Here a nice report about our trip http://metrojournal.co.uk/605/
Channel 4 News has just published a wordcloud of Chancellor George Osborne’s package of cuts for the UK. Great way of seeing the language used to break the bad news…
Oct
09
2009
![]() ![]() At last, embeddable SnowcloudsPosted by Martin Collett in Actionscript 3.0, Flash, FlexI just finished an update to the Snowcloud project that renders clouds in two different sizes, depending on whether they’re embedded or not – the new embedded version is below…
Jul
07
2009
![]() ![]() Fix image memory leaks in Air / AS3Posted by Martin Collett in Actionscript 3.0, Air, Flash, Flex
I add and remove many instances of the class on the display list. I get lots of memory leakage. All my listeners are weakly referenced, I even remove the event listeners when I unload the class instances. I also delete everything I’ve created. Still memory leaks. It turns out, and it took a while to find this, that you need to “unloadAndStop(true)” on images you’ve loaded, then they get unloaded from memory. Now, no memory leaks. There don’t seem to be many mentions of this, certainly one to watch out for if you’re having memory problems! We’ve just put our new Twitter application on the Noon programme, getting reaction and questions after the death of Michael Jackson. I’m really excited to have web technology and television graphics working together, it’s something I think we’ll be seeing much more of. Now our presenters in the studio search on Twitter, select the tweets they like, and immediately put them on air from the studio laptop, no outside involvemement necessary. Emails and web texts appear on the app in the same way too. Collaboration is also possible, a producer in the newsroom can filter the Tweets to make the presenter’s job easier. Profanity and url filtering is built in, as well as removal of some of the Twitter tags to make it more presentable on the telly. I’ve been writing this app for about a month now (ever since Krishnan did ‘Surgery Live‘ – watching the programme and the Twitter feed together felt like a totally new way of doing tv), and it’s finally reached a mature enough stage that we can put it live on air. There’s a slight issue with recovery after loss of network connection that will be fixed in the next day or so – in the meantime the time honoured IT Crowd fix of turning it off and on again works well enough! I learned a lot about regular expressions during this project, Grant Skinner’s excellent RegExr was invaluable for debugging AS3 regular expressions. Stay tuned, we’re working on a few other exciting web ideas that will be on the programme soon, Tweet @krishgm (our presenter Krishnan), @martincollett (me), @channel4news or @c4news (the studio)
Mar
14
2009
![]() ![]() Live blogging election results programmePosted by Martin Collett in Live Blogging, Radio
Feb
09
2009
![]() ![]() Flash weather stationPosted by Martin Collett in Flash, Papervision 3D, Television, Uncategorized
David has a whole range of sensors on the roof of his house for just about every meteorological value you might imagine, he uploads data to the site every 4 seconds, and you can browse historical trends too. He’s even planning to add a webcam, great work! Hello from Washington DC, where I’ve been directing our coverage for Channel 4 News and ITV news on Barack Obama’s inauguration day. I was working for most of the time on the roof of the Canadian Embassy, overlooking the Capitol building while the new president was being sworn in. It was cold, sitting directing for 3 hours at -11C, it took most of the rest of the day to thaw out, but the superb view was great compensation. Before I came out I (almost) finished off a word / snowcloud generator for Channel 4 News, it’s probably the bit of Flash programming I’m most pleased with, at the moment. Have a play, it indexes the most-used words back into the full text of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, and lets you watch the video at the same time. I’ll be working on improving the look and feel when I get back to the UK…
Dec
24
2008
![]() ![]() Simple Flex / Air / BlazeDS messaging examplePosted by Martin Collett in Actionscript 3.0, BlazeDS, FlexHere’s a demo showing an Air app connected to the messaging service on a BlazeDS server. |