http://www.specialmoves.com Special Moves RSS Feed /labs/blog/Draw%20with%20Flash%20using%20iPhone For this R&D experiment, we wanted to find a way for one/multiple iPhones to communicate with a Flash Website in real time. So we decided to build a prototype of how this could work by creating a Drawing Pad application where the iPhone functions as a controlling device and the output is displayed on a Flash website in real time.
]]> Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Kaiser%20Chiefs%20Album%20Generator Working with our friends at W+K London we launched a site for the Kaiser Chiefs. Well it’s a bit more than a site, it allows you to create your own version of the band’s new ‘The Future is Medieval’ album. Choose ten songs from a list of twenty, design your own artwork and get a £1 kickback for each one sold.
]]> Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Divvi%3a%20photo%20sharing Adobe have been promoting the use of AIR to develop cross platform applications, especially since Apple relaxed their rules around 3rd party tools for App development, thereby making AIR a valid tool for iOS development. Recently a number of devices have come to market that have made this more appealing too, notably the Blackberry Playbook and Android tablets like the Xoom.

So we thought, why don’t we try and develop something across all these devices and see what happens? ]]> Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Voodoo%3a%20Unity3D%20R%26D The Voodoo project came about through a desire to build a 3D application for the iPad, learning as much as possible along the way about the tools and workflow involved. The result is an interactive doll where the user can grab and toss him around a 3D environment, pull his limbs with multitouch gestures, and optionally map a Facebook profile picture to his face.

This article outlines the Unity3D for iOS development experience and some of the technical hurdles we encountered along the way.
]]> Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Automating%20the%20Automator%20%E2%80%93%20Hudson%20job%20creation If you don’t know about the wonders of Hudson and Continuous Integration, check out this earlier post on Hudson and Automating Development.
]]> Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/The%20different%20methods%20of%20Font%20Embedding%20%26%20Serving With the impending relevance of HTML5 & CSS3, web-designers and developers alike are looking towards different approaches of font-embedding. Fonts have always been the crux of the online design world, with designers coming up with more interesting and leading designs but being hampered by the fact they will most likely have to resort to a traditional web-safe font (web-safe fonts can actually produce the most consistent results across multiple browsers.) ]]> Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Arial%20Black%20displaying%20in%20Italic%20IE%20/%20WebKit%20SP3 Recently whilst working on a rather large client project we came across an annoying bug. The project originally used a custom font which we advised against due to licensing, instead we decided to use Arial Black. If you’re intending on using Arial Black in your font stack, or as your main font it is worth checking with the client or the creative whether this is imperative. ]]> Mon, 08 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Flash%20Font%20Embedding%20Using%20MXMLC%20Compilation Ever since the early days of Flash, embedding fonts and supporting both multiple and large characters sets has been somewhat of a sticking point. Whilst support for various intricacies of font loading and embedding has gradually improved with each version, there are some inherent difficulties.
]]> Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT /labs/blog/Hudson%20and%20Automating%20%20Development%20Tasks Over the past 6 months we have been using Hudson to automatically build and deploy both Flash and .NET projects. Hudson is a continuous integration server. It monitors source-code repositories and at regular intervals or when it detects changes, it can run scripts. Those scripts can compile code, run unit tests, generate version numbers, deploy to servers and more. Although it’s a relatively new introduction to our studio, it’s rapidly becoming indispensable. Here’s why.
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