boostworthyisryantaylor

My career at Schematic has come to an end, though fortunately on my own terms. I have decided to slow things down a bit so that I can regain focus on the things that have truly boosted my career, such as my blog, speaking engagements, and book opportunities. When was the last time that I produced any experimental work or wrote a long blog post? Why don’t I have any iPhone apps for sale in the app store? These are the types of things that I hope to fix now that I am flying solo.

Looking back on my time at Schematic, the biggest disappointment is that the company had one of the best Flash teams on the planet when I first joined the staff. Over the course of the past two years, I have watched as they let people such as Robert Reinhardt, Danny Patterson, Joey Lott, Geoff Stearns, Drew Cummins, Todd Anderson, Josh Noble, Mims Wright, Roger Braunstein, Ash Atkins, Jeff Yamada, and Alan Queen slip away. It is really a shame more than anything. The most recent incident that really upset me was when they laid off John Lindquist. I really value working with top-notch people, so all of this played a huge role in my decision to move on. Enough said about that.

I don’t really have much of a plan for what my next steps are going to be. I am open to opportunities of all types, so feel free to contact me if you are interested in collaborating on a project, bringing me in to do some in-house training, or offering a full-time position. Contract work seems to be the most appealing option to me at the moment, but I am definitely willing to explore other paths. The bottom line is - I want to work on great projects with great people. If that is you, then get in touch!

Here is a brand new copy of my résumé in PDF format.

Contact me via electronic mail: ryan (-at-) boostworthy.com

Cheers to a fresh start and a new future!

I will be speaking at the Atlanta Flex User Group on May 27th. The presentation is going to make all of your wildest dreams come true and probably overheat my MacBook Pro in the process. Thank goodness for the magic PRAM resetting technique!

In all seriousness though, this is the natural evolution of the presentation that I gave last year at both Adobe MAX and the Schematic Technology Summit. I’m reserving a lot of my new, off-the-chain demos for MAX 2009 in favor of doing some really practical stuff with Pixel Bender and Flex. I think you will enjoy it.

Practical Pixel Bender

Venture into the world of Pixel Bender, Adobe’s powerful pixel shader technology. Ryan introduces the language and its core concepts, as well as the toolkit used for development. He then presents practical Flash Player implementations in the form of filters, fills, and blend modes. Ryan closes with the use of Pixel Bender kernels as generic number crunchers.

If you are interested in attending, RSVP and meeting details are available on the official Meetup page. Hope to see you there!

Thanks again to everyone that attended my AFPUG presentation this evening. I had a really great time catching up with people that I haven’t seen in awhile and making some new acquaintances as well. As promised, here is the presentation in PDF format:

Download ‘rtaylor_afpug_20090428.pdf’

BTW - I mentioned this verbally, but for those of you that were not present, I owe a big thanks to my friend Danny Patterson for inspiring me to do a presentation of this type. A lot of the material covered is from classic programming texts which really don’t get enough visibility in our community. Danny’s presentation at our tech summit last year is ultimately what drove me to produce this presentation, so thanks Danny; you continue to be a huge inspiration of mine!

Looking forward to Alan and Kenny’s presentations tomorrow evening at the Atlanta Flex UG!

You’ve probably noticed that, once again, my blog has been a little slow the past month or so. I have a pretty good excuse though - I have been working away on an exciting new mobile project at Schematic. We once again joined forces with the fine people at Turner Sports (the same group that we worked with on PGA Tour Shot Tracker), this time to be the first team ever to launch the same application for both the Android and iPhone platforms on the same day.

The application I am speaking of is NBA Game Time; it has already begun receiving some great reviews less than 24 hours after launch.

This time around I wasn’t leading up the iPhone development, but rather the Android development - a big first for me. I learned a ton along the way and will definitely be sharing my thoughts and findings in a thorough blog post sometime in the near future. The credits for the two applications are as follows:

Concept/Design: Turner Sports
iPhone Development: Turner Sports
Android Development: Schematic

Coordinating the development of the same application on two completely different platforms was certainly a bit challenging, but the end result was definitely worth the effort. Both applications are free downloads from the Android Market and iTunes App Store, respectively.

We’ll be rolling out some updates in the weeks to come for supporting playoffs. In the meantime, if you happen to try one of the apps out, I would love to hear your feedback!

Updates:

NBA Game Time is Gizmodo’s Android App of the Week!

New featured article on Mobile Marketer: Mobile apps are all about offering good customer service: Schematic.

This is sort of late notice, but I will be visiting The University of Georgia today to speak to students and staff in the Digital Brown Bag class at 12:30pm. Joining me will be the general manager of Schematic’s Atlanta office, Mr. Matt Coble. The structure of the presentation is pretty simple; it will be an open forum where anyone can ask us questions about our process, the current state of the industry, recommendations for graduates trying to make an impression, etc. I am looking forward to it very much!

I will be speaking at AFPUG in Atlanta on April 28th. The topic is something that I am very passionate about, so I am looking forward to it very much! Details are below.

Refactoring Yourself As A Developer

Join Ryan Taylor for an examination of what separates a good developer from being a great developer. Learning a programming language is only half the battle. The skills and practices discussed during this presentation will carry over to any language and platform that you develop for. If you are interested in bettering yourself as a developer, you will enjoy this talk.

If you are interested in attending, visit the official AFPUG Atlanta page for RSVP and meeting details. Hope to see you there!

I know I know I know. 2.5 years later, I am finally on Twitter. It was a good run, but everyone I know is on there at this point; I had to conform. Definitely ping me on there so I can begin building my friends list. I think John Lindquist said it best:

“You used to be cool before you joined Twitter.” -@johnlindquist

:-)

Whoo, that was rough! My burn out seems to be behind me finally. I am catching up on emails slowly but surely and even managed to squeeze in a few blog posts this evening. I have been nose-deep in both Flash and iPhone apps at work, so I am feeling motivated to do that iPhone tutorial sometime soon. No need to give me grief, I am well aware of the fact that I promised it nearly four months ago.

By the way, if you missed my presentation on Pixel Bender at Adobe MAX last year, it has been posted on Adobe TV for your viewing pleasure. Apparently my crutch word is “uh”; I lost count of how many times I said it.

On a final note, my peers are pressuring me more and more into joining Twitter. People are losing the fight all around me (Mr. Doob, David, Grant). Should I follow suit and conform or hold strong?

Awhile back, I wrote a similar post titled Cure For The ‘Unable To Resolve Asset For Transcoding’ Compiler Error. Though old, the post continues to get a lot of hits, so I thought I would post another entry on a similar issue which you may have encountered.

Have you ever been working on a project and went to do a build, only to be slapped with a bunch of ‘Unable To Resolve (asset path/name) For Transcoding’ errors? Perhaps you are reading this post because it just happened to you and you have no idea why. Continue reading.

The reason this occurs is because you have some assets somewhere in your project that are now missing; whether it be because they were moved and their references in your CSS were never updated or possibly because they were deleted by mistake. Whatever the reason, they are no longer at the location specified in your CSS and that is causing the entire embed process to fail. The tricky part is figuring out which assets are the problems. Unlike the rest of errors, the actual problematic assets will read ‘Unable To Transcode (asset path/name)’. If you do not see any errors with this message in your Eclipse ‘Problems’ panel, it is because it only shows 100 errors by default and you may have many more than that depending on the size of your project.

To change this, click the little arrow in the top right-hand corner of the panel and select ‘Preferences…’ from the menu. In the pop up window that appears, find the line that reads ‘Limit visible items per group to:’ and change the number next to it from 100 to a larger value, such as 200. Repeat this process if you still aren’t seeing all of the errors. Once they are all visible, you should be able to find the errors which call out the assets that are causing the problem. Make the appropriate changes and re-build; your problems should be gone at this point.