Ladies and gentleman it’s been a while. I won’t spend long on the soap-box, and where possible will stimulate with moving pictures, not words, but the important new is – Adam Vernon has joined Thought Den and hopefully you’ll come to love him as we already have (despite his gammy eye, though he insists it’s a new, Bristol-based affliction. He moved here especially you see! A good stat for Bristol Media perhaps – Thought Den drag Edinburgh graduate 400 miles to new Bristol studio)

Below is video 01 from our new Geek Club series, charting the Den’s trials, tribulations, banter and revelations. Think Blue Peter, without the bog roll tubes. Or HP Labs, but with less money and more sellotape.

Adam says :

“It makes use of the OSC protocol (likely eventual successor to MIDI), which is normally used to transmit musical and audio control data over UDP. The iPhone app, TouchOSC, is designed to be used as an OSC controller and also supports transmission of accelerometer data, indicating the orientation of the phone. The UDP packets are received by a Java flosc server, running on the PC, which retransmits the OSC data over Flash-friendly TCP. On receipt of a packet, Flash assigns the received orientation values to the rotationX and -Y properties of a cube made with the Flash10 3D API.”

Word on the street is that we’ve moved studio. An official (and thoroughly imaginative) announcement will follow forthwith. Isn’t it a shame that ‘real’ work gets in the way of devising these witty and clever ways to let you know we now stare at different coloured walls when Firefox crashes? Soon your inboxes will sing to the sound of Thought Den’s latest self-indulgent, digital distraction. Curious? You should be…

Dan too, and here’s his plan to fix it. This coming Thursday (8th April), Thought Den are hosting a mini flash game code-a-thon and we’re inviting other AS2 coders to come along.

Flash AS3 day

The day will see us all coding our own games, but we all have to do it in AS3. Painful? No, because we’ll all be in the same room, we’ve all coded in AS2 before, we’ll have the internet and most importantly we can share as we go. A bit like crowd-sourcing from clever individuals.

Thought Den provide.

breakfast, coffees & lunch
prize for the best game at the end of the day!

You provide.

computer with Flash installed
a game idea
openness to help your fellow man

Mail me, dan at thoughtden dot co dot uk for an invite.

—— DETAILS ——-
The plan.
Code a game in AS3.

Prize for best game.
A book! yup. “The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses: A Book of Lenses” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Game-Design-lenses-Lenses/dp/0123694965/)

Who’s it for?
AS2 coders / coders, looking to start coding games in AS3

The place.
Pervasive Media Studio
Leadworks,
Anchor Square,
Harbourside
Bristol
BS1 5DB
some details are here – http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/open-studio-friday

The time.
Thursday 8th April. 8 till 5.30.

Places.
Mail dan@thoughtden.co.uk

There was no escape, he iChatted it to me (I normally just ignore his tweets because I’m terribly busy) but this time he’s hit a good’un! Brazilian viral marketing agency and general media monsters Gringo have produced a nice little self promo (worth a visit if the director of your company insists) but the thing that really caught my attention was their international swear box…They accept submissions from around the world for all the down and dirty street lingo you know will one day end up scoring you a free beer. Or a bitch-slap. Here’s the social widget, because it’s all about social widgets nowadays. Obviously.

Record your own

How many people have spent the last two weekends educating 13 to 19yr olds? We can solidly promise you that it involves throwing a lot of tennis balls, big pens, huge post-its and it’s collated together with a workshop rule, “no throwing the laptops”. Yup, that’s right. We’ve been on the BBC Blast tour.

BBC Blast, which tours the UK in a HUGE bus, has a fantastic mission; give young people an opportunity to experience and learn a few skills and in a fantastic environment.

We pitched a workshop, inspired by the Thought Den Industry Day, called Flash Games – Social Network Wigetry! An intro session aimed at getting creative minds thinking, explaining and ultimately using Flash to produce their own piece of work. Their own version of…

So the last few weekends we’ve been playing ice-breakers, brainstorming, inspiring creative photography, taking abuse and finally herding twitchy mouse fingers through the Flash interface.

It was an immense amount of fun, but ultimately, a lot of kids left feeling like they could confidently use flash to handle some of the more basic interface tools. Hurrah! The plan worked.

Big thanks to the amazing Holly Edwards from RIO who was running the shin-dig, Cathy the content lady, who taught me how to juggle in her lunch-break and to all the kids who weren’t a pain in the….

Sometimes we’ve hit a road-block when we’re trying to make Flash talk to the External Interface in our MySpace applications.

The Flash is having a great time and is more than happy to call Javascript with ExternalInterface when it wants. But when Javascript wants to chat back… beep beep. “Please leave a message”.

Flash appears to ignore the call, and leaves Javascipt in an error state and needing ice-cream.

To help you avoid that little relationship problem here’s the fix to the problem. Add the following to your code,

System.security.allowDomain(”*.msappspace.com”);
System.security.allowDomain(”*.yourdomain.co.uk”);

Flash’s Sandbox is set to divert all calls by default and blocks any chat. However as soon as you’ve added the allowDomain. Flash shouts, “HELLO!”, and it’s all back on again.

One big happy social networking family.