As an email addict I’ve been doing all I can to avoid having my gMail client open so I can be as productive as possible throughout my day. For ages I’ve been using Notify to show me when new mail arrives and give me a quick preview so I know whether to bother to opening my mail. This was without a doubt the most popular menu-bar app in my toolbox and has been invaluable.

I’ll admit to having a bit of a problem with email because I am addicted to checking it and have an OCD when it comes to making sure I never have unread mail for longer than 2 minutes. I’m obsessed. I get the sweats when I see other people’s inBoxes and they have like 10,000 unread emails … makes me really uncomfortable.

So today while obsessing over all the email notifications coming in via Basecamp I decided to look to see if there was an update to Notify. And there was! AND it’s awesome!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

If you are reading this post there’s a very strong chance that you are at the Flash on the Beach conference and you’ve either been given one of my amazing business cards (thanks Moo) or we’ve just spoken and you’re checking me out to make sure I’m not just a crazy man. Well, the good news is that I am indeed a crazy man but my insanity is fueled by a love of all things Flashy.

Welcome to my site, please take a look around … would you like a cup of tea? A biscuit perhaps? This site is my blog but I have a main corporate site which you’ll find over at http://lyraspace.com. There you’ll find some examples of my work in the Case Studies section and you can read about what I do in Services. Most importantly though, keep in touch! You’ll find my details in the Contact section and please bookmark/feed my site for future reference.

I hope you’re having as much of a great time at FotB as I am (I’ve not even left yet as I write this post) and I hope our meeting has made as much of an impression on you as it has on me (I’ve not technically met anyone at the conference yet).

If we haven’t actually met then please do pop over to point at me and laugh … I’m the small, tubby chap with the stupid looking, over-sized glasses. You may have seen me stumbling off my silver Vespa looking flustered. You’ll also spot me loitering around sources of coffee and trying to steal stickers and t-shirts. Please do say hi.

I’ll continue to tweet my experiences (haven’t started) and you can follow me @leeprobert or @lyraspace depending on whether you want the techy geeky stuff or the downright rude!

Thanks for visiting my blog! See you soon.

I recently discovered Skitch and have been raving about it as an Image Markup application. I’ve now also discovered that the Aviary suite also has an Image Markup tool called Falcon that works inside the browser and is coupled with a Firefox extension called Talon for quickly accessing the tools required to do a snapshot. This got me very excited as although I love Skitch for what it does and how well it does it the allure of doing the same thing completely in the browser was too much to ignore. So I’ve done some tests and here are my thoughts.

The Aviary Firefox plugin is great and allows you to launch your Aviary apps via a neat little menu bar button (although I wish it stuck to the design of the other buttons). The snapshot options allow you to choose a section of the screen, the visible area and also the entire page including the complete drop. This is also available in another plugin called Screengrab! and was a very useful way of viewing the design of a site outside of the browser. You can grab sites you admire. Like this one.

The first thing I noticed was that after selecting my snapshot area and hitting the save button it launched Aviary’s default Image editor Phoenix. I then had to save and create a file to open in Falcon. When I did eventually get to edit my image in Falcon I found it to be pretty much the same as Skitch as far as toolset and styling. Performance wasn’t as fast as Skitch overall but this is due to the Flash player and being inside the browser. Personally, this is the biggest issue though. For what I need to do with a tool like this the overall experience was too time consuming and I will be sticking to Skitch for the time being.

This is not to say that the Aviary suite will not be used. It’s important to remember that the Aviary snap will allow you to quickly get a screengrab into a very powerful suite of applications so if your work involves a bit more than just making notes and drawing arrows then this will be the better option. For example, if you were a designer working on some branding ideas and had snapped a logo you liked for inspiration you could very quickly get that snapshot into Raven (Aviary’s vector editor) and draw some curves out over the logo; rapidly generating some ideas for use later. Photographers could grab a snapshot of a photo from a site and open it in Peacock (the effects editor) so they could quickly play with some effects and ideas to use in their own work.

Aviary – I would allow users to login via the Firefox extension and set Falcon as an option when opening your snapshot.
Skitch – something I’d like to see in your tool as it stands is the ability to select an area or the entire snap and scale it up WITHOUT interpolation. I need to zoom in to show individual pixels sometimes.

Another feature I would love to see in any of these tools is the ability to draw a rect around an area of the snapshot and automatically render the rect’s dimensions in pixels next to the rect area. Sometimes I want to measure an area of the screen. The same kind of tool for stamping out the HEX colour of the pixel I’ve clicked on with an accompanying arrow or crosshair. This would be a great way for designers to deliver their designs to developers with dimensions and colour values all set out for them.

http://aviary.com/tools

http://skitch.com

UPDATE:
doodle.png on Aviary.
The plugin is available here.

I discovered Skitch a few days ago now and it has suddenly become completely invaluable to me. Skitch is a screen-grab app for OS X that allows you to quickly annotate and sketch on your grab before quickly uploading it to their site (or Flickr, FTP etc) and then link to or embed it into a blog. Note the use of the word ‘quickly’ there. That’s the key to the success of this tool and why it has become a staple in my arsenal of day-to-day tools.

I use this to grab images of UI work I’m doing, annotate it, upload it and then post a link to the image within a Basecamp message for my client to look at. It’s proven really useful.

While I’m waxing lyrical about tools I’m using here’s a quick list of other great tools I’m using and couldn’t live without at the moment with a quicker reason why.

Firebug – Firefox plugin for debugging CSS, HTML and network activity as well as Actionscript logging via Thunderbolt.

PixelPerfect – overlay a comp in your browser so you can match your development to the designers vision. This saves you a lot of time and effort screen grabbing your dev in the browser and overlaying the results in Photoshop with the original design to see if it all matches correctly. It is still a bit fiddly though and I would love to see an ‘onion-skin’ mode in Apple’s Preview app so I can just sit a window over the browser to do the same thing.

Pixus – this little AIR application is the nicest set of screen calipers I’ve used yet. I did find a screen ruler AIR app called ‘rulers’ but it didn’t allow you to change the registration point which rendered it almost useless.

Evernote – I use this all the time now. Any notes, images, ideas, links etc all get clipped to my Evernote account for safe keeping. Will be the first app I buy on my iPhone when I get one too.

DropBox – store files in the cloud but drop them in there via the finder as if it was on your machine. This works just like your iDisk but allows you to quickly grab the public link and paste it into an email.

MAMP – virtual apache server and MySQL server. Just works instantly. I used to spend days trying to get this stuff to work. Now I can build Wordpress themes straight from localhost.

Basecamp – awesome Project management site online. Even if you find yourself flying solo on a project this app will help you stay organised and in control. Use it with Skitch to post grabs of your work and you will never need to clog up in-boxes again.

Versions + Beanstalk = great subversion management. I’ve tried to setup repositories in the past and have had some success but mainly headaches and have lost the files over time. Beanstalk is a site/service that gives you space to store your source code using subversion. Versions is a really nice Mac desktop app that will then allow you to manage the repositories you create. I know keep all my source code in the cloud so I don’t need to worry if my machine fails.

There’s so many more great tools being developed. Please let me know about yours.

Specifically, ‘How to automatically close open branches of a Flex Tree control WHEN ANOTHER BRANCH IS OPENED’. I need to be clear about this because it’s VERY easy to open all or part of a Tree control or close all the branches at a certain depth but it is deceptively challenging to close the branches of the Tree other than the one you’ve just opened. The reason is this: if you open a child branch and then close all other open branches you will close the parent branch of your tree as well – closing yourself off. This technique allows you to open a branch by clicking on the item as well as the arrow and will check the opened items root item and close all the other open items that DO NOT share this root item.
And some code …

Beware of the animation when doing this. The Flex Tree control does not like playing two animations at the same time so if you try and animate the opening of the branch at the same time as closing all of the others it will not work. I need to build a better Tree control at some point that will handle this. It will certainly make it much slicker. If anyone knows of a component that is already built please let me know.

My new website is finally live. It needs some TLC over the coming weeks but overall I think it’s sufficient for launch … especially considering it’s Flash on the Beach next week and I’ll be handing out a shed load of business cards.

If you’re visiting after receiving a business card then let me say that I’m sure it was very nice meeting you and we had such a laff didn’t we?! That time when you jumped into the sea with your laptop! You were so drunk!! LOL!! Anyway, wishful thinking … there’ll be no repeat of last years drunken shenanigans as I have a lot of catching up to do with old friends and plan on staying sharp. Talking of which I need to go and plan for the next three days.

Hope you like my new website and please get in touch to let me know your thoughts.

I’m writing this in advance of the ‘Flash on the Beach’ fest in Brighton this weekend. I expect to be whoring myself silly while I’m there and if you’re reading this you’re probably one of the ‘whorees’ I whored myself too. Well, thanks for actually looking at the card I probably thrust into your face and visiting my blog. I apologise in advance for anything I may have said or done post 10pm as I was likely to have been in the process of being ‘charming’. Hope you had a great time … I did (probably).

Hi there. Some of you may have come from the Facebook group Flash & flex Freelancers. I’m afraid you wont find any fantastic resources and job postings here … that’s for the group to generate. What you will find however is a website in dire need of a re-build, a CV to give to wealthy friends and colleagues and a page of case studies with links to recent work.