I’d also like to thank Pablo for taking the time to interview me

Here’s a snippet…

- How would you introduce yourself and your job to a non-technical person?
“Hi I’m Mike Jones and I am lucky enough to get paid for my hobby.” – In my experience most non-technical people who ask what you do, (think meeting friends of friends for an evening in the pub), as soon as they hear you do something with computers it immediately marks you as technical support for the rest of the evening :p. I have been known to say that my job is an office clerk to avoid such awkward moments…

- How did you get started with Flash?
I first got in to Flash in 1996, when it was still called Splash Animator by Futurewave. I was doing a degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in South East London and my visual studios manager called me in to his office to show me the MSN homepage. What I saw changed my view of the internet profoundly; looking back it doesn’t seem particularly ground breaking, but they had a small navigation system on the left hand side of the homepage and actually opened and closed in a smooth fluid manner, providing access to sub sections of the site. This was the first time I had ever seen Splash Animator and over the course of many days I downloaded and transferred it on a dozen or so 1.44MB floppy disks back to my meagre P90 at home. Twelve years on and I’m still enamoured with the technology.

The idea is that you install this little System Prefs application and using the hot key combo COMMAND + SHIFT + 4 you can grab a selected area and it is automatically uploaded to the grabUp website and a unique (and fairly ’secure’ – due to its convoluted nature) URL is created that you then paste in to your mail, web page or IM so that anyone you want to see it can.

It is very useful, but I have a few reservations (maybe these niggles will be ironed out in future builds). Firstly it overrides the default functionality that OS X already has for grabbing a selected region of the screen. So if I didn’t want to send it to the grabUp site and just save it to my desktop I have to disable the app in my System Prefs. Not that useful in those cases. I could easily just paste the link and download it from the site. That to me sounds a little long winded and of course won’t work at all if I am offline. This needs changing – it either needs an override or moving to another key combination – Perhaps COMMAND + SHIFT + 5 (I’m not sure if this already does something on OS X though).

[UPDATE] I’ve just noticed that is doesn’t replace the selection functionality built in to OS X. It just augments it. So it still places your screen grab in the folder you have specified (the default ids your desktop, mine is in a folder called Screen Grabs – hence why I missed this). So one of my initial grumbles is now null and void :D [UPDATE]

Secondly, while it’s great the links are unique and therefore somewhat secure (in the loosest terms). There is no way for me to find a grab I have uploaded again unless I manually save the URL myself. I’d rather have the option of having an account so I can manage the files I have uploaded, set permissions, delete etc

Overall a great idea and probably very useful for the vast majority of casual users. Personally I’d like a few more “advanced” features. Regardless, if you haven’t tried it you can get a copy at grabUp.com

My main criteria are:

• Widget enabled – Although I’m not that fussed with all these Flickr etc widgets, I’m more after the ease of inclusion that Widgets offer
• Flexible layout – Not fixed width
• Three Column – Perhaps two vertical and one horizontal…
• Magazine style – So probably a static front page, or “current article” element on the home page

If anyone has any suggestions please feel free to leave a comment :)

The second Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament (organised by Sean McSharry) is taking place on Monday 25th February at the famous Loose Cannon poker club in Cannon Street EC4.

The event is FREE and open to all professional Adobe software users. Adobe are taking care of the bar tab and providing some impressive prizes for everyone who makes it to the final table. Don’t worry if you’ve never played poker before, there will be lots of novices and you all get 20 minutes of training before the event begins. Invariably it’s the beginners who usually do best, as was born out by the defending champion, Steve Riglesford, who will be there to see off all challengers, flaunting his winners bracelet no doubt.

The event is next Monday and there are still some places left, so go to www.pokercoder.com and sign up quickly if you want to attend.

You have to register at the site to get in on the night. You’ll also get the opportunity to network with Adobe representatives and fellow industry experts (an invaluable career opportunity and a really great bunch of people).

So if you want to compete head over to Pokercoder.com and register. Be quick though as it is this Monday (25th February). I’m going as I suspect will most of the “usual suspects” :p. So I’ll see you all there!

So if you have $49 left over from Christmas you could be onto a winner (plus if you have any of the apps already you can gift them to your friends).

Anyway, normal service will resume shortly as my workload is starting to lower finally :p

Anyway, I’m back on Tiger and happy to be there, missing Spaces a bit, but missing Ruby / Rails etc more, oh well time to roll my own I suppose.

Now to just print this… Oh dear, it appears someone didn’t check this prior to launching it. It seems that on my HP 1022nw B/W Laserjet (a pretty common printer) the nice looking form is too big. In fact the bar codes on the prize draw entries get cut off so that makes them totally useless. So now I’m going to have to either grab the image and resize it (this is the easiest option) or try and get my Mac and printer to play “margin friendly” so I can get the whole thing altogether.

Anyway enough of this as it is starting to get rant-y :p. It’s not a real biggy but it would have been nice if someone had at least checked it once :s. Off to the printer then more BioShock :D

Those of you going on Monday – I’ll see you there.

On the more humorous side it could all get a bit “Peter piper picked a…” if you’re not too careful when explaining these concepts / technologies to clients. I mean how many may get caught out trying to use “…Adobe Integrated Runtime for Rich Internet Application development…”.

Perhaps this will become the new word game when client meetings start to drag, someone can try and innocently slip it into the conversation and try to:

1. avoid befuddling the client totally
2. avoid bursting out laughing
3. and more importantly, avoid geting fired :p

Just a thought – coffee time

Step 1

1. Place box the Purple face, face down on the desk
2. Locate Orange face
3. Lift top half away from Orange face
4. “Watch” content is exposed

Step 2

1. Place box Purple face, face down on the desk
2. Locate Green face
3. Lift top half away from Green face
4. “Go” content is exposed

Enjoy :p

Note: FYI the box is VERY EASY to open and I’m sure anyone who damaged theirs did so in the excitement of trying to open it :p

And here are a few “Box” shots

As soon as more people have received their boxes I’ll post the images of the content – until then enjoy my box :p