Inspire

Inspire, a publication from the Adobe Experience Design team, is a site I have only just become aware of. It seems full of fascinating articles, videos and blogs from 90 industry-leading experts who share a common interest in how to better deliver interactive content. I believe Grant Skinner is going to be guest-blogging there soon.

https://xd.adobe.com

Blog and screencasts on FDT’s most useful features

I found this Top 5 list of FDT features written by Marcel Fahle. He does some nice screencasts that do a great job of demoing the power and usefulness of FDT. It might be good for people who don’t know what FDT can really do.

http://marcelfahle.com/2009/06/30/my-top-5-timesavers-in-fdt-and-how-to-use-them/

Flash on the Beach 2009 films just posted

The first round of films from FOTB 2009 have just been posted. I attended this year’s event (my first) and loved it. I plan on doing a big write-up of my experience at some point but for now I’ll just say that I learned an awful lot, met a great deal of good people, had a brilliant time and left feeling inspired. I will be back next year!

As for the films…. I would check out Andre Michelle and Grant Skinner to start with. Andre’s audio work in Flash is simply astounding, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page:-

http://www.flashonthebeach.com/

New Greensock Tweening Engine v11 Release

The ultimate tweening suite from Greensock has just been updated with a major release – version 11 can be found here:-

http://blog.greensock.com/v11/

There are all kinds of new features including a motion blur plugin, a new super-slim version called TweenNano, improved performance and a transformMatrix plugin….. I look forward to getting stuck into this excellent library. Thanks again Mr.Greensock!

Wonderful wonderfl

I know it has been around a while but I had forgotten about the brilliance of this online flash coding site http://wonderfl.net/. You can build flash online without any compiler or IDE and you can fork/share/collaborate the code with others too. BOOM!

Media Sandbox Showcase and Publication Launch

I attended the Media Sandbox Showcase and Publication Launch at the Watershed in Bristol yesterday. It showcased six catalytic investments to innovative Research and Development pilots funded by regional agencies that were produced at the Pervasive Media Studios. I have been meaning to get down to open Fridays at the PMStudios but have been so busy lately that I have failing to do so. Seeing what is coming out of this place and the people involved was very interesting and inspiring and shall definitely be making an appearance to try and get involved in what seems like an amazing place.

I was particularly impressed with the projection mapping work done by AntiVJ. A local flash dev I have recently met a few times George Crabtree did the Air front-end, hopefully he will be doing a presentation on this at one of our upcoming Bristol Flash User Group meetups. I also saw an old friend who heads up a Bristol company called Nomos Media, he produced one of the other projects called AudioEnable and gave a very interesting presentation on it. It is a mobile-device audio recording, sharing, rating and community app, he showcased some school children enjoying using the software and I can see it’s potential for all kinds of other markets/audiences.

At the end of the presentations there was a launch for a book that beautifully showcases the projects followed by some very nice food and drinks. It was a great time, thanks to all who were involved 🙂

Very useful PureMVC framework example

My good friend Nick Forsberg www.seventy6.com pointed me in the direction of this very useful blogpost. All kinds of other interesting posts to be found there too 🙂

http://www.as3dp.com/2007/12/27/minimalist-mvc-example-using-the-puremvc-framework/

Grant Skinner’s Performance Libraries and Presentation

Here is a link for Grant Skinner’s very useful performance class libraries:-

http://gskinner.com/libraries/

Also a page with links to ALL of his presentation slides from various talks. ‘Quick as a Flash’ is the very excellent performance one he gave at FOTB:-

http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2004/06/conference_sess.html

Glastonbury Festival 360 Panoramas

My excellent friend Tom Widd has just had the first of his panoramas added to the Glastonbury website. Hopefully there will be some more over the next couple of weeks with my mug in too 🙂

http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/News/glastonbury-panoramas-field-of-avalon-10-13-2009-1-29-pm-01

Snow Leopard issue with VMWare Fusion

So….. when I installed Snow Leopard my VMWare Boot Camp partition became inaccessible from VMWare!!! Booo! It turns out if you get the FREE upgrade from VMWare Fusion 1 to 2 the issues are cleared up. I am now back into my Windows partition.

VMWare Fusion 2 seems to have a bunch of improvements which are definitely worth checking out. I just enabled the improved DirectX 9.0 3d graphics and for the first time, enabled a shared folder that I will use as a bridge between the two OSes when needed.