Ever wondered where all our stuff comes from and goes to… and why we buy it all in the first place, well check this out… http://www.storyofstuff.com/

 Great site, great animation, great message…

I have recently discovered that if you need to embed a large number of characters form a distressed font into flash, ready for use in dynamic text fields, they can swell your file size quite considerably.

So here is a possible solution… Just use a clean font (which is much smaller), create your text field within a MovieClip, and then apply a tiled mask of distortion texture across the front of it.

I have just put a demo of this in our labs page… http://www.brondbjerg.co.uk/pages/labs.asp

Could be useful!!!

Mike

Yesterday, Adobe revealed to the world what features the, soon to be released, Creative Suite 4 would contain, and it seems pretty good.

While not as exciting as the previous CS3 release perhaps, this release builds strongly on their existing tech and makes some real improvements in work flow and productivity.

Obviously the focus of my interest is on the web aspects of the release, and Flash CS4 in particular. So here’s a few key features that caught my attention:

Flash CS4 & Flash Player 10

• 3D now built in
  It appears to be a 2.5D approach to 3D but super useful to do simple papervison 3D style effects.
• Bones Tool
  Allowing you to add ‘bones’ to a single / collection of movieclips. Basically this means you can connect a series of clips together (arms, bodies, legs etc) with a skeleton, and using Inverse Kinematics, keep all the parts together and moving, not unlike a puppet. This will make character animation soooo much easier now… having created a walking animation just yesterday, I can vouch for this.
• Object-based animation
  You can now adjust individual animation attributes (scale, rotation, alpha etc) independently and they are no longer tied to a single keyframe. So we can say goodbye to complicated nested animations. If you have used after effects, then you will already be familiar with this approach. Again, a really great time saver…
• Publish To Air
  As you can with FlexBuilder, you can now publish directly to Air to create your desktop applications from Flash.
• Player 10, Custom Filters & MP3
  With Flash Player 10 Beta & Adobe Pixel Bender, we can now start creating our own visual fx filters, blends & fills and not just be limited to what is prebuilt into the player, like drop shadow & blur etc. Also, lower level access to the Sound API, means we can manipulate & mix MP3s with more precission (I hope) and also using Adobe Pixel Bender (as above (weird )) we can even create our own audio filters (distortion, reverb etc) … watch out for Cubase / Logic online coming to a browser near you soon .

Dreamweaver CS4

• Ajax & CSS
  Dreamweaver’s upgrade is not quite as exciting, but some useful editing tools for CSS & AKAX have been added to speed up work flow.
• Browser Built In
  You can now preview your work within DW, using the built in browser. This allows you to quickly preview but also step through the code as you are interacting with the page… nice.

Photoshop CS4

• Content aware scaling
  This seems like a really great tool that allows you to easily scale an image, but leave certain areas unscaled. So if you want to scale a landscape, but leave the person in the foreground unscaled, it will do this automatically… again a workflow tool that will save hours of cutting out people from their background etc…
• More 3D Tools
  More 3D tools like 360 panorama tools that allow to edit within the 3D space and the 2D space.
• Faster Processing
  Super fast processing for scaling into and out of images…

There are clearly loads of new features in all of the CS4 products, but these are the ones that grabbed my attention… now we just have to wait for it to be released. I guess I know what’s on my christmas list

Mike

Polly & I both attended the 2nd meeting of the Tunbridge Wells Media Business Networking group ‘Meejahub’ last night at Thorins.

It was a nice group and they were kind enough to let us ‘gate crash’ at the last minute, and we’re not even paid up members… so thanks to them for that.

This is what Meejahub say about themselves:

MeejaHub is a business and social networking group that aims to bring creative and media professionals together to exchange ideas, sources, industry news and gossip - over a drink, preferably, or via this website (http://www.meejahub.co.uk/).

Here at MeejaHub we believe we can all help one another. Think about how much business you get from contacts. The more contacts you make the more business you get, that’s what MeejaHub is all about, making those connections.

Nice to see a bit of community in TW, and hopefully I sign of things to come in a town so well placed to take advantage of it’s proximity to Brighton & London…

Thanks Meejahub!

Mike

We have just launched a new flash site for Simmer Ltd.

Simmer Ltd, are a specialist branding & design consultancy working within the food & drink industry.

We were commissioned to bring Simmer’s innovative site design to life using a combination of Flash, XML, ASP & SQL Server.

The site is a presentation of Simmer’s extensive portfolio of work and is completely CMS driven allowing Simmer to keep it constantly up to date.

A custom window navigation system was conceived and built to allow simple & clean navigation through the clients and projects.

The site also encourages the user to make comments on any of the work they see, to add depth and discussion to the content.

Finally we incorporated a ‘Share This’ button into the site, allowing you to share & bookmark the site… not something often seen within the flash environment.

Take a look at the site at www.tasteofsimmer.com…

Zone Magazine September issue is now out and this month there is a new way to enjoy this great publication.

Issuu is a publication library that provides a really neat Flash document viewer. We have embedded the Issuu viewer into the website so you can view the magazine online as well as download it. It provides a really intuative way to navigate the magazine.

We think Issuu is far more elegant and robust than the many other Flash book viewers we’ve come across and tried to integrate. They even provide an easy to generate Widget to help advertise your latest publication on Facebook etc. (see below)

Check out the latest issue of Zone here: http://www.zone-magazine.com/latest/online.asp

And take a look at Issuu: http://issuu.com/

Get your own - Open publication

As some of you may have seen in the news today, a mystery monkey appeared in the Tokyo subway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7572113.stm

After being stared at and chased a bit, it legged it and disappeared into the Tokyo Underground (a bit like the A-Team).

Well I think we’ve found him…

Cheers

Mike

The BBC has launched this really great little AIR application for the Olympics.

AIR is Adobe’s Desktop application platform for which you can create content in Flash, Flex & Dreamweaver etc.

This brings in RSS news feeds from your chosen Olympic sports.  

It features characters from “Monkey” as designed by Jamie Hewlett which look great with their transparent backgrounds on your desktop.

Get your own Monkey from the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/monkey/7479984.stm

Andy at Zone Magazine has done it again.. another great issue!

Download it form www.zone-magazine.com…

Mike

Ever wanted to know, where you find the time to fit in all those things you wished you’d done?

This man has the answer… Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody…

I will be watching less TV tonight…

Mike