Through the eyes of Brookfresh

Retro media

2009-06-10T04:03:00.000-07:00

Our friends over at Retro media have gone live with a new online service and classic movies shop, check it out at www.retro-media.co.uk

orchard.co.uk goes live

2009-06-09T12:45:00.001-07:00

The first of our big sites to go live this week, Orchard.co.uk are the leaders in recruitment throughout the Manchester and Leeds area. Orchard have relaunched their site with a stunning new style.

This site has a 'tag' driven content system allowing the recruiters to add jobs, calander events and news articles allowing users to perform keyword searches to be on all the sites content. Narrowing down the perfect job has never been so easy.

visit www.orchard.co.uk

The Blind Factory goes live

2009-06-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

The second of our big sites to go live in a week after Orchard had 'gone live' we saw the grand opening of our biggest ecommerce site yet, click on over to www.TheBlindFactory.co.uk to see our flagship online store.

**"After several months in development we've actually gone live. Thanks to Brookfresh we're now trading online" - K Murphy: Company Director, The Blind Factory Ltd** .

The Blind Factory offers a massive range of Window Blinds and Conservatory Roof blinds. After looking at the competition in the market we decided to build a totally unique shopping system, the content is managed by a bespoke system, we think this is going to be a winner.

visit www.TheBlindFactory.co.uk

Freelance work - Abito

2006-12-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

Heres a site I built for my freelance client ripe. I coded some lovely css for the html bit and ive created a couple of the flash elements found at the top of each page. (the one on locations is mine)

Although I built most of the site, some of the flash elements were done by another freelancer, shame that. I think it might have looked better if I'd done it ;)

check it out at www.abito.co.uk

Unused illustrations

2006-12-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple of illustrations I did for a client, the project was cancelled so these went unused.

Shame.

Quickie site goes live

2006-12-06T02:31:00.000-08:00

Lanonna.co.uk has gone live, designed by Lee H and built by me in a day.

its a mad mad mad mad year

2006-12-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

This year has been the maddest year yet. It started with a splutter, seeing me walking around a business estate knocking on doors and waving my card in everyone's face and now see's me never leaving the office as im far too busy.

I have managed to keep all my clients happy enough that they have all returned with more work. Ive even seen a few faces from my past. a couple of ex-bosses (who's bridges I thought well and truly burned) have contacted me with work. Nice work too, Ive updated a site for Disney for one, and built a lovely flash product slider for another. Check out the Jasper Morrison site, im quit pleased with the slider I wrote completely from scratch.

Last month I worked on a project for Amaze in Runcorn that got my juices flowing. A new flash site for a Playstation 3 game from Evolution studios. A month of hardcore coding has produced this site. The guys I worked with were amazing and I learned a lot about structuring my actionscript classes. (seems the site isnt live at this time) It sthe first time Ive actually worked with a flash team on a purely development project.

Website generator has taken off this year with a new site at www.themealmakers.co.uk
Ive written a bespoke ordering system for it and it shows off how versatile the website-generator system is.

Basically ive created a shopping cart that will plug-into the website generator system, ive built it in such a way that its easy to alter to suit any future sites.

Ive also been involved with the re-design and build of the new look for www.lightart.co.uk, this should be going live soon. More news on this project later once it goes live.

Ive been busy creating a few banners for an agency who will remain nameless at the moment. (nothing cloak and dagger I just dont want to offer a list of clients thats all)

And Im currently working on a project for yet another new client that involves a fantastic CDROM, screenshots and production notes to follow.

Ive decided to send my clients VOIP phones this year for Christmas, ill also add a tin of quality streets too. Ive been using a skype phone for the past 2 weeks and have spent roughly £3.00 on calls so far, so considering my monthly phone bills have been in excess of £170.00 I think spending money on VOIP phones for my clients it will pay off in the end. Ive produced a couple of Brookfresh stickers and the phones are now fully logo'd up.

Scorching July

2006-08-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

July has proved to be my busiest month yet, and I thought this was my quiet period. So I spent the first two weeks in Menorca. Sun, sand and running after Bailey. What I didn't expect was the amount of work waiting for me on my return.

The leaflet designed for the client I won through the tendering, turned into an email, and this has since turned into a web page for 'The Carshop'.

Sportlived have also had a facelift to their site, and they have added a few more sports, the site is really growing now, so much so they are advertising for staff.

Here's the new look, the left panel is a flash element based on the press ads and posters. The flash loads in the images and displays them as a slideshow:

While looking for a company called Dubit last month I accidently wandered into the offices of an advertising agency, they were very polite and ushered me out of the door, but not before they accepted a business card. A week later they invited me back to talk about the possibility of doing some work. Last week I produced several banner designs. So the moral is don't be shy and hand your card out to everyone you meet.

Ive also given the main Brookfresh site a bit of a facelift, well more of a botox injection to the eyebrows. Ive added a smart client area log-in, allowing my clients to download and upload documents and images. It's based on the php I wrote last month.

The Perfect Smile clinic have also had a facelift, or should that be a polish and scrape? Ive added a few new sections to the site and generally beefed it up.

In other news I'm freelancing at Pilot (yeah the same Pilot that made me redundant) in-house which makes a nice change as I usually dont freelance, especially not in-house. But they are a cool bunch of guys and it's nice stuff to work on. more later..

Just so I dont think things are going too well for me Slate Direct have done a runner. I thought I would pop in while I was passing their showroom, only to find the place shuttered up and a 'to-let' notice posted outside. They still owe me a small sum of money, but there's bugger all I can do about that as I have no-idea where it is they have scuttled off to. Ill keep the site up for a while until I decide what to do about it.

Anyway, Im fully booked for the whole of August so I cant spend all day typing this, bye for now.

Busy Month

2006-06-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

Overall its been a busy month, Ive won a new client through a new tender document Ive created. And Ive also done several small sites still waiting to go live.

I still havent heard anything from the company retrieving the data from my burnt out drive.

Ive been playing around with php and ive created a small system to allow my clients to upload files to their folders on my site and the php also returns a list of files within that folder automatically. Not bad for my first attempt at php really, you can see the system in action here
it's pretty handy as I dont have to open a html page and add a file link, i just upload the file to the right folder.

Ive also written a flash version of the uploader to be integrated into the website-generator when I have time, you can see the flash version here the php for the flash is slightly different in that it ruturns the list of files in the folder as xml, so flash can recreate the list in a list component.

Hip Hotels goes live

2006-06-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

For the whole of May I have worked on a huge site for one of my clients. Its one of the biggest projects Ive been involved with to date and it makes a change to work on a site that grants the user a bit of intellegence You wont find any annoying "click here" prompts and there are no lists of hotels or maps to be found anywhere. You simply make choices based on the images displayed. Every mouse click changes a selection of high quality images presented to you. Again images are used to help the user make a decision, and a small amount of text teases the user, offering small snippets of history and interesting anecdotes.

The whole site was constructed around a single class, the class itself is a pretty complicated piece of code. It takes xml from the database and presents the menu, each click presents a new menu, again taken from the xml.

There's also a bespoke mp3 player built into the site, and this should appear at a later date, The music on the site is absolutely fantasctic, well worth buying.

Dooomed i tell you.

2006-04-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

last Friday as I was in the process of backing up my Work in progress (WIP) hard drive, the bloody thing died on me. It holds all my work files for the last year. It wouldn't reboot and just contined to make a horrible 'wrr click' death rattle. The irony is that I had just deleted the backup file of WIP to make space for the uncompressed files on my main drive.
The drive is at the repair shop now, lets all keep our fingers crossed.

Update: The drive is dead according to the so called 'expert' I gave it to. Im'm now going to try and find a duplicate of the drive and use the parts to fix this one.

Press adverts

2006-04-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

Sportlived have started advertising the site in various specialist sporting publications, this month ive designed a couple of hockey adverts and a couple of rugby adverts. I popped into whsmiths to check out the International Rugby News 1/2 page Sport Lived advert on p.6.

I also designed the Sportlived brochure which was printed last month. You can order your copy from the sportlived website.

Freelancing again...

2006-04-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

Synergy design, a Bolton based agency, needed an easy to update portfolio on their website. The flash site loads in the data from an external xml file containing client text and references to the relevant images. Have a look at the dynamically created menu system which im rather chuffed with. click here for the site.

Slate Direct

2006-04-19T08:28:00.002-07:00

The challenge was to create a product brochure as quickly as possible for the company Slate Direct. After launching their products with a huge leaflet campaign they needed a website pretty quick.
You can see the end result here

Freelancing

2006-04-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks Ive travelled over the pennines to rainy Manchester for a bit of in-house freelance work. It makes a nice change to see how other web studios work and as they go Photolink run a very tight ship.

In other news ive completed a couple of small flash projects a map here and an interesting 3D product viewer which I will have to post a link to later once the photography is completed.

Fractal interface

2006-03-09T08:57:00.000-08:00

I was asked to create a piece of software to live on a touch screen system for schools. I have no idea where the inspiration came from but I designed and built an interface based on the idea of a fractal. You click on the small cirlces which zoom up to fill the screen showing more small circles around the edges.

Reskinning Flash Coponents in MX2004

2006-03-08T06:52:00.000-08:00

On a recent project I was asked to create an mp3 player for the site. They wanted to play a list of tracks one after the other. Now Ive never had the chance to play with the flash media components before so I was looking forward to it.

What a minefield I stumbled into. There are several ways you can load mp3 tracks into flash, the easiest and least messy is to use the MediaController and the MediaDisplay components installed with MX2004. Basically you point the MediaController at an mp3 file then you 'associate' the MediaDisplay component with the Controller. The MediaDisplay component displays the progress bar and the control buttons.

With me so far?

My client sent a design on how he wanted the progress bar to look. THis is where it gets a bit sticky. You cant just reskin the component, oh no you have to open the component fla file and muck about with it.

heres the steps you must take:

Copy C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash MX2004\en\Configuration\ComponentFLA\SampleTheme.fla to newTheme.fla.
Open newTheme.fla and find the SampleTheme movieclip in the ‘Flash UI Components 2’ folder in the library and rename this to newTheme.
Edit the newTheme movieclip and swap the named graphics for the new versions for your theme.
You now have a reference library of your new graphic set / Theme.

Thtats the basic file taken care of. Then to edit the component do the following:

Open C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash MX 2004\en\Configuration\ComponentFLA\StandardComponents.fla.
Open a new blank Flash document and drag a copy of the component (and any subcomponents that this uses) which you wish to modify from the StandardComponents.fla library to the stage of your new blank Flash document.
Make sure you set the Class path in the Publish Settings in your new Flash document.
Delete the component instance from the stage of your new Flash document and Edit the version newly residing in it’s library, changing it’s graphics (and those of any sub components) to the new versions from your newTheme.fla graphic reference library.
When you’ve changed all the graphics (and any embedded sub-components), right click on the component in the library and chose ‘Export SWC File’. You need to have created a new directory in C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash MX 2004\en\Configuration\Components to reflect the home of your new skinned components and this is where you will save it.
You can now save your new Flash component FLA file as componentName.fla so it can be modified again later if we want to attach our own themed style to the new skinned components.
Go to your Components panel in the Flash IDE, click on it’s dropdown menu (in the top right hand corner of the panel) and click on Reload. The new Component directory and it’s component(s) should now appear.

I found this whole experience frustrating and very time-consuming to say the least. For every change you make you must eport the SWC file then go to your project file, remove the component fron the library, update the component in the component panel drop it back into the job then test it. You get the idea.

Spring clean your websites.

2006-02-13T17:05:00.000-08:00

Ive decided to tidy up the gaming site a bit. One of the guys that does a bit of work on the site for me installed cuteNews a while back. After fiddling about with it ive found it to be pretty good to use, although it still uses tables to display the news. I might have alook at converting it to CSS when I have a bit of spare time.

Ive given the site a spring clean and shaken a few cobwebs loose, ive redesigned the front page and the header as now that theres a hack for the US PS2 available on the site I hope the audience is going to grow.

As the PS2 only plays flash version 4, any animations have to be done without the aid of actionscript, so ive kept the flash to a minimum, animated the logo in the banner slightly and made a button.

They say a healthy company changes their website at least every 9 months, It certainly pays to change something. There's already renewed interest from the tiny changes ive made to brookfresh.co.uk. I think ill have a look at brookfresh.com now.

A good start to 2006

2006-02-10T02:33:00.000-08:00

Its been a busy January and February so far this year. Ive given my gaming site www.brookfresh.co.uk a bit of a facelift and started to use cutenews on the site. Its easy to install and pretty straight-forward to use.

Two brookfresh clients have gone live with their sites this month:

www.pharmacydirect.org.uk have gone live with their e-commerce shop built and designed by yours-truly. The client has taken the bold step of closing his real-life shop and going completely on-line. I'm sure it will be a big success.

www.perfectsmileclinic.co.uk have also gone live with a small brochure site, the site is special in that the flash determins the size of the containing html ( see last post ). I have perfected the system now and it works in all the usual browsers. This is our first site built using flash 8. Aaaand the verdict is that its great. I have used the drop-shadow filter and the size of the swf was a lot smaller than if I had used a shadow-image.

I still need to update the main Brookfresh.com site and use flash8 to reduce the size of the site. Ive also developed a new version of the shifting panels using a more efficient script. But seeing as February looks like its going to be another mad month it will have to wait.

Flash Black box of death

2005-11-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

Ive recently worked on the site for the Orchard recruitment agency at www.orchard.co.uk
The site was designed to float in the middle of the browser, so I copied and pasted a bit of css code that I had previously used on another site (www.4am.co.uk) the other site used a combination of javascript and css to resize the flash movie within. Its a very swanky idea, your flash movie grows and shrinks depending on the size of the page, so you dont have to design all your pages to fit in the same set size.

the shorter version
Anyway, the css was responsible for the flash movie size, the flash being 100% of the containing Div (you're a div). If viewed using Internet Explorer the user sometimes see nothing but a black square where the flash should be, it works perfectly when viewed in other browsers.

So whats the answer
Well at the time of writing the answer is to set the size of the flash movie manually, ie not letting the css be responsible for it. This site doesnt use the resizing ability anyway. Its not Ideal but I cant linger on this for too long, if anyone knows why this is happening let me know.

Comboboxes from hell

2005-10-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

My current project requires me to place a movieclip on the stage using the attachMovie method. The Moviclip contains a couple of comboboxes. A very strange thing occured when the movieclip was attached, the comboboxes dropped down underneath everything else found in the movieclip even though they wer on a layer above!

After one of my usual sessions of trial and error I noticed that if you use a number instead of getNextHighestDepth() within the attachMovieClip method everything works as it should. Do a google search on this problem shows other flash bods have had the same problem.

Resizing the monitor resolution from Flash

2005-09-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

One of my clients recently wanted me to create a presentation in flash, they fullscreen images to fade into each other timed to the beat of music.

Adding the images proved to be a pain in the backside, since everytime I had the fades timed to the music on my machine the timing was off on the clients machine. After a couple of hours scratching my head I realised the clients monitor was set to a different resolution so the images were being stretched more, the processor was having to work harder and because of this the music was starting to get ahead of the images.

The answer is a simple one, we simply reduced his resolution to match my own. Sorted you might think.

The client then made his presentation to his client and his client wanted to take the presentation away with them to show it off. Not a good idea, I thought. We cant go around all the machines he wants to show it on and manually resize the res, so we needed it to happen automatically.

We know that flash on its own doesnt have the capability of doing this so we need a third party solution. I found a free application called ResChange 2.0 which can be found here.
Its free to download and use thanks very much 12noon (the publisher) you made my life a lot easier. All you have to do is pass a few variables to it resolution colour depth etc.

Now we have to call ResChange from flash. This is where the fscommand method comes into play. Macromedia have clamped down on the fscommand methods power, you used to be able to point it at any document and it would open the necesary application. Well not anymore, what you have to do now is point it to the application, but wait its still not that easy, you have to place the application inside a folder called fscommand.

so ResChange lives in the fscommand folder so lets use fscommand to activate it. But how do we pass the variables needed to resize the screen? I hear you shout. Macromedia in their wisdom hace also hobbled the poor fscommand in that you can no longer pass any arguments to the application being called. BUMMER.

What we have to do is create a .bat file that will pass the arguments needed when it activates the ResChange app. It does work I promise you download these files and give it a whirl.

My example sets the monitor res to 1024 x768with a max depth.
Flash can detect the current screen resolution so im sure you could have your flash presentation resize the monitor to its original settings with a little bit of code and the right .bat files.

onLoadInit class woes

2005-08-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

Ive been wrestling with an actionscript 2 problem for a while now, how to load a movie from within a class and pass data from the class to the movie. All of my attempts failed miserably and it was one of those nagging problems that you just know has a simple answer. Here's what I found.

Heres my code:

public function FormBlock(formXML:XMLNode, target:MovieClip) {
formOBJ = this;

// create empty movie clip to load the swf into
container_mc = target.createEmptyMovieClip("formBlock"+ID, DEPTH);
container_mc.formOBJ = formOBJ;
var mclListener:Object = new Object();

//the onLoadInit event just traces out the XML we want to send to the loaded movie
mclListener.onLoadInit = function(target_mc:MovieClip) {
trace("movie loaded");
trace("formXML "+target_mc.formXML);
trace("formXML "+target_mc._parent.formXML);
};

var image_mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
image_mcl.addListener(mclListener);
image_mcl.loadClip("forms/"+TYPE+".swf", container_mc);
}

You can see that im looking to trace out the data from within the loaded movie. Unfortunately this doesnt work. What you need to do is very simple, although I scratched my head for a while. What you need to do is send the data to the Listener object before the onLoadInit:

mclListener.formOBJ = formOBJ;
var mclListener:Object = new Object();
mclListener.onLoadInit = function(target_mc:MovieClip) {
target_mc.formOBJ = this.formOBJ
};

this works well. But over the past couple of days it dawned on me that you dont need to create a new listener Object (slaps forhead). You just use the class instance as the listener like this:

var image_mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
image_mcl.addListener(this);
image_mcl.loadClip("forms/"+TYPE+".swf", container_mc);

So problem solved? Not quite. What we need to do now is make the onLoadInit event a method within the class so the complete code is now:

public function FormBlock(formXML:XMLNode, target_mc:MovieClip) {
formOBJ = this;
container_mc = target_mc.createEmptyMovieClip("formBlock"+ID, DEPTH);

var image_mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
image_mcl.addListener(this);
image_mcl.loadClip("forms/"+TYPE+".swf", container_mc);
}
public function onLoadInit(this_mc:MovieClip) {
this_mc.formOBJ = this.formOBJ;
this_mc.TYPE = this.TYPE;
trace("movie loaded");
trace("formOBJ "+this_mc.formOBJ);
}

Baby Brookfresh is born

2005-08-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

My baby son arrived at 1.40am Sunday morning. So I havent really had a chance to post anything. He's a healthy 7lb and both he and Lisa (Mrs Brookfresh)are well.

We still arent into any sort of sleeping pattern yet so posts may be few and far between. Ill do my best.

I managed to grab an hour on WG today and I added the ability to place blocks of colour on the site. You can see an example of a block of colour behind the text on the homepage. I also added the ability to place swf files too, although this uses the image loader class I wrote so its really nothing new.

I think I'm happy with how the site is designed now. It's taking shape at last. I always find it difficult to design my own stuff. Take the original www.brookfresh.co.uk for instance. After three years this is the first design Ive been happy with, I think we're still getting over 10k hits a month too. Talking of Brookfresh.co.uk there should be another podcast due any day now.

The front end mechanics of WG should be done today once I write the 'add form element' class so I can then concentrate on the Admin area. or as I like to call it 'the hard bit'.

I have registered to attend the launch of Macromedia Studio 8 in Manchester. This should be interesting, I havent had chance to attend one before. I may even buy the app on the day so fingers crossed for a discount eh!

Its Saturday and im still on my Computer

2005-08-20T03:33:00.000-07:00

Ive done the hard bits of the front end to Website Generator (WG from now on) now. And I've redesigned the WG corporate website using the WG itself. I used a photo taken by me on my new Kodak LS755 camera, which I purchased recently so I can photo my Baby, (when it decides to arrive, Due any second now.)

Ive written the menu system using a single AS2 class, if anyone's interested i can add a link to the code, I don't mind sharing my code with most people. The menu class is extremely re-usable in that it allows you to add menus and submenus from data loaded from a simple XML file. If an XML node in the file has children then the class uses this as the sub menu. You can set the _x and _y properties the colours, text and even change the style of the menu you create. Ive limited the number of menus the WG allows you to create to three, head menu, main menu and footer menu with a single level of submenus for the main menu. Does that make sense?

Its the weekend now so ill not be working on the WG, ill be keeping myself busy on my extension otherwise Ill only be pacing the floor waiting for my Baby to be born.

Hello there

2005-08-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blog. Ill try my best to keep this up to date.

Im currently putting together my own creation called Website Generator. Its actually a re-build of a project I started many years ago. The Website Generator lets normal ppl design and maintain their own small website, you choose a template much like you do here on blogger, then you add your text and pics. There are various types of forms to choose from too. Im rewriting it using AS2 classes i also redesigned the way it works, this time allowing for easier modification.