Archive for February, 2010
links for 2010-02-26
Splitting the Atom – Massive Attack
Splitting the Atom – Massive Attack
Whoa.
Massive Attack-Splitting the Atom-directed by Edouard Salier from edouard salier on Vimeo.
Director : Edouard Salier
Commissioner : Svana Gisla
Production : Scream Park, Paris
Executive Producer : Anne Lifshitz
Post Production : Digital District
Post producer : David Danesi
CGI: Jean Lamoureux, Rémi Gamiette, Kevin Monthureux, Jimmy Cavé
Art & Compositing : Julien Michel, Xavier Reyé.
Flame: Christophe Richard
links for 2010-02-23
links for 2010-02-23
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You thought 25 was a lot? Then you thought 35 was a lot. To that, I say, bah… here are 50 top wireframing resources. Chew on that!
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They took Balsmaiq and made it easier. Crazy, but true.
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This is just cool. Play a game of name that website.
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Today “Web” is very different from what it was few years ago. It is better, but far more challenging – you can no longer ignore things like usability, information architecture and design. That’s why wireframing has received so much attention lately.
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Taking good ol' fashioned, page-centric wireframes to new levels has become a hot button pursuit of particular interest to designers and information architects since the boon of 2.0 and all its accompanying buzzwords exploded onto the scene and into the consciousness of companies in 2004. Enter high fidelity wireframing!
A Short List of Other Tech for Flash Designers and Devs to Check Out
A Short List of Other Tech for Flash Designers and Devs to Check Out
What do you do when you aren’t writing classes or managing assets on a timeline in Flash? How do you expand you knowledge or expand your creativity? For me, if I still feel like tinkering on a computer but not really doing any Flash/HTML/CSS work, I like to find new tools and try them out. Sometimes I produce stuff worth sharing, sometimes it’s just tinkering and playtime.
As a professional, it can sometimes become more about the day to day. The grind. You need to take a step back every once in a while and experiment.
Read on.
So what tools are worth playing with? Here are some toys I have had fun with over the last couple years… Maybe if you get some time, you should check em out. In general, I would recommend just picking the ones oyu want to play with based on how much fun it looks or if you have any interesting ideas percolating that look like they could be tackled with that tool. Don’t look at it from only an angle of commercial applicability.
- Silverlight – Unless you have been living under a rock, you have encountered the Silverlight plug-in somewhere. Olymipics video, MLB and NFL have all deployed content in the plug-in. If you are not a Mac only developer, you should at least install the toolkit and try to see how easy it is to rebuild some of your basic Flash stuff in this format. The codebase tends to be a little cleaner overall, as it’s a bit more modern and has less of a history than ActionScript does.
- JQuery – Like dot syntax? Hate JavScript because of it’s lack of structure and OOP? Maybe you dislike it’s over-verbosity? Whatever your reason, give this JavaScript API a shot. It will seriously change the way you look at ECMA/DOM scripting. Since first dabbling with other JS APIs like Prototype, MooTools, etc, I have standardized on JQuery and really, I no longer fear or dread writing JS. I would like a better standardized testing and integrated IDE (Firebug + a Text editor is okay, but there is so much room for improvement)
- Processing and ProcessingJS – Processing has been around for a while. It’s now a 1.0 release, no longer Beta. You can pull some serious stuff off with it. A very robust Drawing API and support for GL. Wow. On top of that, the library was recently ported straight to JaScript, so no Applets are required to render sketches in the browser. The performance isn’t quite stellar, but really, this is an amazing feat of engineering. Expect this space to get a lot hotter as browsers start to add GL support in the impending HTML5 era.
- iPhone Dev Tools – No buts about it. Developing for the iPhone platform is hot. Apps are popping up like crazy and with the iPad on the verge of release, it is only going to get more so. So, why not get on the bandwagon and write something? Well, beyond the politics and approval process of getting your app in the store, there is the challenge of learning a very complex and expansive language, Objective C. Couple with that the CocoaTouch API and rather complex provisioning and deployment process needed to build and test on your own device and you will quickly realize that as a Flash dev, you aren’t in Kansas anymore. That doesn’t mean you can’t dabble though. If you are a student or educator, you can get free access to the iPhone dev program. Also, you can try out the Unity platform for a really powerful game creation toolkit that also will open a world of advanced 3D online gaming and possibly even Wii development.
- VDMX/VJ tools – If you are more into the visual side of Flash, doing generative graphics or have investigated using Flash a video switcher or live performance tool, you should really check into this type of tool. Perfect for glitching video or acting as a visual accompaniment to a electronic set. Completely configurable, media friendly and super powerful, VDMX is made to perform live. If you have some musician friends, use your medai production skills to augment their performances. Tons of fun!
- VVVV or Quartz Composer – Related to the VJ tools, but also capable of doing much more in terms of programmatic and generative effects, VVVV and QuartzComposer both offer node based editor spaces. These types of tools should be familiar to old-timers that played with Hypercard or Apple Media tool. If you haven’t come from that back ground, prepare your self for a bit of a learning curve, but wow, once you get rolling with these tools, watch out! The limits are way way out there.
- NodeBox and Context Free Drawing – I have lumped these two in together due to the somewhat similar outputs: images and animations. They are both scripting based drawing tools. NodeBox uses Python. ContextFree uses a set of rules called “grammars”. These grammars’ syntaxes somewhat resemble C/C++. The drawings these produce can be simple or really really in depth. Each of the apps have examples of the work you can produce with ‘em at their respective sites.
Some of the ones I have been wanting to try out, but just haven’t gotten around to.
- haXe- HaXe is a multiplatform language. While most other languages are bound to their own platform (Java to the JVM, C# to .Net, ActionScript to the Flash Player), haXe is capable of outputting to JS, Flash, C++ and a lot more. Pretty cool. ECMA style programming for client-side, server-side & desktop. Are you using HaXe? Done any cool stuff? I’d love to see it.
- OpenFrameworks – At The Iona Group, we do a lot of installation work. It’s fun. Sometimes Flash doesn’t cut it. One of the avenues I have considered going down was using OpenFrameworks. Check out this video for some cool info on it. High resolution output and lots of awesome hardware integration.
made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.
So… What are you playing with these days? I’d love to see what you have going on.
No commentsWidget update
A year ago I published a post about widgets coming to the television. A year later I have widgets on my TV. Now that I have experienced the widgets first hand, there is not much change to my feelings about the basics of the previous post.
There is still no bridge between the cable content coming over the wire and the widgets on screen. Widget content cannot be populated by on-screen cable content. This leaves out advertising tie-ins and related content that would be automatically populated.
There are however widgets for pulling video content from online. This enables the content to interact with additional features. The main downside to the online content is the timeliness of the content in comparison to traditional counterparts. There is very little to no live television content being delivered through the widget interface, or anywhere online. Any online movie rentals or purchases are delayed by at least a month compared to in-store movies.
HD is another problem area for online content. There are allot of bits to move for HD content and until broadband infrastructure is in place to handle the content, a coaxial cable is the only option.
Online content delivery still needs time to develop and find a viable business model. Timely content will not be allowed to move to an online market unless it promises not to threaten the more profitable traditional models, and until timely content is delivered people will still want cable/satellite and physical dvd rental.
No commentslinks for 2010-02-17
links for 2010-02-17
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This is a demonstration of how to use Firebug, a Firefox addon, to investigate CSS.
It was done using Firefox 3.0.5 and Firebug 1.3.
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The firebug firefox extension allows you to edit in real time your CSS code. Instead of having to make a change, reload, make a change, reload you can just edit it live to see the results.(tags: firebug)
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From the article: In the past, I found myself spending countless hours tweaking my CSS and making everything work in Internet Explorer just as it would in Firefox. Everything changed when I found Firebug. In this tutorial, I am going to discuss how to use Firebug to make CSS development faster, and share some tips for a consistent look between browsers.
links for 2010-02-15
links for 2010-02-12
links for 2010-02-12
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Free fonts, get your free fonts here. Some really really nice stuff.
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Make a whole div a linK? I think I just might… JQuery to the rescue again.
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There are some Flash limitations to be aware of before any Flash project implementation.
Making the most of your toy robot (Part 1 of 4) – Custom hardware controls
Using a keyboard to navigate a virtual space; be it the internet, a game or some other format, is familiar to most adults and older children. The Wowwee Rovio (rover) can be driven by such keyboard controls or mouse clicks with the built-in interface. Couple of problems with this however:
- The interactive needed a custom interface so the built-in web interface (and keyboard controls) would not work.
- The interactive needed to be accessible to children as young as 3 years old.
The custom interface was built with ActionScript3 and so to move the rover, the api was used. With the api, the rover could be sent movements via http requests. These api requests needed to be mapped back to user input and so the web interface was recreated in with as3. The ASDW keys were mapped back to specific movement requests via the api. This is a specific piece of code initiated by a keypress that gets sent to the rover:
switch(e.keyCode){
//forward
case 87: //W key
drive = 1; //1 maps to forward
speed = 1;
request.data = "Cmd=nav&action=18&drive=" + drive + "&speed="+speed; //action 18 is manual drive mode
loader.load(request);
break;
}
The drive variable signals the command/direction for the rover (forward, backward, rotate right) and the speed variable is how fast the command should be executed by the rover. Sending one of these http requests would move the rover a fraction of an inch. Mapping each key to a specific movement and sending multiple commands successively reproduces the motion of the built-in interface. This does not remedy our problem of simplifying the interface for 3 year olds. This is where the custom hardware comes in.
Our custom hardware consists primarily of a joystick but also includes some auxiliary buttons for game functionality which I will describe in a following post. The hardware came from Suzo Happ and also included a UGCI board for USB interface. The UGCI board had an included key-mapping utility which was used to map the joystick and button contacts to key presses. A constant connection with the joystick in any direction sent a repeating key press rather than a key up and down.
With key presses mapped to the joystick control and to the rover’s api through actionscript, the rover could now be driven with custom joystick controls. Now if only our rover could see…
No commentslinks for 2010-02-09
links for 2010-02-09
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A perfect website is the result of the application of several techniques that come from different fields. The most famous trends in the modern web design are just the perfect combination among rules from design, web usability, user interface design, science behind HTML, CSS and Javascript.
A relatively recent trend is the use of mega drop-down navigation menus. They are simple to build and have a great appeal for the users. -
Contemplating using a CSS Framework? Read here to get an overview on pretty much all of em.
