LordAlex Leon | Flash Platform Consultant [ Flash | Flex | AIR ]- Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Seeking a talented graphic designer.

2009-06-16T07:44:00.005-04:00

LorAlex Works is looking for a talented designer to refresh our existing corporate look web and print.

Description:

The task will be to refresh and unify our corporate branding across our site, blog, twitter account and printing material like brochures and business cards.

Requirements:

Excellent portfolio (we are looking for someone with exceptional design skills)
Available during regular business hours (9 AM to 5 PM) North America (EST)
An Skype account (Preferably with Video and Audio)
Fluent speaking and writing in English or French (both would definitelly be an asset)
Must have a broadband Internet connection.

Optional Requirements (not a must but better if candidate meet these also):

You work in Mac OS X Leopard
Experience working with BASECAMP.

How to apply

Please email: info [at] lordalexworks [dot] com address the email to Bolo Michelin. Send your CV & Porfolio.

50 Flash Twitterers Worth Following

2009-06-16T06:40:00.003-04:00

My twitter account has not been open for long, I originally opened it for curiosity. However I started using it more and more to the point that it became a daily routine and an indispensable every day tool. Last friday I had the honor to be introduced as one of the50 Flash Twitterers Worth Following. That made me look back for a moment and made me realize how much I have accomplished with twitter: gained contracts, met new people, kept in contact with peers, hired contractors, shared with the community, announce UG meetings, even ask for help or advice on some things once in a while.

I am even creating a job board (@swfgigs) that will notify instantly my readers about new jobs being posted.

I wonder how other people are taking advantage of twitter for work or personal use. Do you use twitter in a interesting way? has twitter help your professional or personal life?

First impression on Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder 4 - Part I

2009-06-14T23:44:00.008-04:00

With the public beta for Flash Catalyst out, I decided to give it a try on a real project just to get a feel of what will be like to incorporate it into a regular workflow.

I work mostly with large projects and sometimes with teams that I probably know from just a few hours before I get placed right in the middle of the action. Co-workers expect guidance and clients want to see results immediately. So having a proper architecture is important but understanding workflows and interactions between the tools and people using them is fundamental to improve on teams performance and communications, so being able to bring Flash Catalyst into pipeline without causing much disruption is vital.

Step one from Photoshop to Flash Catalyst

I requested a design for a simple app from a Photoshop designer, a wireframe was provided along with comments about what I wanted as an initial interface. When the design was ready, I imported it into Flash Catalyst and indeed, it made a good job of keeping the design integrity.

However I quickly realized the following:

Flash catalyst takes the entire size of the canvas set in photoshop, my designer had created a nice background but I had to go back to him to get it removed. You could also hide the layer but I realized this a little too late (darn). However I think is cleaner just to remove assets you won’t use to keep your files small and more manageable.

Not all designers are diligent at naming *all* their layers and organizing and grouping their content in folders. I had to send it back for a second round to tide up a little more the layers and grouping assets in a logical manner in folders. This does not mean the designer is sloppy or anything but you quickly realize with Fc in the picture these details are very important and not necessarily obvious, but this is something that can be improved once done a couple of times.

Once I got it back, this time assets showed up nicely in folders, however another issue was that some designers use small shapes and lines overlapping to obtain the desired look and feel so this forced me to go and group these assets to make sure I can convert some pieces into components nicely. If you have a lot of these little lines and shapes this can be very time consuming. ( I hear is common to do this in printing work, so something to watch out for ).

Once things looked fine within Flash Catalyst, I decided to give the HUD a spin and start figuring out actions and transitions.

So far my first thoughts in terms of design are:

It is important designers working with catalyst have a good chat with the developer to discuss the best way to arrange assets in such way that that components layer are nicely tuck together and perhaps the states are separated in folders.

Layers also need to be named appropriately otherwise you will get a lot of generic names that will be to be changed later, so give them meaningful names.
Buttons states need to be nicely done in layers to avoid round trips back to photoshop, round-tripping between Ps and Fc is a nice feature, but I if you have to go back and forth 20 times because you overlook details then I just think it’s not productive. I got rollOver states but not all the others, so this is easy to forget.

Our designer at first wanted nothing to do with Fc, so I intentionally ask him to sit with me while importing his Ps file and after going over a few states and adding a few actions he spontaneously said

maybe I can do this

and started playing with. This is definitely a good thing because Flash Catalyst is meant primarily at designers.

One think I must note is that some elements did not end up in the place as they were in Ps , nothing really significant but still, hopefully this will be perfected later.

The next step for me, will be porting the project to Flash Builder, for the final challenge. I am already a little preoccupied by this, as I like to take advantage of frameworks (particularly Cairngorm) so I see a lot of re-factoring involved and I am asking myself if I will be able to bring back the project to Fc after bringing Cairngorm into the project.

I tried it briefly and I got message from Fc saying The project was modified outside of Flash Catalyst and it would not let me import it back, but more on this shortly, so stay tuned for

First impression on Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder 4 - Part II

If you have any comments feel free to use the comments sections, what do you think about bringing Flash Catalyst into your workflow?

Flash Builder 4 Beta and Flash Catalyst Beta now available

2009-06-01T07:52:00.010-04:00

Adobe Labs has made pubic beta versions of Flex Builder 4 now renamed into Flash Builder 4 as well as Flash Catalyst. Twitter is off the hook with comments about it since early this morning.

You can download both apps from Adobe Labs. It seems the apps install separately from your existing installations of Flex 3, so it's safe to install and play with them, without worrying about messing any Flex 3 projects.

I will be blogging about Flash Builder 4 and Catalyst this week so stay tuned, meanwhile enjoy and explore the new IDE's

BTW, what do you think of the new name Flash Builder 4 ?

swfMontreal - Thursday May 28th, 2009

2009-05-27T01:03:00.004-04:00

The next meeting for swfMontreal is taking place May 28th. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it as I will be attending FlashOnTap, but this meeting is packed with good content.

So if you have not signed up for it yet -> click here.

Going to FlashOnTap

2009-05-22T09:08:00.008-04:00

I will be going to FlashOnTap next week. This is going to be my first visit to Boston and FlashOnTab all at once. So I hit the road with Stacey Mulcahy (@bitchwhocodes) on the 27th, who is kindly giving me a ride there.

Looking forward to meet a couple of people I have not seen in while like Tink and Robert Hall. Of course I am also looking forward to meet new people so if you see me around don't hesitate to come and say hi.

Cheers!

*update*

I just realized I misspelled FlashOnTap I had FlashOnTab and I haven't had a beer yet. Go figure! Anyhow I made the correction, see you there!

LOL

LordAlex Works -Tell us your price!

2009-03-19T22:31:00.016-04:00

We want to do something to help our clients in these economic times, so we came with the "Tell us your price initiative" and a new aggressive pricing matrix valid until 2010 offering a whooping 30% (for real!) discount on our consulting rates.

To take advantage of the Tell us your price initiative, you need to contact us and tell us about your project and budget. We will quickly review it and get back to you with an answer within 48 hours.

That is not all, we have also decided to embrace a new emerging language for RIA, RoR (Ruby on Rails). We are very exited about this.

We are also going full scale with ColdFusion Development, real soon so we invite you to inquire with us if you are considering RoR or ColdFusion for an upcoming project.

To know more head to my website: LordAlex Works.

The SWF Files: Beware of closed Micro-Architectures

2009-03-05T00:32:00.002-05:00

There is a current trend of using closed micro-architectures, they can be of great help but sometimes they can be your worst nightmare... read on.

In most cases company X develops a small micro architecture (generally based on cairngorm or similar) to accelerate the work. They sell this idea to the client, which generally agrees to it (Although I have seen cases were the client does not even know about it).

The problem is that in some cases the company X becomes really comfortable with their framework and in an attempt to keep an edge over the competition they close it, essentially the client is not given the source code or the code is simply obfuscated or hidden.

This carries a lot of potential negative consequences, for as long the two parties continue in good business terms or the business relationship is mutually beneficial and cost effective things might go real well. However once this is no longer the case, then the client becomes hostage of company X.

Retaking ownership of the project is a huge problem because company X owns the code and reserve the right to keep it closed.

This effectively block new developers to quickly take control of the code and continue extending the application.
Most of the time I get developers coming to me saying:

"I think is better if we just re-do the entire thing".

For some companies this could be extremely expensive and potentially hurting them financially so bad, they might just abandon the whole project or just take them out of business.

Here is a few things I always advice my clients starting a project:

- Make sure you do indeed need a framework, not all projects need one.
- Enforce open frameworks (like cairngorm or gaia) and make sure they stay true to the architecture.
- Make sure you retain ownership of source files and code.

When you use an open framework, you have a better chance the code is well documented, tested by the community and have tons of resources to solve any potential issues that may occur.

If Company X wants to use a custom architecture, make sure is for good reason, ask questions about where has it been implemented before, I would ask a reference from a previous client endorsing if the framework indeed was useful.

If you are outsourcing a critical project and have no in-house technical resources, hire a consultant or resource outside of company X to overlook the project progress, make to sure proper documentation and guidelines are followed and your interests are well represented.

If you had issues with a close frameworks, I would like to know how some people deal with theses issues, feel free leave a comment.

Adobe Hispano Event

2009-02-12T15:50:00.005-05:00

I will be speaking at the Adobe Hispano Event. This will be my second time around talking to a hispanic audience online. This time I will introduce designers to Flex and the tools that are available now to create original interfaces.

For anyone interested in the event check the link here:

http://www.adobehispano.com/

Nos vemos en Adobe Hispano!

Flash Camp for Developers in Montreal

2009-02-07T15:34:00.004-05:00

Yes, we did it! Montreal is getting it's first Flash Camp. The space is limited so make sure you follow the link for registration and print the confirmation.

Please help spread the word and see you there!

+LA

swfMontreal invites you to join us at Flash Camp for Developers, a free one night gathering with food, drinks, and coding covering everything you need to know about the Adobe Flash Platform – including Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, and Adobe Flash Catalyst. Bring your laptop, we'll provide the goodies.

New to Flex?
If you're at the beginner level, we suggest arriving at 4:30 because there will be a "Flex 101" session for your needs. More advanced developers should come to the event at 5:00 for our Welcome period.

Doors open for Flash Camp at 4:30 PM
4:30 - 5:30 - Flex 101: A beginners' lesson for those w/ little Flex experience
5:30 - 6:00 - Welcome: registration.
6:00 - 6:15 - Introduction
6:15 - 6:45 - "Flex SDK and Using Item Renders"
6:45 - 7:00 - To Be determined (looking for someone local with a cool demo!)
7:00 - 7:30 - "Using the Profiler in Flex Builder 3"
7:30 - 8:00 - BREAK
8:00 - 8:45 - Flash Catalyst
8:45 - 9:00 - Using cloud based services
9:00 - 9:30 - Conclusion and Q&A with Mike Potter

Hurry, and sign up soon: http://swfmontreal.eventbrite.com/

Contract work and consulting

2008-12-14T23:41:00.004-05:00

LordAlex Works is a Flash Platform Consulting firm, helping new media and content providers; deliver intelligent Rich Internet content and powerful Applications with Adobe Flash Platform.

Under the leadership of an international industry leader and active member of the Flash Platform community LordAlex Leon, we deliver expressive content that places user experience as the top priority, translating into high customer retention and return on investment (ROI). We service companies and agencies around the globe on-site and remotely using state of the art web conference tools like Adobe Connect.

We focus on providing companies with the necessary tools and techniques, to successfully deploy complex enterprise level applications using Adobe Flash and Flex by providing solid architectures, upon which your applications can be built. We work side by side with your own developers achieving two simultaneous goals:

1) Increase the level of expertise of your own resources.
2) Accelerate time of development and minimize risk of failure

We speak English, French and Spanish

Clients:

Among the number of agencies that benefit from our services we can find:

Canadian Forces
Piria
MediaClip
Broadsign
Resources Canada (NRCAN)
Intellabase Solutions
ePrize
Bell Canada
Alogient (former Alogia+Logient)
FriendFinder.com
Mocaloca
MSCOM
New Toronto Group
Spherika
Flash Guru Ltd
MyVirtualPaper.com

Requirements:

LordAlex Works requires all projects to be properly documented including a production script, functional design and analysis. If you are missing any of this documents, we can help you produce them.

A deposit will be required before consulting begins, and all development hours must be cleared in cycles of 2 weeks (10 working days).

Project minimum bid must of at least 1 working day (7 hours).

Contact Us:

To hire a consultant and/or to check our availability, contact us at:

Email: lordalex(at)gmail(dot)com (please use the word [consulting] in the email subject)

Tel: +1 (514) 907-5014
Fax +1 (514) 907-5015

Thank you, for your business.

About LordAlex Leon

2008-12-14T11:39:00.021-05:00

LordAlex Leon, is an active member of the Flash community and a well respected industry leader with over 8 years of experience creating content and applications for the internet and devices.

He is the founder of LordAlex Works (LAW) a Flash Platform consultancy firm based in Montreal, helping new media and content providers; deliver intelligent rich internet content and powerful applications based on the Flash Platform.
LordAlex runs a personal blog dedicated to the Flash Platform, and related technologies.

We can find LordAlex in his spare time writing tutorials in English, French and Spanish or speaking at international events and conferences where he is often invited. LordAlex also runs the local official Montreal Adobe User Group, the largest AUG in the province of Quebec.

Speaking and Events

Montreal Adobe User Group (MAUG)

DesignFest , (Toronto Canada)

SPARK, Europe's Premier Flash 8 event (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

WebDU ( WebDU. Sydney, Australia)

FITC (FlashInTheCan. Toronto, Canada)

Publications

Foundation Flex for Designers

IFBIN Author Partner.

Reality ColdFusion MX, Macromedia Press (Credits on chapter 2)

Recognition

Summit at Macromedia (Check the video of the making of Flash 8 and my small contribution, among other great developers to one of the best releases of Flash Ever).

Macromedia Flash 8 Credits (My name can be found under "Special Thanks".

Is your name really LordAlex ?

-Yes, my first name is really "LordAlex". Many people ask me this question, there for I mention it here. A lot of people think is a nickname or handle but is not, that was the name given to me at birth by my parents. Apparently it is a title that gives you distingtion in countries that form part of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Being the only one in the family born in Canada my father decided to mark that adding the "Lord" to Alex which was supposed to be my name. My mother, on the other hand added a middle name "De Los Llanos" which means "From The Planes" so I would never forget one of the most beautiful regions in Venezuela "Los llanos", those huge plains where only the horizon stops your sight, that is where my mother is from.

Why do you blog in 3 languages?

I was born in Montreal. Canada has two official languages, (English and French) which I speak fluently, however I grew up in Venezuela(my parents country of origin).I picked up Spanish there and in essence is my mother language.

Disabling ColdFusion 8 Developer Edition auto-start on Mac OSX Leopard

2008-11-27T22:27:00.003-05:00

Is been a few weeks since I installed ColdFusion 8 Developer Edition in my MacBook Pro running Leopard. Recently I've started to noticed my laptop currently having only 2GB of RAM is been choking when opening a few apps. Taking a look at the Activity Monitor, I realized that I had enabled ColdFusion 8 to auto-start and this was grabbing a bit over 500MB of RAM right there, which is a little wasteful when not doing any CF8 development.

The problem is that there is no apparent setting to disable this. I decided to run a search on Google and came a across a few ways of doing it. The best and cleanest option seems to be just going into your Macintosh HD/Library/StartupItems and delete the ColdFusion8 folder contents.

To enable the server again when needed simply go to Applications/ColdFusion8 > ColdFusionLauncher.app and Launch the server, when done you can shut it down with the same app.

Quite frankly I don't understand why this was not added as a check setting somewhere, but there you have it.

Sponsor banners

2008-11-26T14:02:00.001-05:00

If you have a product, service or message of value to the Flash Platform Community and you need to communicate it quickly and efficiently, I offer a small banner space to do so. These spots are ideal to announce jobs, new products, conferences, etc.

Your ad will be displayed in all content pages permanently and without rotation. The ad must be 125x125 and can be in flash(no sound), gif or jpg format. lordalex.org receives in average over 12,000 unique visitors and over 21,000 page views per month.

Prices are indicated in the banner itself, as they are available in a FCFS basis. No contracts or minimum bids.

Reserve your banner now by clicking the button bellow:

Migrating Blog to ColdFusion 8

2008-11-26T13:29:00.003-05:00

I apologize in advanced for the missing links, I am migrating the blog from PHP to ColdFusion 8.

Essentially lordalex.org has been traditionally a combination of using Google's Blogger engine with PHP and MySQL, PHP is being replaced by ColdFusion 8 and hopefully I will start using a little more Flash and Ajax components here and there.

Yep!, that's right. -It was time for me to come full circle and adventure myself into ColdFusion.

Kind regards.

+LA

Hiring Flash, Flex and PHP Developers. updated

2008-11-13T14:14:00.005-05:00

I got a mandate to fill in a few positions for a local company in Montreal seeking Flash, Flex and PHP Developers.

The position are for junior and advanced developers with knowledge on at least one of these technologies. Multiple positions available.

If you interested ping me at my blog address.

+LA

Simple Pie a neat PHP parsing library for Atom and RSS

2008-09-25T03:15:00.003-04:00

I decided to surf today in looks for PHP scripts and tools to help me with the blog and discovered a neat library called Simple Pie.

I know probably for a lot of people is nothing new, but me not being a PHP guru I just discovered today and I am really happy I did.

I think it could potentially be used with Flash and Flex to pull off a few neat short widget feeding from Atom or RSS feeds.

I was playing with it a little and wrote a small script to parse my own twitter feed. I will be looking at maybe doing a quick badge in flash to display the latest twitt's for the moment is just a real bare bone script displaying the last 3 post in my menu bar on the right.

Coming back to Blogger

2008-09-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

I decided to rollback again using Blogger. Essentially I realized that I am blogging since 2002 and I have a lot of content I thought it was just buried and outdated but it happens that I got a lot of emails asking for old pages with stuff, I thought no one was looking at it anymore.

The Word Press engine is really cool, but I am new to it and customizing my blog is a little hard, I can always use themes and add widgets because is really simple in WP, but that is also the problem I always feel that by using a pre-packaged theme or widget, I loose a bit of ownership of the blog.

The import feature did not really work well and that was also giving me problems. So in general I am actively working to restore everything and perhaps I will work on a WP version underground in a separate directory until I have things properly sort out.

Enjoying a 4 days work week.

2008-06-20T13:29:00.005-04:00

I recently made the decision of shortening my work week to 4 days. Working 4 days a week (8 hour a day) and then my weekend starts on friday.

After experiencing a near burn out I realized in our field we are encouraged to push ourselves to the limit, if you are tired drink a red bull or any other energy drink is the motto and keep going until wee hours in the morning.

Just about 3 weeks ago near finishing a project I started experiencing a strong feeling of anxiety, momentary dizziness, lack of concentration and a sudden feeling of tiredness that would las 15 minutes or so to the point that I became aware something was not quite right.

I called my doctor and I started describing the symptoms he immediately said: you are getting the symptoms of an anxiety attack, due to prolonged hours of work and stress. He prescribed some R&R time and warned me to slow the pace for a while along with with some exercise and healthy food.

Further more I was told lately anxiety attacks are an epidemic on programmers or professional in the software development industry. I don't have any stats to confirm this, but I can believe it.

This prompted me to reconsider my pattern of work and made me realize indeed these last few years has been filled with intense work and very long hours filled with pressure from getting to meet deadlines or simply deliver more in less time.

I started looking at blogs and sites that discuss new ways of managing work and came over this idea of the 4 day work week and decided to give it a try. Also cutting back on energy drinks and pop. I substituted all these with juice and simple cold water.

Having a 3 days weekend has many advantages, being now a father and all, it gives me an extra day to do the things you can't avoid like doing groceries, doing the laundry etc, leaving us (me and the family) 2 full days to really do fun stuff and spend more quality time with the family.

I will be posting more about this in the days to come. See how this works out long term.

Feel free to post here any innovative ideas to manage work or if you have experienced similar need to re-organize you work life.

Fixing the Apple Mighty Mouse Track Ball

2008-06-16T13:35:00.004-04:00

I have two Mighty Mouse's and both the track ball in the center stopped working after a few months of use. I tried a few ways to clean them up but, no joy. So I decided to go ahead and crack the Mouse open and clean it manually.

The process is relatively simple, one just have to be patient and careful handling it. There are a lot of tutorials out there on how to do it, but essentially with a little common sense you can take it apart fairly quick and put it back together.

If I get the request I will post a step by step tutorial.

LordAlex Works: Only evaluating projects starting after June 5th

2008-05-01T14:02:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note, LordAlex Works, currently is evaluating projects coming from *new* clients starting after June 5th, 2008.

Kind regards.

+LA

I will be attending FITC in Toronto

2008-04-19T14:39:00.002-04:00

On the nick of time, I managed to arranged things so I could at least attend FITC in Toronto. I will be arriving Sunday Morning. Is been crazy busy lately, we have a few projects on the grill and I am still adjusting to the changes of joining the club of fatherhood.

See you all there!

LordAlex Works - Helped on the critical mission launching the new Canadian Forces website

2008-04-17T15:39:00.010-04:00

We got an unexpected called about a week ago from the Canadian Forces to help with the launch of the new Canadian Army website. The site was developed by a very talented in house team and the collaboration of 2 other design firms.

The situation got a little critical as a number of unexpected issues started to arise near the launching of the website. It is worth mentioning the site is built entirely in flash and is packed with a lot of media (music, video, 3D models, Paper Vision, you name it)

We were given the task to manage the situation and steer the site back to an acceptable performance level, so the launch could take place on the intended date. We immediately starting working towards that by quickly assessing the site week spots and created a list of recommendation to improve the overall site performance. The changes were implemented and in about 48 hours the situation improved greatly.

After that we started working frenetically around the clock with everyone to complete other parts of the site. The launch target date was met and FORCES.CA is now live.

We are very pleased we were able to contribute a little bit to this exciting project and it was a real please working with the team that made it possible.

We are very proud of our contribution to the site. Go and visit FORCES.CA

Speaking at the 2008 PHP Quebec Conference

2008-03-13T09:53:00.003-04:00

I will be speaking at the 2008 PHP Quebec Conference tomorrow Friday at 8:30 AM replacing Mike Potter whom for circumstances beyond his control cannot make it. The subject is: Realizing the Full Potential of Your Rich Internet Applications.

I will try to fit on MIke's shoes to be best of my ability and I hear the PHP Community is a fun crowd, so I am very excited about this opportunity to share with the PHP community some of passion for the Flash Platform.

Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 are out!

2008-02-25T08:17:00.004-05:00

Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 are now available for download. One can upgrade to the standard version for only 99$ or get the PRO version with charting and testing tools for $299

I recommend the PRO version only for the memory profilers tools in the long run is better investement.

Among other things these are the improvements over version 2:

Full support for Adobe AIR makes it easy to create RIAs for the desktop
New integration with Adobe Creative Suite™ 3 helps designers and developers to work together more efficiently
New and enhanced data visualization features, including the new advanced datagrid, enable even richer presentation of business data
New memory and performance profilers make it easy to optimize your application

I am really excited about seeing Flex 3 ready and out there, this launch is very significant because it officially makes the desktop available for everyone working on the platform.

So, go download and enjoy!