all good for linux today

Those that know of my move to Ubuntu linux will probably be all to aware of my grumbling and ranting that there was still no Air environment for Linux... today I popped open my feed reader and saw, to my great delight, that adobe have today, released Adobe Air for Linux Alpha....not only that, they've also released the next alpha release (3) of Flex Builder for Linux too....

no more ranting from me on this subject....I am now happy.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:43 AM - Categories: Linux | Flex | Tools

proper busy

 It's just past 9.30pm on Friday night and I've decided to take 30 mins out(yes, i'm still working!) to catch up on my news feeds, twitter and of course..to update my blog. This week has by far been our busiest yet down at east coast interactive, we have been pushing ourselves a lot over the past weeks in particular, to get through the fearsome amount of work we've had on and now we're starting to see our various projects come together which is great. I now know what it really means to be "busy". I've worked in places before where the party line is always "we're really busy" but more often than not, its a case of "busy being busy" with no real substance behind the claim other than if they told the truth, they might be seen as not being busy...god forbid!

So there's just the one launch this week...that would be aberdeen-cyrenians.org, a fully content managed website to replace the basic website that had served them for a number of years. Next week will see a few large scale launches including the project I previously posted nothing about heh... along with several add ons to projects we've previously launched, we are also in discussions for a number of larger scale jobs to keep us busy when our current workload comes back down to a normal-ish level.

Mike, Stuart and myself decided we might like some social life back though so after a few months sustained at this level, we did the maths and agreed that it was time to grow and so went looking for a couple of top notch people to join us. I am glad to say that we have just filled one of the two positions I posted about previously although I am unable to name them as they are still currently working out their notice period. The developer in question will officialy start with us on the 14th April 2008. We are still looking for the right candidate for the other position although a number of interesting people have made themselves known so far from places we wouldn't have expected....it's all good!

Here's to next week!

1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:43 PM - Categories: Launches | East Coast Interactive

IETester

Just noticed this on one of the feeds that keeps me updated these days and thought it was worth a post given my previous rant on IE8 killing my standalone IE6 install.

Now i've not installed this yet and probably wont until its in a more advanced state of development but it certainly looks promising.

ladies and gentlemen....test all the IE browsers you need from within IE!  

0 comments - Posted by mark at 10:02 AM - Categories: Tools

great client feedback

I wouldn't normally post on a project until it was signed sealed and delivered but I must admit, excitement has got the better of me on one of our current jobs and I thought I'd post up my feelings on it so far. We have been putting in some funky hours on this one out of pure enjoyment, if not for the folio piece we'll have at the end of it. Now obviously I cant disclose(just yet...stay tuned though) what this actually is or who the client is at this stage but I can say that it's NOT a game and it's for a large scale organisation out with our shores. Technically it's a flash application with some fancy server side "goings on" to allow creation, storing and playback of animation, audio and other data....basically it kicks ass. Here is the latest feedback from the client:
"GREAT WORK" - VP Marketing
"This looks really fun - the animation is even more detailed than I thought they would do" - Online Marketing Manager Getting feedback like this always makes my day...that's why I love my job, I am delighted to say that this kind of feedback is not a rarity for East Coast Interactive...although we can always handle more so it's just as well the project isn't yet complete!

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:42 AM - Categories: East Coast Interactive

no smoking day

Just thought I'd put a mention up that today is no smoking day so congratulations to all those who have quit and good luck to all those who will be doing so today. I have now managed close to 160 days without smoking and feel so much healthier...and better off financially....plus...smokings for losers. (my method is still going strong as you can see!)

0 comments - Posted by mark at 11:32 AM - Categories: General

Jobs at East Coast Interactive

We posted up a couple of jobs on the east coast interactive blog today. I know that the right people are out there so show yourselves! We're looking for a couple of exceptional people to prevent Stuart, Mike and myself from exploding and maybe allowing us to get some sleep/have a social life again etc etc. We have a superb working environment, have plenty of banter round the office and most importantly, work on some fun, challenging stuff across a number of disciplines. Cool jobs in Aberdeen don't come along too often....we've got 2 up for grabs to the right people. See the blog for full details.

2 comments - Posted by mark at 10:08 AM - Categories: East Coast Interactive

IE8 not playing nice

I had been poking around the IE site for a couple of days and thought to myself this morning, I'm gonna install the beta, see if it's as good as it sounds. So, I installed IE8 beta 1 today. Had a brief look about, couple of interesting additions, not least of which is the new developer tools which would be helpfull if I didn't already have the web developer tool bar and firebug on firefox. There's the usual "lets add some web 2.0/social networking integration" which frankly, is handled on a much bigger and better scale by the flock browser or any number of browser plugins for firefox, but hey...this is IE and not a browser that I will personally use for much more than testing of client websites. My use of IE to date has been for that single purpose only, like a lot of others, I gave up using IE for general browsing with the invention of firefox some years ago. So...I found a little issue, this issue is probably only relevant to others who build and test websites on multiple versions of IE. I have a number of browsers installed, namely Firefox, Opera, IE6 and IE7 (this covers a broad enough base on my development machine to get by) and today, as I said, I installed the IE8 beta which promptly overwrote my IE7 install...no problem, I know that there's an "emulate IE7" button in there so I can switch between the new rendering engine and the IE7 engine...but then I tried opening my standalone IE6 browser and to my disgust, it wouldn't display any web pages...ok, I need a working IE6, so what to do, after poking about a bit more, I found (in the developer tools) an option to view the page you're looking at in not just the 2 modes I knew about but also in an additional "quirks mode" which emulates IE 5.5....erm...ok...where's the IE6 option? surely if they've gone to all this effort, they'd add "view as IE6"....apparently not....taking a quick gander over at the browser statistics chart to see if I was missing something, I realised that the only thing I was missing was firefox's growth...I mean wow! but anyway...like I thought, IE5.5 has a very small(1.5%) share of the market whereas IE6 is still up in the top 2(after firefox, much to my surprise!) so when creating "developer tools" and "view options", I would have thought that a view as IE6 option would have been pretty high on the agenda...maybe it's coming in a future release, that would allow me to stop using my standalone IE6 and run IE8, as it stands at this point in time, IE8 has been uninstalled and IE7 restored...poor show, although like I said, this will only be an irritation to people who build and test websites.

6 comments - Posted by mark at 10:50 AM - Categories: Ranting