Pinter Industries

On the Boards

Forgot to make a note about probably the coolest site I’ve worked on, ontheboards.tv. It launched three weeks ago and seems to be doing well. It survived the first weekend even with an article in the New York Times about the site. It was neat to work on a large scale project with lots of custom functionality. The site may look pretty simple, but there is quite a bit happening behind the scenes.

One thing we discovered while developing the media player is the FLVPlayback component doesn’t always raise the Buffering/Playing/PausedStateEntered events when those states are entered. Makes it difficult to properly handle those situations when you don’t know you are in them. Turns out if you use the StateChange event and check the event state, you always know what state the FLVPlayback component is in. No idea why that happens, but if you find yourself building a custom video player, keep that in mind.

Edit: Turns out On the Boards found this post and linked it on their blog. In the interest of providing some more details I wrote another post to compliment this one.

Posted February 19th, 2010 under Code Tricks, Work | 1 Comment »

Two words why Flash won’t be overthrown by HTML5/JavaScript soon

Internet Explorer

I just spent the most of last Thursday trying to get some content to fade properly in IE with help from Chris. It still doesn’t, but it works well enough. When something seemingly simple takes up an entire day to make work in one browser, I’d consider that technology not quite ready. Even using jQuery which is supposed to make all the browser differences not such a big deal, and it does a great job at that for the most part. Seems you can’t adjust opacity and other attributes on elements in IE, something that works no problem in Chrome or Firefox. So the animation IE ends up with less effects and doesn’t look nearly as polished. And the best part about this, is the animation is for a Microsoft site.

Anyways, if HTML5/JavaScript/whatever is going to take over doing all the things Flash already does (and does pretty well for the most part) cross browser support needs to be way better. We are pretty much there with Firefox and Chrome/Safari, but IE is so far behind and has such a huge market share (about 2/3′s) that is impractical to code everything in JavaScript because you have to spend twice as long as you should to make sure it works in all the browsers correctly. Where as Flash, I code it once, it works in every browser. It just makes things so much simpler to have a common platform to develop for that works everywhere.

Posted February 1st, 2010 under Rants | No Comments »

An update

I have been pretty busy with work for the past couple months. Been working on a site for a local performing arts group, and the site already has some press coverage and it’s not going to launch for a while. It will be a neat site once it is all finished, defiantly a project I am proud to be a part of. I’ll be posting a link up once it goes live.

You might be able to notice (if you’ve ever been to the site before) that I actually did some styling on this site. Not that it’s going to blow you away with its awesomeness, but it’s something besides the default theme and I think it looks pretty good. But it’s a good thing people don’t pay me to design their sites, it’s much easier to build them.

Posted November 3rd, 2009 under Uncategorized | No Comments »

WordPress

As you can probably tell from my lack of a theme I use WordPress for this blog. I use it cause it’s simple and I’m not doing anything crazy with this site. Anyways the last couple times I’ve logged in it there’s a new update. Now I don’t log in that often, only when I can actually think of something to write about. I really like how they have auto-magical updating, but it’s annoying to log into SSH and back up the site and database each time. I suppose I should just write a script for that, or see if any one has done that already… Looks like most people just write their own scripts, I’ll probably do the same or just copy one I like. But one of the more annoying things about the auto update is they don’t tell you what the new features are or what issues have been fixed, it would be nice to know what I’m getting. They could at least put a link to a page that tells me what is in the new version. Yes, I do like the updating system, but it could be better. Guess I probably should update now.

Posted July 13th, 2009 under The Site | No Comments »

Deciding on coding standards

As everyone knows coding standards quickly become a religious debate as soon as there are more than a single developer working on a piece of code. Luckily the people I work with share the same sense of clean coding standards as I do.

However the other day we had a dissagreement about what to name the event parameter in a handler, ‘e’ or ‘evt’. Neither of us had a strong argument for using one over the other. So we ended up playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is the perfect solution for deciding on issues that have little to no impact on how the code actually works. It enables a decision to be quickly made, and hopefully the parties involved agree that RPS is a fair and balanced method.

If you want to get super geeky, you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard. I just found out about that the other day because of a t-shirt on Think Geek. I haven’t tried playing yet, it may take a while to remember what beats what now.

Posted July 2nd, 2009 under Code Tricks | No Comments »

It’s been a while

I apparently suck at blogging. I haven’t posted in almost two months, that’s not going to keep anyone coming back to see whats new. Oh well, guess I’ll give a quick update of whats new in the Pinter Industries world. Not a whole lot actually, like no new site design, although I have sketched out some ideas.

The big Flash CMS project I worked a bunch on still hasn’t gone live. Not sure what they are waiting for since they haven’t asked for any updates recently. At least I’m finally getting paid for that project. Got a cool video portfolio site project for a friend that I’ll be starting, and hopefully finishing, this week. It will kind of be a portfolio item for me as well, since it should be a pretty neat Flash site.

The big project at the moment is something I’m working on with Heavy Robotic Chris. We are restarting a project we had built a year and a half ago and taking it to the next level of functionality. We both think it’s a great idea, something that we will both use, and hopefully people will use it this time around too. I’ve been writing quite a bit of JavaScript and PHP that writes out JavaScript, so it’s been a good learning experience. I’ll have much more to say about that project once it launches. Not that I think anyone would steal our idea and build it before we finish, especially since Amazon already did that.

Posted June 30th, 2009 under Uncategorized | No Comments »

Video gaming

I found an interesting blog post about video games and the direction of the market and design related to board games. You can read it here, and I suggest you do, the author makes some very good points about things possibly not turning out well for video games. He mentions the consolidation of the game publishers, which is already happening in video games, there are a couple huge publishers that pump out a lot of games, which leads to a lack of innovation, which also already happens.

But I think he missed one big point, it is much easier for a small independent gaming company to make a quality game, release it, and have it become ‘successful’, than it is for a small independent company to create a release a quality board game. Granted success has a lot of different meanings, but there are big differences in teh two markets when it comes to building and distributing the product. With a board game there are physical items that need to be manufactured, packaged and then sold at a store, well you could sell them online as well, but you still need a bunch of storage space at least. With a video game, all you need is some computers and some programmers and artists, which could be all the same person. The cost and commitment is much lower. With the loads of different platforms for gaming, and different distribution options, even on the same system, an independent company can make an impact. Look at Braid or Sins of a Solar Empire for example. Braid is one of my favorite games on the Xbox 360, it is just so beautifully done, the art, the music, the gameplay, it all works together so well. I haven’t had a chance to play Sins of a Solar Empire yet, but some of my friends are big fans. Thats a big game, and it supposedly was built on a budget of less than a million dollars, and they built their own graphics engine.

Anyways, I was just trying to point out that I don’t think it’s the end of the world for video games. I think there are a lot more talented people with good ideas and the ambition to try and make their visions playable. Heck, even board games are making a comeback with the more hardcore style games, although Europe still seems to be making the funnest games.

Posted May 5th, 2009 under Gaming | 1 Comment »

A minor update

Well I got some of the site updates I wanted to do. There are still more content and style updates I need to do. But I did get WordPress moved to the root of the domain, which was super simple. I followed this tutorial and got it done in five minutes.

I also got pretty permalinks working, which took me a while because I wasn’t reading the instructions correctly. But that’s all working now. If you have mod_rewrite enabled in Apache edit your site configuration file under apache2/sites-available (at least that’s how apache is setup on my box). And place the following config in any relevant <Directory> tags.
Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All
Then all you should need to do is log into WordPress and choose your pretty permalink style from the ‘Permalinks’ section in ‘Settings’.

If you don’t have mod_rewrite enabled, on Ubuntu you can enable it with this:
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
To disable, use the a2dismod command instead. Thanks to this guy for those commands.

Posted April 28th, 2009 under The Site | No Comments »

Busy projects

I was pretty busy last week. I’ve been working with Chris of Heavy Robot on a large scale Flash CMS site, we are taking over maintenance and development duties. It’s interesting to see what the original developers did and their design choices, some of them make me wonder what they were thinking, others are very well thought out. And it sounds like there will be more work on that project this week.

Besides that, I’ve got a game I’m porting to the Android mobile platform, an upcoming interactive map project in Flash, some other Flash work, and maybe some fun side projects in there as well. But I’m always looking for more work, so if you have any, Flash or other programming work, let me know.

So speaking of fun side projects, Chris and Brian made Heavy Mural. It’s a neat site for figuring out how to build sticky note murals. Well it doesn’t have to be sticky notes, you can use other square colored items. I think it’s pretty neat, hopefully some other people do to.

And on a related note, I met up with Chris and Matty Harper and Amy Brodie of Dreamlets fame for an idea brainstorm last week. It was a great time, we hung out at the ‘dream pad’ and discussed ideas for cool projects. It was inspiring and makes me want to do more side projects, but I need to finish up the ones I’ve already started first.

So, some day you’ll see some of my projects on here. And someday you’ll also see an updated style and more content on this site.

Posted April 20th, 2009 under Work | No Comments »

Still Alive

Okay, just a quick note to say I’m still here and will be making some updates to the site real soon, like including my resume and work samples up here. I’m going to try and do better with actually posting here so maybe there will be something useful or interesting up here at some point.

Posted April 6th, 2009 under Uncategorized | No Comments »