As ever, it’s always good to receive recognition for the effort of so many (client and agency side). So it thrills me to say that the site We Love designed and developed for Sony Ericsson’s Mobile World Congress last month has been received so well by our peers within the industry. Peaking at number 4 in the Design Charts, Site of the Day on Design Licks, Being reviewed in Creative Review as well as being listed in many other ‘hot pick’ sites…

So. Congrats to the team! A job well jobbed!

We are stoked to have just got word that one of our sites – Life’s a Bounce, has just been featured on PageCrush.

It is always nice to get recognition for our work, so if you have noticed our work being featured anywhere else on the web please let us know!

We are on the hunt for Front End Developers again!

We Love is a fresh take on what a creative design agency can be. Small but focused, driven and creative we design and produce unique digital solutions for a diverse range of international clients. We feel that the people that work for We Love are its most important assets. In fact, they are the DNA of the company.

Skill sets and Personality: You should ooze talent, have vision and can code the ass off Kylie. You know your way round flash and can animate better than the Warner Brothers, ActionScript better than Cyborg, as well as being willing to prove yourself in a fast growing, fast paced industry.

We won’t tie you down to PureMVC or any other framework – good OO design principles and high code standards are all that’s required. AS3, PHP/Python and a good knowledge of HTML/CSS a must – anything else will be a bonus and knowledge of the Gaia flash framework is favorable.

You use BZR/SVN/GIT regularly and have experience with issue tracking apps like Trac. You are someone who is mature enough to understand a brief, and can take direction as well as contribute and show initiative.

You must have a couple of years experience behind you and be Mac happy and PC proud.

Benefits: We Love offer an excellent benefits package which includes performance based bonuses and personal development budgets as well as the opportunity to grow and learn whilst working on leading edge and exciting creative projects.

Salary: Competitive Salary

Location: A beautiful Manor House in Maidstone, Kent, near mainline train stations.

If you think We Love is the place for you then email gavin@welove72.com

Its been a while, so I thought I would take the liberty of giving a brief round up of whats happening here at We Love manor. It has been an extremely busy couple of months.

We are busy interviewing for a tip top developer and project manager to join the family as we are growing (as per plan…) and thus have had to organise more space to house the talent – taking another 1000 square feet of this glorious building which we call home (including the fabulous butlers lounge!!) – Well we will need somewhere to put the table football.

We have had an extremely busy time pitching into some fabulous brands, some of which are looking extremely fruitful, so keep an ear to the We Love grapevine for breaking news. The big news this week is of our new relationship with L’Oreal Active Cosmetics. We are busy working on the Vichy Consult site as I type.

We have launched a few sites over the last two months as well as developing games for English from England and next week are due to launch a couple more… again stay tuned for these extremely wonderful and groundbreaking babies… We have produced a new brochure for an exciting housing development in Brighton for InPlace and one for West Kent College (a new client of ours I am not sure we have shouted about yet).

We have continued to deliver for Mobix / Seachange. Unfortunately, due to contract I can’t share the work to date with you, but I can say that it will alter the way you consume media in the future. Very exciting and a long / strong relationship has been formed.

James has been busy defining a new breed of tweeter… strangely called a grunter… this being the cool people of the twitter world… after visiting several tweet-ups. And we are hopefully getting approval for some seriously cool virals for another of our long clients.

Gav and Mel have fallen in love with Python – the future of development – after visiting some geek fest in the big smoke.

Last, but by no means least… our new website. It will be with you soon. And yes it is going to be magical. I can’t wait!

Well that’s it from me. I hope you all have a weekend for of scary love. Happy Halloween!

Mark

We are super excited to be attending the Stack Overflow Dev Day at Kensington Town Hall tomorrow. It will give us developers at We Love a chance to mingle with other coding masters and pick up a few hints and tricks.

See you there…

Check it out>>>>

News just in from MAX conference in LA that Adobe are nearly ready to release Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones. This has been a longtime coming and is a big step forward for the future of smartphones, with promises of fast rendering, low memory consumption and less battery drain. 

We should be seeing the first examples on the following platforms: Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, webOS, and Blackberrys in early 2010.

One noticeable absence from this list is the iPhone, so it looks like us iPhone owners will have to just keep waiting. We can’t have it all I guess?!

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash dynamic text implementation, enabling the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. It is a standards compliant way to deliver rich typographical text in a flexible manner to over 90% of web users. Text within a web page is replaced with your desired font. This, of course, all happens too quickly for the user to even notice what’s going on.

There are quite a few blogs, articles etc on the web on sIFR but hardly any that show or explain on how to actually get it working.

To save all trouble David Yeiser @ www.designintellection.com has written step by step instructions on how to get sIFR working.

check it out >>>>

On a recent flex project we had some complex animation – including alpha masks – to be embedded. Not sure why, but when embedding flash files in Flex with the tag, all action script is stripped out. It would be interesting to hear Adobe’s reasoning on this one, but here’s a solution to keeping the embedded swf’s actionscript intact.

The first step is to embed the SWF in your Flex project as binary data:

[Embed(source="complex.swf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
var theBytes:Class;

Next you need to load the data contained in your SWF by using Loader.loadBytes and instantiate the embedded SWF.

var loader:Loader = new Loader();
loader.loadBytes(new theBytes());

This will create your swf and if all you need is the actionscript to run, you can stop here.

Isn’t it fustrating how if you select multiple objects in a Flash file and choose Convert to Symbol, it places all the objects on the same layer, regardless of where they were before. Even more fustrating when you have nicely organised your file by labelling each layer. I found this quick Command to do just that. If you save in your Commands folder, and re-boot Flash, you can re-map your F8 key to use this Command instead of the regular Convert to Symbol Command.

fl.getDocumentDOM().convertToSymbol('movie clip', '', 'top left');
fl.getDocumentDOM().enterEditMode('');
fl.getDocumentDOM().distributeToLayers();

You can create simple Commands like this on your own. Just open up your History Panel via Window > Other Panels. The top right of the Panel has a menu that allows you to see the JavaScript of your actions!

Also, one thing I’ve always found annoying with distribute to layers, is that it tends to shift things to a half-pixel position like 24.5 – and our designers DO notice – which can be avoided by turning off Snap To Pixels before using distribute to layers, or this command