Labs

This is an atypical Labs post, as it doesn't really concern specific code at all. It's more of a wake up call. It starts with the same thing you've been reading about everywhere -- the iPad. It ends somewhere much different and much more important for our industry. It's a conversation about what we're doing as experts in this field and how we move forward together.

The announcement that the iPad won't support Flash kick started a lightning storm of opinions. The alleged issue at hand is that the iPad doesn't support Flash. This is a bad thing. It's a bad thing for the same reason that it also doesn't support Google Chrome, Firefox and (even) Internet Explorer. It's a bad thing because it doesn't support Unity and Java. It's a bad thing because it supports what Apple wants it to supports and that's all. Which isn't to say that we don't love making Apple applications... because we do. It's just that the iPhone app store was an incredible leap forward from the previous generation of mobile applications and so was rightfully recognized as revolutionary. The iPad isn't revolutionizing netbooks, it's devolving them back to a fully closed era. One environment, one language. A cumbe rsome, time consuming distribution process.While you can certainly be expressive using Objective-C and with the iPad, the decisions on how a user engages with something we make should be left to the experts.

When it was announced a while back that Zend was going to include AMF (Action Message Format) functionality supported by Adobe, I was excited to hear that there would be an "official" way to use AMF with PHP, as I had used AMFPHP, an unsupported implementation, with mixed success. I experimented with Zend AMF a little when it was released, and there were two things that annoyed me about this implementation as compared with AMFPHP, but I revisited it this week and discovered remedies for both issues.

Everyone has a complaint about CSS. Everyone has a complaint about browser compatibility. This is something Rosemary attempts to address. This is not a CSS framework.

Rosemary is an open-source modular cascading filter-based modification system for CSS files; or commonly recognized as the acronym, OSMCFBMS4CSS. Your CSS files are run through a series of filters that modify it one after another. These filters can be toggled on/off, rearranged, or all of them disabled completely to give you raw output. It provides a scalable CSS wrapper that you can continue to use no matter what version of CSS is supported (or unsupported).

A quick introduction: My name is Tyson, I am an Art Director. I had the pleasure of working with my esteemed colleague, Jamie Kosoy, on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show project recently. My design team (Chris Petrillo and Caroline Caine) and I also dove headfirst into Silverlight and I'd like to share some of our observations and insights.

Expression Blend

Our initial thoughts on the Blend interface were fairly positive. It reminded us somewhat of After Effects and it wasn't a difficult program to pick up if you already are familiar with Flash or After Effects. We did begin to run into some technical issues with it, however. Jamie discovered that it is a pretty "leaky" program pertaining to memory, and this seemed to be causing issues with certain files crashing on machines other than the one they were created on. One of our biggest issues with building in Blend was...

I had the pleasure of diving headfirst into Silverlight in building the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment -- Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project's detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?

So now that the project is launched, I'm feeling reflective. And I have to say: Silverlight is a worthy competitor to Flash. It is a lot of fun to build in. I recommend it. I think there are times when it'll be faster to build certain things in Silverlight than Flash and vice versa, and it is a matter of learning where the strengths and weaknesses are for each.

There were some things that frustrated me, but overall I found Visual Studio to be a great environment to learn to code in, C# was an extremely easy language to learn and most importantly of all the Silverlight player to be really flexible to the stress we put it under. Our team noted several times that we especially like Silverlight's animation capabilities -- we felt like we had far more "control" over what was happening on the screen than in Flash.

Sometimes when making custom classes a trace of an object just isn't enough information. For instance, if I had a custom person class, a trace would probably look something like [Object Person]. A quick and easy solution is to override the objects toString() method to provide a more detailed explanation. As with all good things though, use it in moderation. There is no need for each class to spill it's guts in a simple trace. Sometimes a movieclip should just be a movieclip.

I will be giving a presentation this Friday, August 21st, at the Chicago Portfolio School. I will cover a lot of the same material as my recent appearance at the Denver Art Museum, including Big Spaceship's approach, culture, techniques, philosophy, and process.

The event on Friday begins at 5:30 and is free! More info about the event can be found here.

Charlie discovered the idea of the super formula. Since it sounded super, Charlie proposed a challenge, a coder challenge, a super coder challenge. The challenge was straightforward – create a super formula editor that creates a super shape. The other parameters being that the shape must spin in 3D (well at least look like it), the shape must be composed of at least 10,000 particles, the shape must be editable and it must be made in Flash. The winner determined by the fastest FPS, as judged by Mr Doobs stats class.

Just wanted to post a thank you note to those who came out to DelveUI and came to see my talk. I felt like there was some small spark of an understanding that designers and programmers in this industry don't have to relegate themselves to "Standards" or "Flash" camps... a subject I'll probably write on at some greater length at some point.

Slides coming soon.

I will be speaking at the Denver Art Museum on Wednesday, August 5th as a part of the AIGA Colorado speaker series.