Experienced Atlanta Director Contractors

Since I’ve moved out of the contracting scene with my new position at Studiocom, I’ve received two requests for experienced Director programmers. So if you’re an experienced Director programmer in Atlanta, please drop me a line.

Thanks Roundbox! Hello StudioCom!

Over the last few months I’ve been contracting at Roundbox Media. It was great fun to work with Leif, Javier (eh?), Mike, Dan, Holly, Michael and the nut known as JesterXL. Of course there was Justin, Jennifer, Dad, Jonathan, Won-Il, and four cool puppies. They made my Flash in Director pain much more palatable. Alas, the position they were offering wasn’t quite right for me and something a little more appropriate presented itself at StudioCom.

I’ve known Juan Pablo Gnecco, the founder of StudioCom, since the mid-nineties when he was a producer for Atlanta multimedia pioneer Floyd Design (which became iXL). In the last couple of years I’ve referred my friends Mark Blottner and Chris Stalcup there for employment. A few months ago when I decided I needed a full time job, I notified Juan Pablo and he kept me in mind when they launched their new games division.

StudioCom is the creator of the wildly successful Coke Music website which houses the multi-user Coke Studios environment. My work, with my new boss Alan Queen and the team he has assembled, will be to help manage the client side development of a new proprietary multi-user environment which will utilize Flash, Director (gasp!), and Java technology.

My goal was to work in a more intensive, primarily Flash based development environment. I think I’ve managed to get there with the bonus of continuing with the technical direction role that I held for so many years at HIP.

I’m really excited about collaborating with an incredibly talented group of people!

Darby Update

You might remember that a few months ago Darby had surgery to remove a mass from his skin. There was a fairly horrifying scar on his side. Well a few weeks ago another lump formed along the scar line. We took him to the vet and they aspirated fluid from it, sent it to UGA for testing (again) and put him on antibiotics. A few days later Joyce notice a large amount of blood in his stool. The vet said that it was probably colitis from the antibiotics and not to worry. The sore on his side continued to drain and his itching worsened. We got an elizabethan collar for him. The Sunday before Thanksgiving he developed a nose bleed from his right nostril. Off to the emergency vet clinic. All tests normal, but he had a fever. Monday and Tuesday his temperature continued to rise and he was extrmely lethargic. Wednesday morning we took him to the vet who immediately got him admitted to Georgia Veterinary Services for ICU. Darby was extremely sick. They shaved the itchy spot on his back and it was covered with crusty open sores. After 36 hours of ICU his fever broke and he came home for the weekend. On Monday GVS put him under general anaesthesia for a tracheal wash and skin biopsies. Later in the week we found that he has Pemphigus Foliaceus, an auto-immune disease common in Akitas and Chows that attacks the skin.

Flash In Director – Again! (This Really Should Work)

Recently at Roundbox Media I was tasked with creating “project publishing wizard” with Director. Since it really only involved a few text fields and lots of BuddyAPI, I decided NOT to make the interface with Flash. I mean why go through all that right?

So I discover that old school Director text fields do not behave properly when editing text that is longer than its borders so I use the new DMX2004 Flash text box. Everything behaves nicely. Until Monday.

When the Director Flash text boxes (“fields”) begins (on beginSprite) I set each one to the value of a global variable which is initialized to an empty string. When the user selects the “next” button, all of the fields are validated and if valid their values are assigned back to the global variables. All fields must have a value except for one. This one can be left empty if desired.

When the user clicks next, if the one field that can be empty is actually empty, BOOM – Director (or the projector created with Director) crashes. Has anyone out there had any problems with empty fields causing Director to crash when its sprite ends?

Seem like it should work but of course not! It’s Flash in Director!

Oh and get this…while debugging, at times while the value of the field sprite will be “”, when comparing to “” or EMPTY (sprite(“mysprite”).text = “” or sprite(“mysprite”).text = EMPTY) it returns False! ARRRRGGH!