Numiko techynight returns, geeks rejoice
Our monthly internal techynight – or geek-together – kicked off again last night, partially re-inspired by the snowballing Leeds GeekUp night (which we can also thank for finding Clare, our latest recruit) but mostly driven by the simple need for geek to connect to geek and share geeky knowledge.
In a growing team, it’s always important for people to be able to stop once in a while and catch up with each other, share experience and pitfalls, insights and advice. With several projects running concurrently across different teams within the studio, it’s also a good opportunity to show-and-tell work to people who may have seen little or nothing of the project on a day-to-day basis. As well as welcoming new kid Clare, designer Stu came along to dip into the River Geek – and lo, he was refreshed.
So this month we debriefed and shared the joy of a few cool things, including;
- Our shiny new site, which implements a suite of technologies we’re going to call the Numiko Adaptive Content Model, or NACM. A deep-linkable, Google-indexed, XHTML-fueled Flash site? Oh yes. As our first use of AS3 away from the lab, it was a bit of a learning curve but despite some frustrations with error messages and hide-and-seek with class packages, all involved agreed Adobe’s new regime is strong and definitely the way forward.
- An interesting audio-visual content management system using Flash video to browse and view archived adverts over a LAN.
- ‘Moviestar’, the latest Flash 9 beta player, and its support for H.264 and other Silverlight-killing features
- The wide and deep and long church of CMS – when deciding what to use for particular development requirements, the massive variation in what it actually means to Manage Content makes a one-size-fits-all approach unwieldly and unrealistic; better to have a few deployable options at your disposal.
We also touched on version control, Apollo/AIR, the magic of pseudo-streaming, and JSFL automation within the Flash IDE – and then most importantly we went for lashings and lashings of pizza and other mozzarella-related items. Bring on next mont’s geek-together!
