Blog moved ALERT ******

My blog has moved to http://betweenthetweens.com Please come and check it out and make sure to update your bookmarks...

scribblebug

just finished building this site for my sister. It's called scribblebug and is well worth a look. Check it out here

Photography meets Illustration

See the full photo set here

Silverlight

So over the past couple of weeks I have been messing around with making my first Silverlight application. I say application but really it is a just a simple hero banner which I had previously knocked up in Flash in a day. What happens is 4 images fade and scale between each other while a window expands center stage from the _yscale and text dynamically appears with a typewriter effect. There is also a button that appears on rollover with a URL programmed into it. So I got Parallels running on my mac (which incidentally is great) and had Expression Blend 2.0 (September Preview) installed which is what you need to create a Silverlight package. So Silverlight is actually the plug-in much the same way the Flash Player is a plug-in to your browser. It is Expression Blend that is the designer's tool to create the Silverlight application just as Flash 8 or CS3 would be used. I checked out the 'getting started' tutorials on Lynda.com which is well worth a look and then got started.

My overall impression of Blend is that it is similar to After Effects. The look and feel is that of dark panels with use of fixed or floating panels that can be minimized easily. It also makes use of sliders in the form of click and drag (left or down for minus amounts and right or up for plus amounts). To start building the Silverlight package you need to collect all your assets together which have to be added to the package in the same sort of way that you'd add say an image to your library in Flash. All well and good so far. So I managed to drag an image to the stage and with Expression Blend there is no need to create a movie clip and so I was ready to start animating. What you have to do first though is to create a 'timeline' which seems counter-intuitive coming to it from the Flash world. Oh and you have to watch out for whether the timeline is 'recording' or not as this will track any movement or changes. This became very tiresome very quickly. But I did manage to eventually get two images to scale and fade between each other. You have to set up key frames where you want the animation to be and off you go animating. Blend is a time based animation package which is ok but not very precise, I think I prefer animating over frames. What I did find weird was that there seems to be no way to resize an image to an exact pixel point. The only way I could manage to resize images was with the handles and then you had to resize to a 3 decimal point of a pixel which seems very odd.

Now I felt quite pleased with myself that after a day's work I had scaled and faded 4 images between each other and made the window pop open and closed at various points. By the way, Silverlight does not pixelate your images when scaling which is a problem flash has long had and is only overcome by using the BitmapData class. So my first major obstacle with Blend was how to preview the work. In Flash you would test the movie and it would appear in the stand-alone player or you could view an HTML page to see how it views in your browser. With Blend you supposedly press F5 and it tests your movie for you. But for me this did not work. It seemed frozen on the first frame. After an extensive internet search I found some xaml code (xaml is the new programming language for Blend and Silverlight and is very XML based) that would autoplay the animation on load. Now I thought that the onload command was supposed to be built in? Anyone coming at this from a non-code background is going to be very frustrated very quick. It took a bit of hacking but eventually I got the XAML to work and my animation started to play.

And so to frustration #2. When viewing the animation in Firefox the dimensions were wrong. I had set my document properties within Blend and the XAML seemed right too. So what was the problem? I decided to get my hands dirty and look at the javascript and this is where the problem lay. It seems that Blend did not create the browser page properly so by changing these width and height properties I was on my way. Although this does seem a very basic thing and one that will again frustrate many people (myself included). Leading me to think that perhaps this version is not ready for public release yet.

Frustration #3. Each time I previewed my work in Firefox it asked me whether I wanted to reload the project as it said it had been modified outside of Blend. Clearly it hadn't but I did reload it each time. This seemed weird and the major issue I had with this workflow was that it reset your page settings and layout to the default which is not cool because the animation layout is not the default setting. The Lynda tutorial recommended allowing the reload.

So my next task was to create the text. Now I wasn't going to try anything as complicated as coding a typewriter effect, I was simply going to get my text to fade in and out. So I set up my text box and typed the copy in and then I went to select my font. WHAT??? Only 9 fonts available. That can't be right. This is for a client and they need a specific font. Grrrrr. Back to the online forums. No help there. So I pulled in some resources from work and eventually got some tech support from a person who worked on the Silverlight program over in the States. He said that Silverlight only supports 9 fonts. Really? Well I suppose the same is true of Flash but you can still design with other fonts and Flash will embed them for you or you can do it yourself. Not so with Silverlight. The only solution was about 20 lines of javascript that the guy sent me. And to be honest it was way over my head. Blend creates 3 javascript files and I had no idea where to put this code. This seems crazy to me and really frustrating. So this is where my project died.

I'm off to Silverlight training for the next 3 days so I plan to ask a lot of questions then. I am required to learn this software package as the client is demanding Silverlight applications in the near future. But my advice to any fellow Flashers looking to learn another software package is hold off on this one. It is simply not ready. It is not designer friendly yet. There is potential for it being ok. But it is years behind what Flash can do and you will need to learn new code to get it to work. But then again this is Microsoft and they will be pouring a lot of resource into this project in the future so be sure it is set to challenge Adobe. But for now just sit back and wait.

gondry motorola ad

I was delighted to see some new Gondry work in a medium that he is really well suited to: the advertisment. Showing here with an ad for Motorola. Gondry is the king of the lo-fi look. In his last movie The Science of Sleep there were several dream sequences where the city seems to be made of cardboard. He is obviously exploring this a little further here. I absolutely love the way he explores the features of the new phone by imagining it as a real world entity complete with people inside operating the various functions. Gondry loves the surreal but he is never over-indulgent. Always charming and forever creating a tangible and enticing world to explore. His new movie Be Kind Rewind is out soon.

Interactive Shopfront

I really love this ingenious way to showcase your wares in a shop window seen here for New York Fashion Week for Elle MacPherson Intimates. Devised by Human Locator this is a great way to generate interest in a shop display as it encourages people to explore the window at their leisure and spend more time there than they necessarily would. Adding a level of interaction like this breaks the mold and reminded me of this banner of the day over at bannerblog. Exploration with your mouse to mimic your finger movement is the same in this banner as waving your hands by the window to see what is underneath. This really appeals to our inherent nature to be nosy and explore.

Review: Sticky Windows

I've been using Sticky Windows for about a week now and I've got to say I'm impressed. This great little app sits in the background and is launched on start-up. It is an alternative to minimizing windows to the dock which I've got to say I'm not a big fan of. I find that doing this I often forget about what I have open and using the application switcher can often work in unexpected ways. With Sticky Windows you drag your window to the side of the screen and it morphs into an elegant tab. You can see what you have open but the windows aren't all cluttering your desktop. If you're anything like me you have several windows open at once, this is a great way to manage your workspace. That is until Leopard arrives and we have Spaces, but more on that soon.

The countdown to Leopard

One of the most exiting new features in the upcoming Leopard has got to be Stacks. This could be a great new workflow for people who have to manage several files all over their system. For myself, I often find that I have a desktop littered with various files. What Stacks aims to do is to group those files by kind and stack them ontop of each other in a 3D style pile. With a click you can open the fan of files or have them arranged in grid. Thus saving a whole bunch of real estate on the desktop. Here's what you can expect from Apple in Leopard...



But of course what Apple does well has usually been done by other people first. I recall seeing the following video about a year ago and just highlights exactly the kind of bleeding-edge stuff that people are working on. An attempt to make the desktop a more intuitive space and more like the kind of space we actually have around us. Don't forget when the personal computer first came out we were expected to take on the notion of files and folders to understand the hierarchy of a computer's directory. This is just the next step....



And could this be the future. Apple is well in place to provide a home computing system like the following video. Multi-touch iMac? Open GL graphics. It's all there. The question is do we really want to be using hand gestures to navigate our personal computers?

iPhone vs iPod touch

So with Apple's touch line-up now in place for the UK holiday season I must admit that I am hankering for one of these devices. But which one to choose? There are three choices.

8GB iPod touch for £199
16GB iPod touch for £269
8GB iPhone for £269

The iPod touch is undoubtedly a great device but the iPhone is an iPod as well. And it would be so great to do away with that extra device I carry around with me, my phone. So are any of these configurations worth me giving up my 60GB iPod and my Sony Ericsson? Ok so storage is undoubtedly an issue. At the moment I carry around about 30GB of data. Half of this is in the form of music and the rest is a few movies and most of my picture library. I also use my iPod as an external hard drive carrying various essential bits of data as and when needed. For me to purchase any of these multi-touch products I'd have to rethink how I treat my media and move away from the notion of carrying it ALL with me. This is do-able. I have a vast amount of music that I never listen to and I could treat it the same way I treat movies on my iPod and just have a few. But realistically is 8GB just a bit too restrictive? I think it probably is. In this sense I should really hold out for a 32GB option especially now that the touch devices have an OS to hold too.

The next question I'm asking myself is could I live without the phone facility. In reality I don't make that many calls. Most of my call activitiy is in the form of texts. Actually a wi-fi option on the iPod touch is pretty good. You get great browsing speeds and where I work falls into the city of London which is a free wi-fi network. This could work. The only downside is that Apple has decided to not bundle the mail program (along with a couple of other nice online apps) which is a great shame as I subscribe to .mac and I don't want to be going online to check my mail all the time. Big black mark against the iPod touch for this one.

So it really seems that this first round of multi-touch devices just aren't for me. I think it makes sense for me to get the iPhone at some point but I need it to be my fully functioning iPod too so 32GB is a must. Some food for future thought is that Apple must get on the 3G bandwagon for the iPhone to be a viable competitor to other UK phones (without losing battery life). They also need to address the camera in my mind. It should really be on the front side so that video chats become possible and a flash option should be included for still shots. Although camera phones have always been dodgy in my mind. My Sony Ericsson has a 3MP camera phone with a good flash but it is VERY slow and the images are just OK. Camera phones need to address their lag time to make them a viable option to replace carrying a camera with you. But when you see the quality of the video on a product like the Nokia N95 you know it is possible and really does give hope that the all in one device is just around the corner.

5 gum

Wrigleys are bringing out a new line of designer high tech gum and have tasked The Mill LA to produce these awesome ads depicting what it is like to chew on their product. Some incredible production values here as you sense and experience the sensations for each flavour Rain, Flare and Cobalt. I just absolutely love the ball bearings version. I want to lie in that pool, what a great massage. You can check out their microsite here

pickled onion site is live

Got the Pickled Onion (Bermuda) website finished today. It has been live with a soft launch for a couple of weeks but today I finished some minor amends to get the site fully live and complete. I'm enjoying doing restaurant websites as you get chance to create a rich media site of sorts, graphically rich and with audio. I wasn't given that many assets to work with and would have liked to have a few food shots as I feel this would really enhance the site. Perhaps I can add this at a later stage. Hopefully I have captured the look and feel of the new restaurant but your comments would be appreciated. Check it out here

go (green) gadget go

As we become more and more interested in the environment and the impact we are having on it, so companies are having to gear their products towards this trend. A slew of products are about to enter the so-called green gadget market but how do you feel about these products? Here's a round up of some that caught my eye.

Solar Power



First up is the solar powered mouse. Yes you heard me right. It could save millions of batteries a year from all those wireless mice. But how practical is this product? Do we not need sunlight to charge this beast (Wait I don't sit near a window. I'm on the lower ground floor of my building. I have my hand over my mouse all day. Hmmmm)

Solar powered products are great in some instances and I think this product could be good. I know it can be a pain to remember to redock the wireless mouse at times. Although, part of me does feel like this is a bit gimmicky and simply jumping on the green bandwagon.



Now this is a great idea. Motoroloa have recently patented this solar charged mobile phone based on the fast selling Razr. Ok so this will start out as an expensive option but lots of people don't mind forking out for quality gadgets (can anyone say iPhone). And as the cost of charging the newer phones increases with a phone's complexity, this solar powered phone will be a great option. And it looks kinda cool too.



And the silly. The solar powered bikini for the woman who has it all (sat by her by the pool...and it needs charging NOW). It just looks darned uncomfortable :S

Technology made from wood



As memories of the Morris Minor fade into our collective mushroom growing memories could it be time for a bit of a revival? Could we see a day where computers coated in plastic just seemed so passé...



This bamboo polished mouse given to the organisers of Live Earth looks great and to be honest would look great on most Ikea beech effect wooden desks. I think this is nice, different and unusual. I'm just wondering what the scroll wheel is made from?



You've got the wooden mouse. How about a cardboard coated notebook? Ahem. I'm not sure about this one. I want my laptop to be able to take a few knocks and not go all soggy if a drop of water gets spilled on it. Environmentally friendly yes. Durable maybe not.



Flat packed and made from cardboard. Muji has the answer with these great little speakers. They look pretty good and the sound isn't bad. Totally portable and mostly recyclable this is a great little gift for those with a green heart. And now that Apple is going greener it will even go with your iPod nano.

Products made from gadgets



As the waste mounts up from our disposed tech so some clever and industrious people are recycling some of this waste into "attractive" jewellery. Perhaps the upcoming Sex and the City movie will see the eponymous heroine sporting a 'C' on her right ear and a 'B' on her left from her recycled old G4 powerbook, perhaps even an old piece of motherboard dangling around her neck disguised as a necklace. Now if Gaultier or Westwood are onboard....



Any ideas what this chair has been made from? It is in fact made from recycled Playstation cases and at £99 each is simply a bargain. But they are quite hard to come by at the moment. The reason? Not enough people are throwing away their Playstations (yet).

Going green is certainly a concern for many environmentally aware corporations. Just look at Blackle which demonstrates how much energy Google could save (135,227.251 Watt hours saved at the last count) just by using a black background. Highlighting a company's energy use is one way to instigate change. Awareness is on the increase. Having a smaller carbon footprint is becoming at the foremost of people's concerns. Recently the Lights out London campaign urged Londoner's to switch off their lights for an hour saving a huge amount of energy for the capital whilst raising awareness about these issues. It is only a matter of time that companies will truly cash in on this growing market of consumers and start fighting over their EPEAT rating.

we are the night

I've had this album for a week now and I've got to say I am loving every minute of it. It is electronic heaven for me having always really liked the Chemical Brothers. They do not disappoint with this their latest album. Do it again is a floor filling, thumping and really catchy number that's already doing well in the charts. But the whole album is like an ecclectic look through someone's musical tastes. For example "The Salmon Dance" which is just bizarre in that it talks about the life of a salmon?!? and yet the song is really lively and catchy. This album works on first listen and just keeps getting better. Check it out on iTunes here

a rhythm of lines

It's out! The rhythm of lines microsite is finally live thanks to a LOT of hard work by the boys. This is what I was telling you to look out for after the TV ad I blogged about before. This is really cutting edge Flash work here utilizing some nifty papervision-esque 3D techniques and the speed of the Flash 9 player. Vorsprung Durch Technik this really is. You create your own rhythm of lines with this flash app to create a sculpture of ribbons that exists in a 3D space. Don't forget to enter your creation into the competition because Audi will choose the best designs to be printed out and sent to you. The way I understand this working is that you essentially have a 3 dimensional sky box which is fairly vast. The centre of the box draws you into it so you can never actually reach the edge. The ribbons are drawn dynamically based on the x,y,z co-ordinates generated by the mouse movement. The car models are created by using the co-ordinates generated in a 3D package such as Maya and then having that model outputed via an app called Collada to create an XML file that contains the co-ordinate information needed to draw that shape. Enjoy!

there's something in the water

Thanks to Jo at work for sending this cool animation round for V Water. I guess this product is new to the UK but I'm definitely used to it from my travels to the US. It is a nice product in itself but the way this is being marketed in the UK is quite interesting. They are going for that low-res hand drawn approach that is so popular these days. The cartoon style is playful, almost child-like. The story is fun. It is a good way to present V water as the product itself is basically water with a few extras thrown in. Tapping into the energy drink market would have been the easiest option but they are aiming towards a market who wants to try something new and different.

the dark is rising

Oh my god I could vomit with excitement. Forget The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Earthsea, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe and forget Harry Potter. This series of books is superb. Written in the 60s by Susan Cooper it is an amazing fantasy coming of age story that blew me away as a kid. It was aimed at the older more discerning teen and had me totally captivated. I don't want to give away any plot points as there is one in particular that is best left for the movie but is sure to delight. I hope they aim this above kids as in my memory it was fairly adult in theme. Definitely one of your darker fantasy novels. What is also great is that it is totally British in plot featuring and melding English folk lore into present day. I hope the inclusion of an American (surely only to appeal to the US market) will not detract. Can't wait...

beyond the banner

Thanks to Marc at work for this heads up. It is a good example of thinking beyond normal constraints (phew I didn't say 'outside the box'). And although this isn't technically brilliant it is a good idea and loads of fun. I won't spoil the surprise just promise you'll keep watching until the end :) It is worth it. Check it out here.

fire & water

Don't you just love it when a piece of work just jumps out and says something to you...like wow. Superb photoshop skills are in evidence here as a blend of water drops forms to take the shape of fire. It really works because you do get blue flames some times (the gas hob works especially well). It reminds me of a British print campaign out now for Bacardi where the bottle's side is exploding into water. I can't for the life of me find it on the net though. Here is the original files on the web. No mention of the artist's name. Would love to find out who is responsible and perhaps see some more of their work. Oh and if anyone can point me to the Bacardi work I would be grateful.

photosynth demo

Photosynth has come a long way since I saw it about a year ago. This demo will make your jaw drop open in amazement. You know how when watching a sci-fi movie like Blade Runner they zoom in on an image and enlarge tiny portions of the screen? Well this demo shows this capability. Ok so we're not there quite yet in terms of being able to do that to any image because at the end of the day the resolution of an image is always a factor. If you take a picture on a mobile phone you will never be able to do much with it. But what photosynth does is postulate that of any given landmark there are enough images taken by people that are online to be able to create an interactive map of that place. So given the meta-data of images stored, say on Flickr, this application can build up a representation of that place. You can zoom in on any feature and can even fly around a virtual 3D representation of that environment.

The demo also showcased Seadragon which is a way of displaying 'vast amounts of visual data' onscreen. A really nice touch was the ability to show every page of a magazine on screen and then really quickly zoom in to a page you'd like to see with absolute clarity. Stored within corners of a page could be advertisements say of a car which again you can zoom into. But these ads can contain tiny extra images of further details so that if the person is interested they can zoom in to read that information. It's kind of like those micro dot things we used to see in old spy movies. It's a great idea and again done by Microsoft. When did Microsoft become the innovator again? Are they now the underdogs?

LFPUG

The London Flash Platform Users Group (LFPUG) is a fantastic resource for those who work in the Flash community. They meet every month at various east london bars, which is great because it means that beer is always available, and they invite guest speakers to come along and talk all things Flash. This last talk was on 3D in Flash with two sets of speakers. First up were the legends responsible for Papervision, Carlos Ulloa and Ricardo Cabello a.k.a. Mr. Doob. Carlos kicked things off by talking about how to get started with Papervision. Ok so a 3D artist is essential for most tasks and a good knowledge of a 3D package (Maya, 3ds Max etc) is helpful. But the explanation of how to think in 3D was what got me interested. The introduction of the z axis and the concept of a sky box are all crutial in thinking outside (well actually inside) the box. Check out the papervision blog and get on the mailing list. It is actually quite easy to get started with this tool, once you have your basic 3D object, and the code not too difficult (although I'm sure it does get quite involved quite quickly).

Next up were the guys over at Special Moves. This company has been around for 7 years and specialise in creating 3D for all kinds of output with Flash being a major factor for them. We learned that there are many ways to create 3D, from simply faking a parallax effect, through to isometric games, through to fully immersive 3D environments. It was great to see some GT work being showcased. Christian Aid Week was a good example for them of a 3D model that was set isometrically and the viewer had no interaction with the actual model. They admitted that this work was extremely difficult for them in terms of nailing the animation but the end result is awesome. GT is more than likely going to be working closely with Special Moves in the near future so watch this space.

Both of these talks were extremely useful for me as most of us who use Flash will touch upon 3D in some way at some point. GT have already worked with both Special Moves and Papervision in the past. Check out a rhythm of lines which is due to go live any day now for the work done by GT using Papervision... it is going to be very cool.