Feb

20

Human Skateboards

February 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Amazing user-generated content: Human Skateboard.

Found on lessrain blog.

Feb

12

One of the projects I worked on last year won an Addy (an advertising industry award) on Saturday night. I’ve worked in a number of advertising agencies over the years and some people get really excited about winning an Addy. I’ve never been to the big night reception, but hear it’s pretty cool in Cincinnati. Quite a big party. Anyways, this year Mickeys.com won the best of show prize, the first for an interactive entry. I think most of the credit needs to go to Rob, as he designed the killer look of the project. And to Josh, for managing this creative project. Congrats to Josh, Rob, and the rest of Barefoot.

Update: More local coverage from the Cincinnati Enquirer

Feb

12

This is something that I have been waiting on since the release of Flash Lite 2.0. This is game changing. One area, where I felt, J2ME beat Flash Lite was in the area of multimedia. J2ME has an add-on called Mutlimedia API. It allows you to control audio and video on the handset the way that Flash Lite is announcing it will be able to do. This really levels the playing field in my eyes. Flash Lite had supported video in the past, but relied on the handsets default video playback runtimes. This meant that the handset had to switch applications in order to play the video. Not the greatest user experience.

When I authored some of the Flash Lite 2.0 example files that shipped with Flash 8, I included a video playback example. In it, I had to do MIME checking on the client side for each video the application wanted to show. That will still have it’s place, but FLV support is awesome.

I can’t wait to play with this. Awesome work Adobe engineers!

Feb

7

Sweetwater, here in Fort Wayne, is looking for a Web Designer. Their previous designer apparently flew the coop for sunny, warm weather in San Diego. Can’t say that I blame them considering our -4 degree days here recently. But seriously, this is a cool job. Sweetwater is a large complex, national recording studio, and supply warehouse. This gets you into the music biz. Not too mention, the Web director over there is knowledgeable guy as well. (He and I both graduated with the same degree from the same university). If you are interested in northeast Indiana, check it out.

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Feb

7

Currently, I’m listening to the new Bloc Party. Similar sounds as used in Silent Alarm, but it’s certainly it’s own album.

I am also listening to Mew. If you haven’t given them a listen, check them out. It’s big sounding, spacey indie rock. I hear a lot of influences in them ranging from Sisters of Mercy to Flaming Lips, with a little more modern Secret Machines and Silversun Pickups thrown in.

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Feb

6

Latest Project: KnowledgeWorks Foundation Map

February 6, 2007 | Comments Off

We just launched a new project for a client–KnowledgeWorks Foundation. The client is a non-profit organization dedicated to education. It is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Charity. They’re a great client and we do some interesting projects for them. This one was no exception. Educators and parents everywhere can benefit from this application. The site is built using .NET, Flash, Flash Remoting, and a discussion board package called Community Server.

The application is based on a map that was put together by The Institute For The Future. They have predicted the social drivers of change and impact areas that will affect education in America over the next ten years. The map is interactive. Each social area on the map is an area that can be expanded, discussed, printed out, can have external resources attached, and referred to a friend. We’ve enabled social interaction with discussion boards, bookmarking inside the map, and tagging.

The map uses Flash Remoting to connect to the .NET/SQL back-end. Users session information is stored in Local Shared Objects. The map content is searchable making use of a deep-linking mechanism. This also covers SEO. Map content can be printed out using a dynamic PDF module.

The discussion boards are a modified version of Community Server. Not the easiest thing to skin, but eventually we made it through all the stylesheets.

In the end, this is a very robust Web based application, that I think the education community overall can really benefit from. Check it out here: http://www.kwfdn.org/map/

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