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Here’s my spin on the drawing API function in Flash. Have fun.

In attempts to better get a handle on my mental and physical health, I’ve taken it upon myself to do certain things everyday. One such thing will be to take a photo everyday. I’m not doing this to be some sort of introspective look at what a great fucking genius I am; I’m only doing this to get myself to think whenever I don’t necessarily want to. This project is intended solely for my benefit, but I’ll be posting it for you on my Daily Photo Project photoset on filckr.

The Mill is a visual effects company based out of London and New York. I think they’re work shows an important aspect that most people don’t think of when they think of 3-D effects: subtlety. I think that’s the role that design should play in transmitting information. The best design doesn’t even make you think about design, it makes the information the hero.

The provided example is of a commercial for Nike starring my future ex-wife, Maria Sharapova. When you watch it, the story is at the fore-front. What you don’t realize is that they used only 100 extras in the commercial. The crowd was digitally animated.

My loop not quite finished, but you’ll be able to get the gist. I’m way too tired to even think about trying to fix it right now. Let it play for a bit. It will make a little more sense.
WARNING: There’s no pre-loader, so please, give it time to load if you’re on a slow connection, or viewing from PC.

I’ve had a bitch of a time trying to get this thing to work. I built it in flash to read the UTC time and show an image and name of a city where it is happy hour. Everything worked fine with the code, but I couldn’t get the flash file to show up transparent in the widget. So the part with the title, map, and clock (the only really valuable portion of the widget), they are all in a very tiny .swf surrounded by sliced Photoshop images. And even that was slightly complicated.

I went with a stupid, colorful theme rather than something slick. And, the back got messed up somehow, but I’m tired, and Mythbusters is on, and I need some sleep. But not bad for an ENTIRE’s day work.

I emailed my friend Kevin (the designer in California) about this class (Technology as a Creative Medium), and he gave me some great advice. I thought I’d share a little bit of his wisdom (and keep the rest for myself):

So this is a big year for you. It DOES mean you will have to choose a path and then give it 800%. The great thing is that you will be learning all your life. Technology will continue to change, design styles will change and the culture around us will continue to change. Each one of those will be merciless in demanding that you keep up. So whatever medium you choose to specialize may be where you start — but who knows where you will end up over time? It has been the one thing I have loved about design as a profession — change — ALL the time. Of course there is a graveyard of designers who, no matter how talented they were, never took well to change. Didn’t want to learn new things. It sounds like the topic you have to choose will be your thesis of sorts. Not sure if they actually call it that, but it could be a thesis for you personally — something that you choose, out of all the possibilities and commit to be your starting point in your career. Even if you move into other areas over time — by staying on top of the field and having a driver in you that keeps you learning and creating.

My camera has been giving me issues recently. Today, I checked up on price for repair, $175. So, I must let go of the old, and welcome the new.

Should be arriving at the beginning of next month.

I was asked to show xpath as used in my Flash 2 project, so with out further adieu, a crash course in xpath:

The project is simple enough, use xpath to parse xml information to an array, and from there, you can do whatever you want with the info.

First, make sure you import xpath from the appropriate directory, after you down load the package from the provided link.

The function that parses the xml is very simple, just be mindful of the hierarchy of what you are looking for within the xml file. Also include what you want to happen once the xml is loaded, in this case, a function that starts the whole thing moving.

Then, all you have to do is tell the file where to look (the url var that is declared with your other vars) and tell it what to do once it’s done loading the xml (in this case, perform the aforementioned function).

And that’s xpath in a nutshell as best I can describe it. See it in work.

Tom Green has a great philosophy on the medium. It’s a very “is what it is” attitude. (Is Daoist an appropriate term?) I’ll supply you with some quotes I found interesting, as I place great value on what people say.

My approach to teaching and writing about New Media technologies is real simple: Focus on the process, not the technology.

How true this is. I’ve never really had an emphasis on the technology, though that’s what I seem to be best at. I can put together almost anything I need to, the trouble I find I’m increasingly having is finding what the idea is.

This one’s from his blog:

Was hanging around with a bunch of my students a few days back and one of them asked: “What exactly is that we really do?”

The answer caught the student by surprise…. we tell stories. In fact we are the storytellers of our age.”

Sound familiar?

But the best example of the philosophy that I was previously discussing is this excerpt The Rise of Flash Video Pt. 1:

In 2003, I was in Seattle getting ready to do a presentation on Flash Video at Digital Design World when Jim Heid, the Conference Organizer, saw the title slide of the presentation and mentioned that I might be facing a rather tough crowd. I looked out over the audience, sized them up and told Jim I had his back covered. He said he wasn’t too sure about that and pointed at the title on my screen: “QuickTime is dead.” Looking out into the darkened room, I watched about 200 people in the audience open their Powerbooks; hundreds of bright white Apple logos staring back at me. It was indeed going to be a tough crowd.

Nobody really expected the stranglehold that Apple, Microsoft and Real had on the web streaming market in 2003 to be broken. Yet by Spring 2005, just 18 months after that presentation, that is exactly what had happened. Those three web video delivery technologies practically vanished, replaced almost entirely by Flash Video. This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.”

This is essentially the reason I switched from advertising to design, the idea that people aren’t willing to let go of things that don’t work, simply because they are familiar. If Flash Video is better, more universal, then there’s no reason to put your content on a proprietary player that certain user’s can’t access. You’re loosing money. Just like the idea that the :30 second T.V. commercial is the ultimate thing in Advertising. Guess what, with things such as Flash Video and onDemand programming, the :30 spot will die. It’s just a matter of time, and you might as well accept this fact and start looking in to better technologies.

And actually, I could expand this train of though into other aspects of society, but for the purposes of class, I’ll stop there.

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