About to go to RIAPalooza, how ’bout you?
Are you in the Chicago area? Do you like RIAs? If so, are you attending RIAPalooza? If not, why not? If you are planning on attending, drop me a line. Also, be sure to follow the RIAPalooza feed at Twitter. I will be tweeting from the event, and hope to have a nice long recap [...]

Was pleased to hear that my application to a Digital Summit at Disney was accepted and that I am going to head to Burbank with colleagues to discuss the future of digital media and distribution. The conference is being sponsored by IRTS and the Disney/ABC television group. I am sure it will provide an opportunity to meet with friends in L.A. and dive into some digital TV!

A colleague and past student, Dave Look, forwarded me this very cool talk by some principals from the firm he works for, DDB Tribal. It explores the expansion of the net beyond the browser and the digital “awareness” of physical items. Lot’s of practical examples from RFID tags through cutting edge phone apps.

This post is way late. Last month I had the opportunity to attend LDI-Live Design International and present on the “Adding Machine” at the projection master class session. George Brown, Erich Keil and myself spent some time in Orlando and also visited colleagues at two other universities in Florida. I learned a tremendous amount and am getting geared up for the next large projection piece scheduled to launch in June in 2008. More to follow on that! The pic above of Erich (L) and George (R) was taken before seeing Blue Man Group and then hearing a presentation from the crew about the technical and creative aspects of the show.

More Betas in Labs… Soundbooth CS4, Dreamweaver CS4 and Fireworks CS4. Nice!
Man Adobe is just cranking em out. Labs has fresh new betas of some CS4 applications. The new Fireworks CS4 beta looks especially nice for RIA UI design. Cool features, indeed. I will be checking out the Dreamweaver SVN integration this week, for sure. I have little faith in using Dreamweaver for my dev work, [...]

Video TimeSlicer: Generate Multiple Thumbnails from a Video Using Flex and ImageSnapshot
At The Iona Group we have hundreds, probably thousands of videos that we have shot or somehow acquired from client asset libraries, etc. These videos are stored and logged in a pretty big legacy database (Don’t laugh, I think it’s Access). We also have some clients where stored their video assets in a big fat [...]

The A-Ha moment. When the Flash Platform Becomes More Than a Toy For Your Client
I recently had the pleasure of spending a full day at a client’s site along with some representatives from Adobe. It was great day for networking, introductions and demonstrations. A number of technologies were shown, from Acrobat 3D to LiveCycle, to InDesign/InCopy and finally Flex with Data Services. This client is already using Flash on [...]

10 Books You Must Have in Your Library as a Flash Platform Designer
I know that not everyone likes tech books. My wife and family being some of them. Anyway… I do. I have a huge arsenal of text for the last decade or so that I read, lend to friends and students and then keep around for further reference. In reality there are actually more than [...]

Bending Some Pixels – Just Playing Around: First Impressions of Pixel Bender and Flash Player 10
So, I downloaded the Flash Player 10 Beta and the Pixel Bender Toolkit and I must say, it’s fun. I have yet to do anything truly productive with it, but as a creative tool or something that shows the amazing possibilities of Flash 10 off, there isn’t a much better demo out there then downloading [...]

SWFShot Now Available in the Adobe AIR Marketplace, Info on Getting a Free Secure Certificates, Too.
I’ve just added my second application to the Adobe AIR Marketplace. You can check it out and download it here. For those that may have missed it, you can learn more about SWFShot in this post. Previously, I added my LOLCat Viewer application to the exchange. You can learn more about that app in my [...]