It’s been a long time coming, but I’m now making the big jump to being my own boss and the master of my own destiny. I really couldn’t be happier. Five years at magneticNorth and two-and-a-half at LOVE have been simply marvellous, but as of Monday November the 8th, I shall be freelance and proud – off into the big wide world as a one man band.

So hopefully someone out there will need some cool games making, some AS3 coding, some Flash designing (oh and coding on that link – just go with it), a spot of writing, an interactive installation or maybe just something nice for Xmas. I’ve made plenty of lovely interactive stuff for people like Diesel, Sony PS3, the BBC, Kellogg’s, Warburtons, Dr Martens, Vauxhall, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Umbro, if that helps.

Please say hello on email, twitter or LinkedIn and you’re on my site now, in case you were wondering what this was.

Cheers. As you can see above, I’m visibly excited.

Crosby beach yesterday in the company of the metal Gormleys and wouldn’t you know it – forgot the camera. Millions of photos of these fellas must exist already, but I fancied a go all the same and of course had my telephone on me.

Coloured in Mill Colour, cropped, sharpened and slightly contrast-adjusted in Photogene, I like this one with the wind farm and the clouds over the hills in the background. Not a bad resolution either.

Having played with CameraBag and everything else, nothing really stuck till Hipstamatic.

Just checked now and found you can stick higher quality on in the settings. Damn. 525px wide’ll just have to do for these.

A £3.50 Ikea light, from above, pepped up on with Photogene on the phone. Love the way the 3GS handles white balance and focus.

Not painted a stroke in 16 years since my GCSE Art teacher tossed me an off-hand C and “accidentally” threw away 2 years of hard work after the final exhibition. Bastard. Hope the fixative did for him. So it took an iPhone to get me to have another go and this is it.

Turns out Brushes is pretty damn good fun and highly, dangeously addictive. But what’s really slick is that it records everything you do into a .brushes file on the iPhone, which the Brushes Viewer OS X app can then use to recreate all your fingering at a much higher res.

It can even make quicktimes of the process, but bear with me – need to sign up for Vimeo I think. There are lots of far more able people than me at it over at Flickr too.

PS. The girl did it.

The iPhone SDK is not going to be the sort of environment like Mac OS X where developers are free to create system-level plugins. No one is going to get to diddle with MobileSafari without Apple’s approval.  

You’d get no argument from me there, but maybe there’s another way. What if – and it is an if – Adobe were to write a legit iPhone app that functioned as a new AIR platform, so us legions of hungry flash designer/developers could create bespoke apps to run in it? That’d be pretty cool and a lot more likely than Apple allowing Adobe to show video etc in webpages. Plus they’ve had a long, long time to figure it out, so you never know.

Slicker still would be if Adobe, instead of creating a platform app for AIR stuff to run in, made it possible to output from AIR directly as a native iPhone app, test in Device Central and deploy via iTunes just like we think traditional Apple devs will. Top all that off with well-written custom AS3 libraries (asking a lot from Adobe I know) for the various types of multi-touch interaction we’re all now so used to on the iPhone and you’d have a kick-ass, user-transparent dev platform based on flash. In fact, stretching this a little further, I can imagine testing these apps out directly in Device Central on a forthcoming MacBook Pro using its new multi-touch trackpad to get everything just so.

Now I’m not saying this is all that likely – something on that scale would more than likely require a big dollop of help from Adobe – but I’m crossing every finger I’ve got. I can dream, right?