Front-end Developer, Designer and Consultant

Catch me in .NET magazine “Where next for the Flash Platform” roundtable

As part of last month’s Flash Camp in London, I took part in a round table discussion on the Flash Platform for .NET magazine (Practical Web Magazine in the USA). The NET mag issue 188 is out now in the UK and will be worldwide very soon.

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Prudential Retirement Flex application wins Revolution Award

As I mentioned in a previous post the Adobe Flex project for Prudential that I worked on has one a prestigious Revolution Award in the financial category.

The retirement planner was the first RIA application for Prudential, however the decision to go with the Flex solution to provide a richer user experience has paid off.

It’s a shame that many companies shun the idea of breaking the mould and going with RIA technologies like Flex and AIR. This project goes to show that bold management and technical decisions, well designed and executed can produce a market leading innovate solution to drive revenue.

So a big well done to all people on the Prudential Retire Your Way project.

You can download the Revolution Awards 2009 winners PDF from here.

Flex app shortlisted for top award

I have just been informed that an Adobe Flex application that I worked on last year has been shortlisted for a Revolution Award in the financial services category.

The application is a retirement planning tool for Prudential in the UK and developed using web services in Adobe Flex 2. It guides the user through a journey of calculating how much money they are likely to have at retirement, find any possible shortfalls then save and review the information at a later date.

I was the lead Flex UI developer and responsible for the skinning of the Flex user interface, transitions and custom view components. The project incorporated a custom Flex 3d chart that was built as an extension to the standard Flex charting components. The skinning was done using Flash CS3 assets as symbols and then applied using CSS and scale nine.

Launched in 1997, the Revolution Awards recognise digital marketers and their agencies for outstanding work in promoting products and services and have become the premier annual event for the digital marketing industry

The Prudential planner is up against Dare Digital for Barclays and Harvest Digital for NatWest in the finance category.

You can download a PDF of the shortlisted contenders for the Revolution Awards 2009 from the site here.

The project is now maintained in-house.

Flash Camp London presentation

I was super excited to give a session at Flash Camp London today to Flash creatives from around the UK.

The camp was aimed more at the designer and creative side of Flash and we wanted to show some of the new and shiny features of Flash CS4. Some great speakers attended and I was honored to have presented on the same bill as some of the most renowned and respected individuals in the Flash scene.

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Flash Camp London 09 – Feb 26th

Flash Camp London 09 is a community run event sponsored by Adobe.

It’s a great meetup for all those people involved with the Flash platform and to listen to some great speakers including Mike Chambers, Seb Lee Delisle, Lee Brimelow and Serge Jespers.

Unfortunately you also get to hear me give a session on creating a chromeless AIR application in Flash CS4. I will be covering how you can simply and quickly create a cool AIR application using the new features in CS4 then how to deploy your application using the AIR badge installer. Source and presentation files will be available on this site after my session.

There will be give aways throughout the day and I’m sure we will be continuing the social afterwards so don’t get running straight off.

Follow the progress on Twitter (http://twitter.com/flashcamp_uk) and don’t forget to use the hashtag #flashcamp_uk on your posts and tweets.