and _y as variables to render, not calculate.
					points[shapes[j][i]]._x = vpX+(points[shapes[j][i]].x+xOffset)*(fl/(points[shapes[j][i]].z+fl+zOffset));//scale;
					points[shapes[j][i]]._y = vpY + (points[shapes[j][i]].y + yOffset) * (fl/(points[shapes[j][i]].z+fl+zOffset));// scale;
				}
				//Ok, you have checked all the points in the shape, now is time too look at the distances
				//This is important, cos the distance to the observer, will mean which shape is render on top.
				//Since we have a sum of distances in X Y and Z, we need an average
				//Next code is the same than dividing by four (cos the four points per shape)
				dx /= shapes[j].length-1;
				dy /= shapes[j].length-1;
				dz /= shapes[j].length-1;
				//We add an element to the distances, and is basically the distance from each point, to the camera. Note than fl is on the Z axis, and is where the camera is.
				//We store and object with the distance, and also a shape ID to know which shape corresponds with the distance.
				distanceArray.push({d:Math.round(Math.sqrt(Math.pow(dx-xOffset, 2)+Math.pow(dy-yOffset, 2)+Math.pow(fl-dz, 2))), index:j});
			}
			//Now, we need to sort the array, to know wich shape is near and need to be render on top. So a simple Sort function.
			distanceArray.sortOn("d");
			//Here is where the fun starts. Now is time to render each polygon
			this.graphics.lineStyle(0,0xFFFFFF,40);
			//for each element in the distance array (the same length than the shape array, we will render the shape.
			for (w = 0; w

You can download the whole thing here: http://harry-northover-code-store.googlecode.com/files/Native%20Cube.zip

Thanks,
Harry.

Over the past few months or so I have been trying to find out ways to populate traffic to my blog. Along my travels I have found some ways that work very well and some that have no effect at all. I thought it will would helpful to you guys to post my findings.
First off you need to clarify a few things. These are:

1. Who your intended audience is. My specific audience is Flash designers and developers.
2. A few sites that are where you want to be. This lets you analyze what they do, how they do it, and what the outcome is.
3. What your blog is about. This is something you should know, but if you change it suddenly then you are going to lose a lot of visitors as they are either going to think you doesn’t know what you are talking about, or that it’s not your main area of expertise. This doesn’t limit you to one particular thing; you just need to be able to link it to your blog topic.
4. You must be prepared to blog fairly regularly. Too many blogs just lose visitors because of lack of recent content.

Now we have sorted that, there are a few technical details you need to take into account. These are loading time, content displayed and if your intended audience are likely to meet the requirements needed by the displayed content. With that all sorted, onto the main part of the article. How to get more visitors.

1. Get as bigger list as possible of blogs that blog about the same sort of stuff you do, and then when they post new stuff, leave a comment. You don’t even have to read the article, or even like the blog, just leave a comment and a link to your site if possible. This means that anyone else who views this article will see your name and probably click through to your site. Once they are there if they like what they see, they will hopefully become a regular visitor.
2. With smaller blogs like yours will be (to start off anyway), strike a deal with them to link to each other. This will provide beneficial to both of you. This is where what sort of topics you are writing about and what the topic of the other blog comes into play.
3. Add your blog to as many blog directory’s as possible. A good place to start would be Technorati. Here, you also need to be sure of the topics you want to write about.
4. Digg your articles. Add a Digg button to your site and hopefully people will click it. This will at least get you listed in their latest section for a while.
5. Find a niche in the market. This is one of the biggest things that you need. Saying that your blog is about Flash isn’t good enough. You need to be more specific. Things like 3D in Flash, or even more specific like using a particular engine. This should be good enough for a niche. Or something like Flash Lite which was what Richard Leggett’s niche was. Find out everything there is to know about this and write about it.
6. Contact other bloggers. This is certainly not a failsafe method as it depends who you contact. If you try to email big companies or extremely popular bloggers then you will be lucky if they even read your email. I remember about 6 months ago I contacted Fi and was lucky enough to get an email back which was great as it gave me a professional and expert opinion on my site. As them if they have any tips on how to increase traffic, or loading time or whatever. If they are popular in which the world you want to be then maybe they can help you out by introducing you to other, more senior people.

So there you go, my top 6 ways to increase traffic. Now remember this is just a set of guide lines and are not going to work for certain at all. The key is good, reliable content. Once you have this you are half way there, if not all the way.

Harry.

Harry.

I have been making some changes to the visual design of my blog, so those of you who have been here before, let me know what you think. The theme I am using is Big City and can be found here. I have made a few minor changes to suit my liking as well, if you were wondering…

Now to enjoy the rest of my half term. The main highlight being London next Tuesday. Although I doubt this time will be as exciting as the last trip Know what I mean? He he.

Also sorry about the speling mistakes in my writing. A friend pointed some out and I read though some of my past posts and now I just hope my English teacher doesn’t see it otherwise my 15th birthday will no longer happen.

Night all,
Harry.

PS. I will get round to doing an about page soon, for those of you who are wondering what the hell I am all about (I’m still trying to work that one out myself ).

Just to let you know, I am making a little progress with my portfolio. I know it is taking absolutely ages to get anywhere but I am having troubles with my PC, and my laptop is extremely slow (anyone fancy buying me a Mac?). Also, I am still having trouble with how the content is going to be displayed. I was all sorted out with 3 different scenes, each randomly loaded and displayed. Then I saw these themed experimental pieces by Eric Jordan entitled the “Virtual Series”. Now, I want to do something like this… I have been doing stuff like this in Cinema4D for a while but have since lost touch with it. I will try and pick it back up over the holiday.

Another interesting thing is this new customly designed furniture over at 2A studios. Here’s the link: http://www.plat4m.com/news/general-2a/2advanced-conference-table-comes-to-life/.
Now this isn’t directly linked to web design, or anything like that but it is interesting how they came up with the design, used Cinema4D for the prototype then got it constructed. This isn’t something I will be attempting anytime soon though

Also, a major bug I have with the general press, and some of the web design world. It is this, people comment on how much companies and induviduals like AKQA, Billy Bussy, Eric Jordan have changed the web design world, but no where near as may people seem to think how much we can change it an improve it in another 5-10 years. Now im not saying that these companies didn’t do an execleent job, because if they did I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now. All I am trying to say is live the saying:

The best way to predict the future, is to invent it.

Phew, got that out of my system. That is all for now, folks
Harry.

Over the past six months to a year, I have been saying to myself I must use my skills to earn a little of extra cash.

When I say this, I mean by contributing to sites like FlashDen.net and Ultrashock, with things like creative templates. Now, the trouble is that I get bored while making these templates. The reason is because with a template, you cant be as creative as you would be working on an individual project.

This is the part I strugle with. When I work on a project I like to be creative, cut lose, go out at try anything and everything. With a template, you can do this to an extent, but you have to make it so that it is appealing to a wide range of people.

I thought this might be worthy of a post because it would be interesting to see if anyone suffers from this inability to be boring

In the future, I hope to be creating some stuff, so now I have mentioned it on my site, it will be an incentive to start, and finish (!) working on a template!

Harry.

Harry.

You can read more about the new release here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/.

My favorite feature must be the new animaton model in Flash. Also, the ability to add a skeleton to 2D graphics. It is just great, but there is too much for me to tell you about, so head over and read all about it!

Harry.

Hope its useful!

http://code.google.com/p/harry-northover-code-store/

I have uploaded the code to the very first version of my portfolio. Some of the files have been lost over the years, some some of the FLA’s aren’t there.

Harry.

CUDA 2.0 is the new C based programming environment for this new technology. You can download it free of charge here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html.

This version also includes an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example for both PC and Mac versions of the software, which allows developers to design plug-ins that move the most compute-intensive functions of Photoshop to the GPU, such as filtering and image manipulation.

Harry.

When build my portfolio, I planned the whole thing out using these questions:

1. What story is the site trying to tell?
2. What will my viewers what to see at the site?
3. What content does the site need, to fulfill these questions?

So, now you know the bare minim of my design process, here are the answers I came up with:

1. I am trying to tell the story of how much I love what I do.
2. My viewers want to see my work, and what makes me, me .
3. The content that is needed, is my work, and something to tell the users who I am?

So there you go. Now you can see that there was no need for a home section. What useful information could I of displayed on it? My latest project, but why? For this, they can just visit my portfolio? A quick description about me? Why not read the full thing over at my about section? You may be thinking that all this could of been place in a home section just for ease of use, maybe to get the user interested in what the site has to offer. This is not relevant for a portfolio. If it was a news site, or a company site, then yes, this could be used to get the end user interested in what the site has to offer. For a portfolio, the chances are, the user has come to this site to view my work, or to read about me? So they are not going to need additional work into making them view my portfolio, or read about me.

Another question here is, well what else would make then interested into view my work? The site it’s self. If you place the user into an engaging and satisfying experience, they will want to carry on and view the rest. This is basically my design process for a site!

_

So that is the design side of things over with, now lets get onto what I have done so far. Well,

1. 1. Have almost finished the main menu (Just a few things I’m not quite sure about…).
2. 2. Set up the external SWF loading, and all the stuff needed to load the appropriate sections in. The text you see when you click on the portfolio section and about is all in an external SWF.
3. 3. I am working on the portfolio sections. For early previews keep checking the beta link, as I will be uploading them soon.
4. 4. I have started sorting out all the database stuff, etc. This is all going to be loaded using AMFPHP/MySQL/PHP.

So there you have it , a very in-depth look into my portfolio!

Harry.

Have a good evening,
Harry.

Hantsweb Awards.

My web site has just been nominated for a Hantsweb Award. You can see the list of nominated sites here: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/hantswebawards/its-hantswebawards-nominatedwebsites08.htm?category=12

Harry.

I have just received my copy of ‘Guidelines for Online Success’, the first FWA book to be published. I must say, what a great book!

It has 6 sections, each targeting a specific aspect of the web. These are:

• Interface & Design – Michael Lebowitz.
• Marketing and Communication - Martin Hughes and Jordan Stone.
• Technology & Programming – Eric Jordan.
• Technical Advice – Pascal Leroy.
• Content / Content Management – David Huge Martin.
• E-Commerce – Mark Ferdman.

So far, I have read the Technology & Programming section and Interface & Design! These sections were really informative, and this book is great read for anyone who wants to stand out from the crowd!

Harry.

(mt) Media Temple

I have just started the process of moving my website to a new server. The company I am using is (mt) MediaTemple.

This was for various reasons. Basically I wanted more flexibility and bandwidth. It was cheaper over at (mt), so I went with them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Free Virtual Servers, I just preferred (mt).

The move won’t be complete for a while yet as I have to sort out the name servers on this domain etc. Their might be some odd things going on for a while, but hopefully I should be up and running withing a couple of weeks!

Harry.

Here it is: http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=210002129.

Hope you find it intresting!

Harry.

Fi are looking for Interactive Developers.

Here’s the link: http://www.thinkswedish.com/#ContentHolder:feed=blog&Entries:0=entry+1=983

Good luck, and who ever gets it, I’m completely jealous!

Harry.

I read an article here: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/a-first-ever-lo.html, and it shows you how the Defcon wireless network is set up and how it is monitored and kept secure.  This would be an intresting read, so check it out!

Harry.

They are looking for feed back on improving the usability, look and feel, and functionality of the Adobe Labs website and would like to know what are the 1 or 2 site enhancements that you would like to see added.

This gives you guys the chance to change what you don’t like about the site, so go for it

Give you feedback here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=586&threadid=1384250&enterthread=y

Harry.

Used for community to MySQL from Flash

Over at Gotoandlearn(), Lee has posted a couple of tutorials on how to set up and use AMFPHP to let Flash communicate with PHP/MySQL.

After view the videos, I have seen how easy it is to transfer a lot of data from Flash to MySQL. This opens up a lot more possiblitys of developer Flash CMS back/front-end solutions. A greate example of a Flash blog is FI – Think Swedish blog.

If you are intrested in developing data-driven Flash sites, check it out. Its very easy to set up and get developing! There are also some more video tutorials at http://www.amfphp.org/videotuts.html

Harry.

Adobe Labs have just released a new panel for Adobe Illustrator CS3.

It is built entirly in Flash and is designed to give you easy access to relevant topics. You just type in what you want to research and it returns the info straight back to Illustrator.

If you would like to download it, go here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/knowhow/

Have fun!

Harry.

From Adobe Labs:

1. The DNG 1.2 specification, which expands and formalizes the concept of a color profile for raw (i.e., scene-referred) image data captured by digital sensors,
2. Adobe Standard camera profiles that significantly improve color rendering, especially in reds, yellows, and oranges,
3. Camera Matching profiles that match the camera manufacturers’ color appearance,
4. DNG Profile Editor, a free software utility for editing camera profiles, and
5. This web page, designed to help photographers get the most out of the new camera profiles and the DNG Profile Editor.

In a nutshell, this is a way to improve color rendering for digital raw photographs.

To download it, click here ( http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles ).

Harry.

This app was meant to show that your were extremely rich, but what it really did was show you had no common sense.

It was bought by a Jesus Phone user known only as Lee5279xx spilled $1,000 on some red pixels because he was addled enough to think Steve Jobs has a sense of humor.

This just goes to prove you can make some easy money, although for some, I imagine it would be quite hard for some of us to sleep at night having done this!

http://www.gotoandlearnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17488

I hope this helps some of the aspiring young developers/designers out there! Leave a comment if you have any other tips etc

Enjoy
Harry.

Well, we all know that Vista wasn’t Microsoft’s best hour. So, this got a lot of people wondering (including me), will the next version (Windows 7) be worth it? Well that’s is what I intend to find out.

Less Clogged Up

Well, with Vista, it got very bulky and slow, this was generally because of backward compatibility and old library’s. This caused the code base to grow and become very hard to manage. In August 2004 Microsoft “reset” back to the Windows Server 2003 code base. This was because the code was getting out of hand and the developers were losing site of the original aims.

Well, Microsoft didn’t want this to happen again, so with Windows 7, they are stripping the kernel down to the bare minim not creating a new kernel for Windows 7. Rather, they are refining the kernel architecture and componentization model introduced in Windows Vista. This means that the code is a lot easier to manage and let cluttered.

Also this would me a great level of speed and more developer time spent on important things, not wadeing through boilerplate code.

Multi Touch

There was a recent demo of Windows 7 and its new multi touch features.

Multi-Touch in Windows 7

These are a great as this means that you don’t have to buy something like Surface to get this sort of technology at home. With the multi-touch features, it will be a lot easier to edit and manage photos, music and generally make it a more pleasant experince.

There’s a catch to this. With Multi-Touch you are obviously going to need to buy and new laptop to get this functionality. This means more money, especially if you have recently purchased a new PC and don’t want to splash out again. This means that you will just have to wait and enjoy the other features of the new OS.

Backward Compatablity

Unlike previous versions, Microsoft are not including old system files and library’s to make it backward compatibility. With Windows 7 the are taking a different approach as they are not making it not making any effort to make it backward compatible with previous MS apps. binary compatible with older versions, instead they are using virtualisation to make then run.

This is good and bad news for both consumers and developers. It is good news for developers as when they develop their software they can harness the greater power of Windows and not have to worry about backward compatibilty issues. The obvious down side is that they will have to rewrite their software to take advantage of the new features. EDIT: Microsoft will be using virtualisation the enable previous applications to run on 7.

Conclusion

Well, overall Windows 7 seems to be heading in the right way. It looks like it will have a lot more in the way of next-gen features. So, if your are waiting for 7, hang on. It will be worth the wait.

Yes, they have extended the support on XP. This is good news for those of us who don’t want to make the jump to Vista. There may be other reason for Microsoft doing this…

As well all know, Vista wasn’t exactly Microsoft’s best release of their Windows product line.

This was mainly because it was to bulky and need a fairly high end PC to run it to its full potential. Now this is fine for those of us who have high end PCs and have the time and money to upgrade. For those who’s PCs are more than ~3 years old, Vista isn’t and option.

Because of this, people may be looking to Linux as support was going to end in 2010. Microsoft realised that this could decrease their share in the Home OS market. So, until they can get Windows 7 out of the door, they want to encourage people keep using XP and not to switch to Linux or another OS.

This means that security fixes and SP3 will be coming out. Also, PC manufacturers will also continue to install XP on their machines.

Once Windows 7 is out of the door, then the pressure will be on for people to make the switch. This will be more feasible as Microsoft is rebuild Windows 7 for scratch, so there isn’t as much clutter as there was with Vista.

Harry.