A Couple of Days with iPhone 2.0, A List of My Thoughts.

I bought an iPhone days after the launch last year. I think I had to. I’m pretty much a Apple devotee. I loved it. I had some problems activating it, but I got over it. I jailbroke it pretty much immediately, putting games, twitter, and tons of ringtones, etc on it. I anxiously awaited the 2.0 software update and grabbed it as soon as Gizmodo posted it.

I have been playing with it, and I have to say, it’s pretty freakin’ sweet. The appstore works well. The selection of apps is good. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. However, a few minor things…

1. Still no way without a jailbroken phone to set your BG color behind your app icons?
2. Still no configurable sounds for system events, etc?
3. No Google Analytics app? Adsense reporting?
4. Twitteriffic is okay, but I preferred the old jailbroken app “MobileTwitter”… less app chrome.
5. Not enough app demos on the app store… If I am going to drop , I need to know the app is good.
6. No Flash.
7. No Copy/Paste
8. No way to force new browser windows to be opened with hyperlinks (maybe a click, hover release interaction would work for this?)
9. Speaker still too quiet for most settings to make the speakerphone usable
10. Give me some fun features (Maybe my callers could listen to a predefined ipod song while the phone is ringing or while they are on hold)

How about you? Have you upgraded? Bought a 3G phone? Had issues with activation? I’d love to hear your experiences or find out any cool apps you might know about.

Interesting Data Visualization: Radiohead’s “House of Cards”

A great song and a fabulous video. Check this out:

On top of the video being just really cool, the information on how it was made is also pretty engaging. It’s available at code.google.com, and you can actually get some of the source, too. Though it appears that the actual visualization used in the video was made using Processing, the point cloud data has also been used to make a 3D data visualization app built in Flash that allows you to rotate the nodes that comprise Thom Yorke’s visage around on the stage. Very cool stuff in general. Procedural animation FTW! Definitely worth reading up on.

Totoro Forrest Project

Despite my best efforts, I am starting to go green. Recycling, carpooling, CF bulbs, etc. I have concerns about carbon emissions, and ground water contamination. But most importantly, I am concerned with the effects of deforestation.

We only have so much land on this earth, and we are quickly using it all up. Wooded areas that I used to play in and fish in as a child are now gone. Houses now stand where my secret tree fort once did.

The Totoro Forrest Project is “an international charity effort to preserve Sayama Forest, also known as Totoro Forest. This endangered sanctuary on the outskirts of Tokyo is where director Hayao Miyazaki got the inspiration for his much loved character “Totoro.” Over 200 top international artists from animation, illustration, and comics are donating artwork especially created for this cause.”

According to Drawn.ca, Pixar Animation Studios is hosting an auction on September 6th with all proceeds going to the Totoro Forrest Project.

The above image is by Edward Li and is entitled: “Fishing for Mr Echo” Check out the full gallery of images here. For more information on the project visit Enrico Casarosa’s blog.

Now where is my checkbook…

Even more of Andrew Stanton

NPR has a nice, long audio interview with Director Andrew Stanton. About half way through the interview he speaks on the brilliant use of the song Put On Your Sunday Clothes as the introduction to WALL-E. He also mentions that his original concept for the humans of the future was that we would have essentially evolved into giant green blobs of Jell-O. Now THAT would have been awesome!

I promise I will post with my thoughts on the film in the next day or so. Thanks again Josh!

We’re Hiring!

Interested in working with a great group of people? We have the job for you!

Job description and details are available after the jump.

Overview and Responsibilities:

The Iona Group, Inc., a creative communications company in Morton, Illinois, seeks a creative and driven individual who is passionate about art, design, and the collaborative development process.

You are a multi-talented artist/designer with a strong drive to stay up-to-date on today’s latest technologies and their applications. You thrive in deadline-driven environments, can take direction and are capable of monitoring your own progress. You can interact with clients to understand their needs and respond appropriately. You write and speak succinctly. You can design and communicate with developers, as well as represent your visual ideas like nobody’s business. You are versatile and can create in a wide range of visual styles using various techniques. You can adapt your knowledge and expertise to fit a client’s unique needs. You want to learn, develop, and grow as a part of small team of designers who are passionate about the work they produce.

Desired Skills:

• Experience working through a formal design process; determining project and client needs, conceptual design, implementation, and quality control.
• Must be a team player and demonstrate excellent people skills, especially under deadline pressure
• Must exhibit a thorough knowledge of the language of animation, video, and motion graphics and demonstrate illustration, web, and typographic sensibility
• Ability to take design direction from concept through execution
• Experience working with and ability to maintain brand specifications when implementing and executing designs
• Must be familiar with the various design, animation, and editing packages including and display superior competency in at least one functional area: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Flash, Maya, Final Cut Pro, and InDesign (mac platform preferred).
• Cross-browser, cross-platform knowledge of CSS, and XHTML
• Videography skills are a big plus.
• AA, BA or BFA in Visual/Interactive Design or similar field is required
• Three years experience is preferred, however, exceptional less experienced candidates will be considered.

Applicant must provide a portfolio showcasing sample work. If the work is collaborative, please provide a specific description of your role on the project. Portfolios can be submitted as a PDF or a URL link to jobs@ionagroup.com.

About Us:

We are a small close-knit team of designers, developers, and videographers who create engaging websites, interactive museum and tradeshow installations, videos, and interactive applications/RIAs for clients throughout the Midwest.

We work for clients like Columbia College, the Museum of Science and Industry, Shedd Aquarium, Pioneer Hi-bred, and Caterpillar. We’re located 10 miles from Peoria in the heart of Illinois — nearly equidistant from Chicago and St. Louis. Our production staff prides themselves on maintaining a friendly and open work environment. We care a lot about creating amazing pieces for our clients, providing a fantastic work environment for our coworkers, and giving back to our community, both locally and globally.

This is the great adventure!

I will be busy the next 2 weeks with several video shoots in Kentucky, The Ukraine, and Romania. I will not be posting during that time, but fear not friends. You can peek in on the action by following me on Twitter. I will be sure to provide updates often.

-Matt

(Oh, and if my Netflix Que starts looking a little iffy, it’s because my wife has taken control for the next couple of weeks.)

Giving Back: The Iona Group Donates XO-1 Laptops to An Area Daycare

Most all of you may be aware of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. Well, we have some good news. The place I work at, The Iona Group (we have a new website up, by the way), is donating 5 XO-1 laptops to a low income child care facility in a neighboring community. Very cool indeed. Here the details from the press release:

The community service project Intersection (www.oneintersection.com) and Morton-based creative design firm, The Iona Group (www.ionagroup.com) are donating 5 XO-1 Laptops (a part of the One Laptop Per Child campaign, www.laptop.org) to the low-income daycare center, Bloomington Day Care.

The laptops will be given Thursday, July 17 at 10:30am at Bloomington Day Care in Bloomington (located at 309 E. Wood Street in Bloomington).

The Iona Group purchased 10 XO-1 laptops, 5 were sent to Africa to needy villages and the other 5 delivered to them to gift to children in need in the Central Illinois area. Intersection is a local community service project that longs to bring neighborhoods and people together to find commonality. Intersection recently partnered with Bloomington Day Care to put in a new playground and bike paths this past April and also partnered with the day care center in 2007 by updating playgrounds and facilities. Together, the two organizations will donate the 5 laptops to the daycare center that has very little technology to help children begin to learn the skills of a compute.

The XO-1 Laptop has been called “A unique machine with features created specifically for children of the emerging world.” Both organizations representatives will be at the day care center this Thursday to answer any questions and show the staff and children the new laptops.

I am really happy to be working for an organization that does such great work for its clients and also, thanks to efforts like this, its community.

The Missing Wrench: Adobe’s Easy Flash Editor

This seems like a recurring topic for me. The lament of the modern Flash Designer/Developer. The quandary is a deep one with no easy answer. Has Adobe’s near completion of Macromedia’s vision for Flash as a modern, powerful virtual machine robust enough for application development left the designer in the dust? Where is the missing wrench in the Flash designer’s toolbox?

To find some answers, obviously search this blog. But also, topics like this pop up in Grant Skinner’s blog here as tangential topics and mentions in the comments, and serve as the root subject of some of Colin Moock’s recent posts here and here. This is obviously a concern of Adobe’s, likely forming the base concept of Bordeaux (which I believe is defunct) and definitely influencing the progress on Thermo.

To get some context on this issue, let’s reflect. When Flash was taken over by Macromedia, it was meant to provide an easy path to the web for artists and animators that didn’t feel at home in Director’s somewhat fearsome IDE, myself being one of them. Why was this needed? Well, Lingo was hard for many! It was a real programming language. Compared with Hypercard or the Apple Media Tool, it was like rocketscience. Even with the addition of behaviors, I wasn’t really comfortable there at my state of programming skills then. It was not like Photoshop or Illustrator or After Effects, it didn’t feel creative. Then Flash hit the scene and the much lighter plugin provided a better way to get your content seen. Sure, it had little support for external media, lacking extras and the oomph that Director provided with heavy duy bitmap sprites and the like, but it sure made pretty things easy to make. Creativity on the web blossomed.

What really made me think about this today was the current state of our candidate search for developers. You see, I have spoken to a couple developers that write Java as their primary language, and I mention that we do most all of our stuff in the Flash platform and they tell me that AS3.0 looks pretty familiar to them. You read that, Java developers say they could feel at home writing Flash content. Wow. Please remember that Flash is a tool in the Creative Suite. The Creative Suite.

I’d like to see somethings happen to remedy this situation, and it needn’t be all of them. Some things I’d like re-examined to help ease designers into Flash:

1. The addition of drag and droppable behaviors to Flash. Links, GoToFrames, Load Media, Load XML, Load Video, Video Controls, etc. These could live in a panel, be icon driven and do an automatic import of the needed classes and even write the appropriate frame scripts. Easy peasy. I could see this being a huge selling point as a new feature for Flash’s IDE.
2. The possible re-forking of Flash into Professional and Standard versions. Give the Standard version the standard mode code editor of yore (Was that Flash5 or Flash MX?). Get rid of a bunch of the more advanced and UI components. Add GetURL back in! Heck maybe even a *gasp* Flash 4 style modal dialog box to give designers an easy way to write AS3 code. Creative Suite Web Edition could have Flash, Creative Suite Web Premium Edition could have Flash Pro.
3. Creation of a more animation pure-play application. Add solid vector AfterEffects output options maybe? What are cartoon artists supposed to use in the Adobe toolset? Flash CS3 is like a battleship when all you need is a dinghy (and due to lack of proper cameras etc, like a dinghy with one oar shorter than the other) in this arena. Remember LiveMotion?
4. How about a Swish-like program? I used to use Swish back in the day to help with text effects, etc. It had fairly decent animation controls then. I haven’t kept up with the tool at all, but I am sure that creating a basic Flash experience is probably easier in Swish than Flash. Why shouldn’t the Creative Suite have a gateway Flash drug?
5. Build out the underused and underdeveloped Slide authoring metaphor to allow for Gaia Framework like creation of simple node based Flash experience sites, complete with easy customization of transitions and loaders. Write the AS behind the scenes and no one will be the wiser.

Now granted, I like AS3. I do. It took a while to warm up to, but man, I won’t go back now. The thing is, writing import statements and forcing designers to know what classes are seems really anti-creative. I’d bet you agree. I want a way to bring the designers back into the fold. An equalizer. How about you?