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…

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

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

I found this post the other day about how to evaluate if your business ideas / grand schemes for world domination / next big things are actually viable and likely to succeed.

The author has rated various famously succesful applications Twitter, Ebay, Google etc against the following criteria…

Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?�
Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

So, why not see how your super new app / product is going to do…
http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.asp

Good Luck and if you discover that you do have The Next Big Thing, then give us a shout and perhaps we can help you build it!!

Cheers

Mike

Welcome to our new blog!! Whether or not it’s going to be one of those one entry diaries that we’ve all started on new years day and can’t quite keep the pace come 2nd January remains to be seen.

The plan is that we’ll both add some witty and informative posts about the goings on here at BD&D, but I suspect it is most likely to become a log of meals consumed throughout the day (banana & chocolate chip muffins today)

Anyway, here’s hoping that this is the first post of many…

Polly
x