The Less Rain London office is now looking for a Full Time AS3 Developer to complete the team!

You will be developing interactive environments in Actionscript 3.0, ranging from consumer & corporate websites to Rich Internet Applications. Here are some examples of the level of coding we expect:

• www.redbullsoapboxracer.com
• www.redbull.com/flightlab
• www.neoderma.com

Your role involves working with our front-end designers, back-end developers and Flash Developer team. Every project we do has a great concept / idea behind it and pushes the boundaries of what is possible, so you will never get bored doing the same website over and over again.

As a person you are quick, accurate and stress tolerant, a problem solver with good communication skills. You are self-motivated; flash development is a passion, not just a job. You like to try out new things and are willing to pass your knowledge to others.

You have a wide knowledge of Flash development and in-depth experience in web development.

Skills

• Solid Actionscript 3 Development (OOP)
• Experience with architecture/design patterns (MVC)
• Experience with Data integration (XML, SOAP, Remoting, etc)
• Experience with Papervision3D and/or other 3D Flash open library
• Strong Math and Physics capabilities
• Game development experience appreciated
• High level understanding of Flash, Flex, AIR and other core Flash Platform
• Basic third-party 3D software knowledge appreciated (such as 3ds, maya, cinema4D, unity3D, Shiva)
• Understanding of Back-end and Database technologies, but not necessarily having the ability to implement.
• Community awareness with new technologies, frameworks, resources and open source libraries
• Programmatic motion appreciated
• Eye for detail, performance and optimization
• Experience with video and audio
• Low-Level development appreciated (bytes level)
• Eclipse/FDT, Flex Builder and SVN appreciated
• Basic graphic design and motion graphics skills
• Basic Photoshop and Illustrator skills
• Basic understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Initial salaries are comparable to the market level and there will be a chance to negotiate as you develop.

Send your resume, references and portfolio to vassilios-at-lessrain.com.

Please include salary expectations.

Following our “shock and awe” presentation at the Flex User Group Berlin in August, we’re invited to present the Red Bull Soap Box Racer at the Adobe Flex User Group in Hamburg on the 20th of October.

Check the flexughh announcement for details. Thanks to Fabian and the flexughh for hosting us!

There’s a new feature in the Red Bull Soapbox Racer, that allows you to connect your Soapbox Racer account with your Facebook account. It allows for easy login as well as challenging your Facebook friends, sharing your cars, tracks and race results in your Facebook feed.

Connect yourself on www.redbullsoapboxracer.com.

Red Bull Soapbox - kids of all ages in self-made cars, racing down a steep hill. An extremely popular event, held throughout the year across the globe. The cars are powered by gravity only, no engines allowed but all dreams and colors.

And now it’s online! All of it, the cars, the race, the place to meet and challenge your friends. We call it Red Bull Soapbox Racer and racing you will.

Race first, think later

One single click on “Race now” and you find yourself on top of a steep road, pointing downhill. While the countdown is running, please be reminded that the game is based on a realistic physics simulation and you should not not not smash into one of those nice obstacles. Do collect cans for an extra speed boost and don’t forget the spanners. With ultra speed comes maybe damage.

If you didn’t win instantly the first time, maybe it was the wrong track. We have tracks for everybody, Wildwest, Night Ride, Turkish Riviera, Waterland, Alpenglück - many more will be added. Or was there a problem with the car?

Another car, another race

Red Bull Soapbox Racer lets you build your own car in 3D. Just draw the outline with your mouse. It’s really that simple and everything you draw will have an effect later in the game. The rounder the wheels the better, reconsider materials, use more stickers, paint, use colors, use more colors than your opponents, use every tool you have at least once. And winning races will get you even more of those. (THERE IS A NAILGUN!)

Give it some love, cars will be rated by who-knows-what so make sure there is no doubt. You may also browse through all existing cars for some inspiration.

The Challenge

After tinkering and test driving for a while there comes a point in time where you are quite sure to have the best car ever built on this planet. Challenge your friends! Invite them by E-Mail or simply click on the name of your long-time-rival in the so-called friends list.

A challenge works like this: Start the challenge and you have three attempts to race your best time. After that your opponent will be notified and offered three rounds to beat your time.

And after that, there is the highscore list for everyone to see.

Steeper, faster, harder

It’s even better to challenge somebody on your own surprise track. Give it a try, it’s simpler than building cars. Draw with your mouse where the street should go, done. Then, if you like, adjust the downward slope with some gusto and remember the guideline: The steeper the faster. Place obstacles and power-ups as you see fit, some recommend at least one can of Red Bull.

Red Bull Soapbox Racer is the latest addition to our creative online communities. Make your race times heard, we sure will try to beat you. See you on the circuit!

Related Posts:

Red Bull Flugtag Flightlab
Developing Red Bull Flugtag Flightlab

“The main goal of the Integra project is to create a new piece of software for composing and performing music with live electronics. The environment will be tested in real life thanks to substantial new commissions and an effort to modernise existing repertoire that currently uses obsolete technology. Furthermore, the project is an exciting opportunity to bring together research centres and new music ensembles from across Europe.”  - Integralive.org

We’re very excited to be involved in UI/UX design and Graphic design for this new music software development project. There is a news post here about our involvement. Have a look at the whole site for more information on the groundbreaking work that Integra are doing.

Last year during the development of a project where blur filters were used extensively we put into practice several tips and tricks to be able to render this visual effects quicker.

What caught my attention on top of everything was something really obviuos, in fact it is mentioned in the Flash documentation (I never read every single line), values that are a power of 2 (such as 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32) are optimized to render more quickly than other values.

Having this into account, the problem (a fairly common problem in systems programming) was to locate the "next highest power of 2", whenever I need the value to be dynamic.

Here there are a few AS3 algorithms to find the next highest power of 2:

Flash Switcher extension is a well known Firefox extension to switch between various Flash player versions. Also very useful to save or remove the current installed Flash plugin.

In the last two months I have found people around my friends network having a lot of trouble making the extension work with Windows Vista, getting this two common errors while installing the extension:

Component returned failure code: 0x80520008 (NSERRORFILEALREADYEXISTS) [nsILocalFile.copyTo]

Access to folder C:Windowssystem32MacromedFlash is denied. Consider to use an user accesible plugins folder instead (for example: ~/.mozilla/plugins/ )

The solution to get ridd of this error messages is very basic, you just need full access to the macromed folder in your system.

• Go to C:\Windows\System32\Macromed
• Right-click "Flash" folder to open the properties panel.
• Click the "Security" tab.
• Click "Edit" Button.
• Select the current user in "Group or user names:"
• Change folder permissions, normally I change it to have full control.
• Click "Apply" and "OK"

Another question that comes together with this errors is how to customize the Flash Switcher extension.

The default download for Flash Switcher includes a fair variety of player versions but not all and you may need to add newer players to fit your development needs, for example the new 10r22_87 version.

First you need to download the player from the following Flash Player archive:

Archived Flash Players available for testing purposes.

Download Flash Player 10 (debugger versions) (60 MB).

Open your Flash Switcher extension plugins directory, located at (remember I'm talking about Windows Vista):

C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\extensions\flash_switcher@sephiroth.it\plugins\win

Create a new folder and name it 10.0 r22 debug, which is the new version to install. (Released February 24, 2009 due to security vulnerabilities)

Next you need to install the Flash player (flashplayer10r2287win_debug.exe) which goes to C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash

Now copy the NPSWF32.dll file from the "Flash" folder to the Flash Switcher extension plugin directory that you just created.

And that's all, now your Flash Switcher extension should work without problems in Windows Vista.

We've just completed the development of the One Race Wear microsite for our friends Bionic Systems and their client One Industries.

Bionic Systems were responsible for the project and art direction, we added our Flash treatment:

In the last few days I've been experiencing weird rendering problems in some websites while using the latest stable version of Firefox (3.0.1) in MAC.

Searching google I found more people having similar issuses like blinking pages when using SWFAddress for Flash in FF3 MAC.

• SWFAddress Help Forum
• Firefox 3 + Adblock = disaster (asfusion blog)
• FF3 breaks SWFAddress (sometimes) on OS X
• Firefox 3 and SWFAddress

In all the cases the solution given for the problem is to add a small delay between the visual transition and the JavaScript interaction of SWFAddress.

After reading all this posts I thought the problem was specific for SWFAddress but my surpsise was when I found similar problems in one of our projects which is not using SWFAddress at all and it is almost 4 years old (AS2). In this specific project we were using ExternalInterface extensivelly.

I have done a small test with just a gradient background and three round corner buttons using ExternalInterface call method to call three different javscript functions and the results are scary:

1) First button (left) calls an alert in javascript using a timeout:

JAVASCRIPT: setTimeout("alert('test 1 with timeout')", 1000);
FLASH: ExternalInterface.call("test1");

2) Second button (middle) calls an alert in javascript:

JAVASCRIPT: alert("test2 no timeout");
FLASH: ExternalInterface.call("test2");

3) Third button (right) calls scrollTo in javascript:

JAVASCRIPT: scrollTo(0,100);
FLASH: ExternalInterface.call("test3");

Second and third button in FF3 MAC makes the flash movie to behave in a weird way when the javascript action is executed.

http://www.lessrain.com/projects/luis/as3/bugs/ff3mac/deploy/

Looking at this results and considering that SWFAddress uses ExternalInterface I can say for now that part of the problem is caused by using the ExternalInterface call method in FF3 MAC (looking at the problem from a flash developer point of view, I don't know what is happening behind the "Cocoa Firefox" scenes), but maybe the problem goes deeper than this, I don't know yet, this is only my first attempt to find out the causes of Flash blinking and behaving bad in FF3 MAC.

As a little homage to our most popular and seemingly helpful blog post about the Nasty XML load bug in Internet Explorer I created an app that tests the caching behavior of the browser it's running in.

To recap - Loading XML files in Flash over an SSL Connection in Internet Explorer fails if the "Pragma: no-cache" or "Cache-Control: no-cache" HTTP headers are set in the server's response.
In AS2 the loading failed silently, in AS3 we at least get an IO Error #2032, which has been discussed several times (see below)

If you want to keep the browser from caching your dynamic content you'll have to use other means.
Judging from my tests, the best headers to prevent caching without causing errors in IE are: "Cache-Control: no-store" and/or "Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMT".

You can access the test suite here:

• Loading over an SSL connection
• Loading over a normal connection

Set the headers that you'd like the server-script to return and find out what happens when the same request is sent twice after each other.
Use the Live HTTP Headers Plugin for Firefox if you'd like to see what the server actually returns.

Other interesting insights

• The problem still exists in Internet Explorer 7! Don't know about Vista...
• Here it's suggested that "Cache-Control: must-revalidate" and "Cache-Control: max-age=0" also work. While that's true in the sense that they don't cause an error IE, they don't seem to prevent caching 100% - there is a timeout.
• "Pragma: no-cache" causes the error in IE, but doesn't actually prevent it from caching at all when it's set on a non-ssh connection.
• Firefox internally sets the expiry date of script files to the past - so unless you set the "Expires" header to the future it'll never cache the content.
• Safari and Firefox change their caching behavior when the "Last Modified" header is set. If it's in the past they seem to be happy to cache the file for you.

PHP sessions

Note that in PHP, as soon as you use sessions with session_start() the no-cache headers are added automatically. You'll have to replace those headers or turn the default behavior off in php.ini. To replace the headers (found in the comments of the original post, see also the session-cache-limiter function and comments):

session_cache_limiter(’public’);
session_start();
header (”Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
// or if you still want to prevent caching
header (”Cache-Control: no-store”);
header (”Pragma: public”);

Related links:

• Adobe TechNote
• Related Microsoft bug
• More on Error #2032
• Microsoft article - How to prevent caching in Internet Explorer. Especially "The Pragma: No-Cache Header" section
• Even more trouble with gzip compression
• And the Microsoft bug report for that

As a practical add-on for our loyal Flight Lab users we created a mini hangar widget that users can embed on their blog, social platform profile etc.

We happily used Clearspring as the platform for our widget, just click "Get this and Share" and take it away. If you enter the e-mail address you registered with at Flight Lab, the widget display your own planes to show off your flight machine building skills.

Related Posts:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Developing Flight Lab

We've recently completed the website for the German/Italian property investment firm Stofanel Investment AG.

A subtle use of Flash and Papervision 3D creates an abstract, dreamy and atmospheric paper space to reflect the company's vision of a harmonious relationship between nature, architecture, community and self.

The corporate identity we developed in collaboration with yippieyeah is based on botanic patterns (Phyllotaxy) as you would find in the growth patterns of sun flowers for example - it underlines the companies dedication to nature and community.

Regular readers will be pleased to find the site equipped with our usual technical treatment: fully dynamic, browser-button- and deeplink enabled (thanks to SWFAddress) and HTML-version for search engine optimization.