Some of you may have noticed a lack of posts recently, that’s because I’ve been busy with my latest project – Flash User Group UK.
That’s right, it’s finally set up and ready to go with the first meeting planned for mid April, I hope to see some of you guys there the ones who can’t make it we will be throwing the footage of the event onto the groups website. As any new group we need as much support as you can so can you e-mail, tweet and shout about it as much as possible.
[Hit the Flash User Group UK's Website for more details]
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Flash has received some well deserved criticism over the last year in regards to its performance. I have found that its image in the web design community has become damaged for many reasons that are not relevant to today’s player. Adobe and developers of the platform have made some mass yet unappreciated improvements to the player over the last few.
Search Engine Optimization today is not such of an issue if you build the site well and also deep link it. Even accessibility isn’t a huge issue with great tools available to make your content text to speech friendly. But what Flash is really getting criticized for is performance.
Fortunately Adobe was quick on the ball to resolve the problems, but in turn they expect device manufactures to play ball and work with them in the process. Google have recently brought out the Nexus One which is a Flash Player 10.1 capable phone. Google worked closely with Adobe to ensure that the player ran great on the system and from what I have seen so far it looks awesome. Flash Player 10.1 brings huge advancements in performance especially on the mobile platform and in delivering HD content, such a huge progress should warrant it its very own version number ‘Flash Player 11′. Adobe has proved time and time again since Adobe Max 2009 that Flash is ready for the mobile platform and have added Flash support to many awesome powerful phones supporting full Flash Player with accelerometer and multi-touch support. This I call progress.
So why no Flash love for the iPhone?
Apple are greedy, and they want revenue, if you could jump onto hulu to watch a video why would you buy video from iTunes. I agree this is just business sense but with the iPad people really thought that they can’t use the same old excuse again that it runs too slowly, but Jobs pulled out that card again. The people want Flash and Apple have received some serious bad press from the lack of it.
People say that Flash Player is inaccessible, but I ask you which is more inaccessible the 99.9% of internet enabled computers with Flash Player or the percent of people with HTML5 capable browsers.
Flash isn’t the processer hungry application it used to be, both Adobe and developers of the Flash platform are learning that keeping their code optimized will go a long way into keeping the platform alive.
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I’ve been playing around with BitmapData and Webcams for the last few days for an Interactive Pool Table that I am working on. Today I got side tracked, after visiting Decode at London’s V&A museum I felt as though my programing is becoming more art orientated by the day. It’s not much and it’s very simple but here’s what I’ve been playing with today. Simple but fun!
[Hit The More Link For The Flash File - Requires Webcam]
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I was fortunate enough to have recently gone to the Victoria and Albert Museums conference Decoding the Digital. Decoding the digital was a conference that discussed new media’s place in the art based community and the issues and controversy of digital based art. Casey Reas was one of the great artists there and has work featured in the Decode exhibition at London’s V&A as well as around the world. Caseys work is about processing data to create beautiful pieces of work. In 2001 Casey and Ben Fry created a tool called Processing, this tool allowed them to create wonderful graphics such as the one seen above. Fortunately for you all I recorded Casey Reas’ talk on ‘Form+Code’. If you get the chance visit Decode and Digital Pioneers at London’s V&A.
[Hit The More Link For The Video]
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Another key note another Apple device! Today’s keynote featured the iPad, Jobs latest and greatest creation… well at least latest! Disappointingly the iPad will not run Flash Player all we can do is hope Adobe do some tweaking here and there to get Native apps running on this baby! But what have they done?
The Device
The device has an awesome 9.7 inch IPS screen at 1024×768. It comes in 16, 32 and 64 GB flavours and has the option of 3G. It sports an accelerometer, 1GHZ Apple A4 processor and 802.11n wi-fi allong with all the other stuff like compass and bluetooth. Ohh yeah and it has a 10 hour (real use) battery life.
The Software
As expected it runs a variation of iPhone OS. What this means is it supports all iPhone apps out the box. The SDK will allow people to develop for the iPad specifically so we can see some really awesome apps come onto the app store when this gets released. It also has iWork which takes the full iWork sweet and has re-interfaced it to the iPad and to be honest looks pretty sweet!
What else?
Something I was happy to see was the new dock keyboard which holds the iPad in place as well as charges it. It also has video out for presenting iWork on projectors and will come unlocked to any network anywhere.
When?
iPad ships with Wi-fi only in 60 days and with Wi-fi+3G in 90 days internationally. 3G plans will take longer to arrange outside of the US.
I guess I’ll get this… when it gets jailbroke!
[Hit The Gallery Here]
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Thanks to the wonderfull world of Twitter I have stumbled uppon a great tool called Project Sikuli. Sikuli allows you to automate greate GUI based scripts by applying Python combined with screen shots. I have found this to be an exceptional tool as your delays can be set to when a visual element occurs rather than a static number. I have used Sikuli to open my Chaos based generative art instalation and close it when the UI gets too complicated, this process is repeated making sure that the canvas is kept clean and at a high frame rate. The reason I could not do this via AppleScript was because I wanted the installation to run for as long as possible and due to the nature of Chaos this varied from run to run. All I can say is what a great tool with many uses and beta testing user interface.
[Video After The Break]
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Multi-touch is great when you want to enable complex features on a fairly intuitive and easy to read interface. But when deployed in a Windows or OSX environment common traditional elements such as screen orientation and workspace compatibility get in the way of development and are often more hassle than they are worth. The greatest thing about Multi-touch is collaboration and Pictionaire, a project by Andy Wilson and Björn Hartmann, really takes advantage of this and is an awesome tool for designers.
Although impractical at the moment due to costs and maintenance and complexity of the system we could well see this make its way on to the consumer based market in the future. This technology will allow designers to work both digitally and physically at the same time bridging an important gap in the design process and in turn reducing developing time through increasing productivity and allowing better access to information and through the digital interface.
[Video After The Break]
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The Apple Tablet, rumoured to be called the iSlate, is rumoured to be announced January 27th. Yes I know I said rumoured twice in that last sentence but let’s face it we all know its coming! But what we don’t know is whether it will run a variation of iPhone OS or full on OSX. Odds our in my opinion it will run iPhone OS as it’s the best money maker thanks to the app store and this device will not be designed as a replacement for your computer. Fortunately for us however, it doesn’t matter whether is iPhone OS or OSX.
Flash Cs5 will publish to the iPhone platform and with a few tweaks here and there I’m sure that adobe will fix it up to do the tablet. If they leave this until the release of CS6 I may just go on an adobe hunting killing spree! On the other hand though, if it’s running full on OSX then we have AIR 2.0 or Flash. Regardless of the OS it will undoubtedly feature multi-touch and accelerometer which we will be able to access through the new AS3 extensions that Flash CS5 will bring us.
How will this be different from both the iPhone and Mac’s then?
This will come from how the user adopts the system, with the intermittent release of Flash CS5 a range of developers and designers will surely be publishing for these platforms, and the great thing is you can publish to all of them at the same time by making your stage object positions and scale dynamic to the resolution of the screen and platform that you are using.
But what about Safari?
I think that Apple will be heavily scrutinised if they don’t feature Flash Player into Safari on the tablet as it will be a powerful device with a reasonably large screen and will no doubt be capable of it. Apple have kind of got away with it with the iPhone due to it being a phone, but with many phone OS’s featuring Flash Player in the browser they can’t hide for long. If apple to feature Flash Player into the tablet and it runs a variation of iPhone OS then I believe it will be inevitable that they will be forced to feature it in iPhone OS 4.0, which may have a announcement and release on the same day!
Also Flash CS5 developing will be great for iPhone developing, but for more complex designs you’re better off going with Objective-C, the reason for this is that although Native Flash Apps for the iPhone will be great, they will lack in performance as proved by the existing apps on the App Store. Undoubtedly the tablet will feature a much higher performance graphics chip and processer than the iPhone therefore quality Flash published games could be a possibility for the tablet.
Regardless of what happens next week it will be important to us all.
[Don't forget to follow Engadget and Gizmodo for the release on January 27th 10AM Pacific!]
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Ever wanted to see what you look like in 3D? Well look in a mirror, but if you want to create a 3D model of yourself it’s really quite simple and will only take an hour or so if you have the kit allready. It’s easy, stylish, geeky, fun and innovative.
[Instructions & Gallery After The Break]
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If you want to blog you’ve got an array of tools you can use including WordPress and Blogger. If you want a forum your best bet is PHPBB and if you want a Virtual Learning Environment you have a strong selection of powerful services including Moodle. But what if you need to create a website fast due to a budget or time limitations. I know you can create Pages in WordPress but you can’t create the site without a Blog.
Why are there no successful control panel based PHP Publishing Applications? Think about it… you could create your site fast with custom themes and plugins and your clients can just jump in and make changes as when and often they need them, now I know what you’re thinking it would kill the Web Design industry surely? I don’t think so, people will still need themes and plugins and anyone who wants a website with a little innovativity will have to pay up and have it built in the old fashioned way.
Let me know what you think or if I’ve overlooked a service in the comments!
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