http://www.specialmoves.com Special Moves RSS Feed /labs/Bacon%202012 Bacon is a two day, two track conference run by the lovely Ladies and Gentlemen at Mint Digital. It focuses on 'things developers love', to deliver a tech-led, all-encompassing event held at The Mermaid Centre, London.
 
I was lucky enough to be there to soak up the knowledge and, after an early morning injection of coffee and bacon sandwiches, that’s exactly what I did. As it turns out, I learnt quite a lot and as a bonus, found a use for my university-gifted, note-taking reflex.
]]> Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/The%20Agile%20Way%2c%20Our%20Way At Specialmoves, we’re into agile. We like the structure it brings to our development, the understanding it has for how technical stuff is made and the inevitable changes we’ll encounter along the way. But above all, how it empowers developers far beyond the more traditional waterfall approach. The sprint planning, development, retrospective and demoing at the heart of agile puts the development team in the driving seat. Skill plus ownership will produce results that skill alone never will. ]]> Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/MongoDB%20shows%20the%20way MongoDB is an open-source document-oriented datastore. It’s one of the darlings of the NOSQL world, and with good reason, using it on our 24 Days project really helped getting started very quickly - run mongod.exe and you are good to go. There’s no schema, set up is effortless and there are drivers for every major language and platform. As you probably can tell I quite like it.

Download Mongo and follow along on in the shell if you have the time - the data I used for this write-up is in a script here. Some instructions for running it. If you don’t know Mongo there is a great tutorial shell - http://try.mongodb.org/ to get started.

]]> Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/Capes%20and%20Aliens In a studio meeting the other day, Steve (one of our developers) presented a little iPad game that he'd mocked up in a few days. It was simple, but nifty - you move the 'Green Atom' character whilst avoiding and destroying asteroids that appear from the top of the screen. We all fought to have a go and a rugby tackle later, I had the iPad in hand. It felt responsive and smooth and most importantly, good fun!

As dev-led projects tend to go, all the art assets were stock bits and bobs - the rewards of many a Google 'Image Search'. There was some great humour in it, but it all needed a bit of designer loving. We thought we'd design a few characters and elements to bring it all together as a side project to brush up our drawing skills. Steve gave us a folder containing all the assets with a brief of "Take 'em and make 'em shiny!". Or something like that. ]]> Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/The%20Beginning%20of%20Skynet%20with%20Arduino%2c%20AIR%20%26%20Flash Being in an industry of technology and innovation, I am always looking at new ways to create interactive systems that are fun but also useful. This project began when I first learnt about the Arduino, which is: "An open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” ]]> Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/Using%20MVC%20at%20Specialmoves I joined Specialmoves as a .NET developer at the beginning of 2011. At the time, the lead developer had just started an MVC 3.0 .NET Razor project. At my interview, it was clear that MVC was the way forward for Specialmoves and I wanted to get involved with that. I had only ever worked on web forms and was really looking forward to seeing what was new. ]]> Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:19:34 GMT /labs/Responsive%20design%3a%20a%20combined%20workflow%20 As a digital company we're always looking to push ourselves to use the latest Tech, Design and Production principles. 'Responsive design' and 'Progressive Enhancement' are amongst the most exciting things happening in web design and development as we speak. And we think we've got some answers as to how designers and developers can better work together to visualise and build responsively.
]]> Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/Better%20JavaScript%20organisation%20with%20RequireJS When you've got lots of JavaScript files in a site you can run into problems. Each file you specify is another http request, every third-party plug-in can come with several dependencies that have to be included, and remembering what order things need to be executed in might not be obvious at first.

Require JS solves those problems and in this article, I'll let you know how this lightweight library can help you organise your JavaScript into well structured modules. ]]> Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/Demystifying%20HTML5%20%26%20CSS3 If you’ve been even remotely connected to the Web Development community you would have at some point heard the chatter about HTML5. Unfortunately, you’ve probably ingested a lot of misinformation as well.
]]> Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/How%20I%20learned%20to%20stop%20worrying%20and%20love%20Jenkins I’ve written about Jenkins before but felt that a broader description of how we use Jenkins would be good to share. It’s interesting how many places still don’t use continuous integration tools like Jenkins and how many places don’t automate their deployment systems. Hopefully this will help them get started. We’d love to hear about people’s experiences of Jenkins and how they use it.
]]> Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT /labs/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/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/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/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/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/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/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/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/A%20little%20chat%20with%20Darrell As one of our founders, Darrell Wilkins’ opinions have helped to shape Specialmoves since we first started out. Here are a few of them.
]]> Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT /labs/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.
]]> Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT /labs/Flash%20Data%20Transfer%20using%20FluorineFx Recently at specialmoves, we’ve worked on some very large, multi-language, bespoke CMS driven sites. The Flash versions of these sites require many calls to the back-end (.NET) to send and retrieve data.
]]> Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT