r o b l o g

A short animated film written, produced & directed by Charles & Ray Eames for the IBM Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The movie topic is the computer in the context of human development, more specifically it traces the history of storing & analyzing information from the days of the cavemen to today’s age of electronic brains.

A video has just been added to the onAIR tour:
http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/videos/2007/08/01/lee-brimelow-transitioning-to-the-desktop-with-adobe-air/

Lee is great and he works at such a great company too. As for all this AIR, I really have to get started. The results are so much similar to ZINC, but with a much cleaner interface (and I presume more stable and less quirky)

I heard a lot about Erik Natzke way back in flash 5 days. He had a really intersting experimental showcase site. I remember his work was massively respected. Then he disappeared - his site went down and I didn’t hear much about him. So the other day I stumbled over a video of his at FITC in 06.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-1458352919661594741&q=fitc
This guy is a true master of the flash meduim and is always pushing it to it’s limits. His work was on his site for a while but now it redirects to his blog:
http://jot.eriknatzke.com/

I loved his swarms and ribbons. So I tried to replicate:
swarm_1
swarm_2
ribbon

The style of this site comes from Brazil. I don’t know who he is, I just spotted the style at video.onflex.org. I have however got really stuck into customising it for my own pleasure. I have stripped out all that sidebar nonsence and categories and reduced it to a simple clean interface. I also added a little flash piece instead of an image.

Now, I’m not all that fussed about maintaining a blog, I doubt anyone will read it. Primarily, I just want to lean about the software. But more than that, I also want to use it as a CMS for my new site.
I’ll use the title and post for the heading and description, but I also need a link to the flash/image/flv/java file assets. For this I’ll use a custom field. When that is sorted I’ll need to add hidden categories for two of the features on the site - work and experiments. I can then get feeds of these categories that can be use to poulate the flash site. Nice.

• asset: example

I saw this mesh wave thing, and I thought it would be a good effect to replicate in AS3. I had a good idea that the wave used perlin noise mapped onto a 3D perspective. Check it.
I built it in AS2 to see the speed difference and it was remarkable. It was a good learning experience to learn AS3. With AS3, the language has finally matured to be in the same league as JAVA and C#.
Next on the list is papervision, Digg API and that Flex CMS…

Apollo is the future. It brings websites to the desktop.

http://video.onflex.org/2007/03/19/apollo-camp-keynote-from-kevin-lynch/

This is a stop-motion animation of an old pole position game where people sitting in a grid of chairs are used to render the pixel graphics. It took 6 hours and required 600 images. Now I think I could do the same type of thing in flash and make it interactive…

Fontifier turns your own handwriting into a typeface. You print out a sheet that has all the standard characters laid out with a space for you to you write in (or draw in). Then you scan it, upload the image and the software turns it into a font!

This font is made with my wife’s lovely handwriting:

www.fontify.com

This dude is amazing. He is the one behind we feel fine and universe.

Cool hunting have featured him.

Check out his website www.number27.org, he has done all sorts of stuff.

He also talks about his work at the TED conference

The film Helvetica has finally been released. Coming soon to Sydney….. maybe … maybe not.