Monthly Archives: April 2005

Truth in advertising – going for the cheap friday laugh.

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(S)hell

Yes. Yes I am. I’m all about the cheap laugh and Shell Oil was happy to help me out in more ways than one. It starts out with driving home in the rain on fumes. I am relieved to see a shell logo appear on the horizon. What? tonight it isn’t Shell. One light burns out and I am left with a cheap joke about gas prices. So here we go. (full-sized image here)

As I pay almost $3/gal (sorry Europeans, I know you don’t get this joke) looking up at the sign saying “hell” I am struck by the thought “I need to drive a marketing person by this sign. They might see an honest advertisement for the first time in their lives.” After realizing I didn’t really feel like spending my weekend wiping up exploded brain chunks, I file the thought away and went back to getting some gas.

On the topic of truth in advertising, if you haven’t seen the movie Crazy People, I highly recommend it. Its a very funny movie about a Madison Avenue ad exec that is overcome by the desire to tell the truth and is put into a mental institution. It was also filmed in the town where I grew up.

My last thought on this is that my partner Ray saw this differently. While I was amused about the marketing issues involved, Ray saw it as a political comment (our perspectives certainly are a product of our lives! ;) ). You should definitely read his entry. It is funny, interesting, and as always left me angered by the right-hand side of the political spectrum. Oh yeah, and he passed by a gas station where the premium was $3.15!!!

Flash Lite Breeze

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I’m writing this while listening to the FLash Lite Breeze Presentation. Yay for more stream of consciousness writing.

The presentation is starting out with some demos of Flash Lite content. Aquan (a game I made), a 3D car view that can be spun about on the phone and went over to some information about India Games, a large-scale mobile game studio that has started producing Flash Lite content.

The presentation shifted to helper applications like FileExplorer (the same app that Russ suggested the other day) and Torch. Then bill covered some of the things people are wanting to do outside of Flash Lite like place a call, open the camera and or media file.

To place a call:

getURL("tel:5555551212")

This will bring up an OS-level popup that asks the user before actually making the connection (same as WAP, but nicer ;) )

Media Files and Applications can be opened provided that you know the static path (which is all but a deal breaker to me)

From there the presentation went over to the Flash Lite Exchange and the Flash Lite Forum. Hmmmm.. some of the chatters are getting a bit rude now. It seems reasonable for Macromedia to show their developer resource areas. oh well.

Now we are into the question area and most of the questions had to do with feature requests for the next version of Flash Lite, Flash Lite penetration, business model questions, APIs for accessing phone information (screen size: no, make and model: yes), Platforms (PSP:no, iPod:no, DS:no).

The breeze will be archived (whithin the next week).

And now I need to get to work but I will come back through and add links and some more details later :D

What are the Best Conferences for Flash Folks?

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  gannon

I want to make a list of all conferences for which Flash is relevant. Those will include the regulars, but also I’d like to go beyond just “Flash Conferences.” If you are into games, GDC and E3 are still relevant. If you are into devices 3GSM and CTIA are good. What are the ones for every nuance of Flash that are good to attend? Also geography and language are irrelevant for the purposes of this thought exercise ;)

So far I’m thinking of Flash, Mobile/device/gadget, Design, Animation, and Game conferences. If you can think of other good subcategories, let me know!

Click Here to see the permanent page and add more conferences! Once I get a good list going I will add it to my left-side navigation.

Flash Lite Breeze Seminar with Bill Perry

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Bill Perry is going to give another great online presentation on Flash Lite tomorrow morning at 8AM (PST). According to his blog, the topic will be more on the technical side largely focusing on FSCommand2(). He also anticipates it being highly interactive with lots of questions from the audience. Hope to see you there.

P.S. Thanks so much to the rest of the world where Flash Lite is way more popular for making the presentation early in the morning. Darn you and your time zones ;)

Want to work at Yahoo! (Sunnyvale, CA)?

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Yahoo!

Yahoo! is hiring for several Flash Engineering positions, and I’m going to feature them here as I start getting them organized. Today’s feature is for an Engineering Team leader for Yahoo! Local. Despite what the job description sounds like, this will be a Flash/Flex position. The team to be led has a variety of web development skills, so it’s best for the applicant to be conversant with a wide variety of skills. They are looking for a senior, geeky Flash dev, and if you know Flex (well), all the better. If you are interested in the position (and you should be, this will be a good one) please send me your resume and I will forward it on.

I’ve been at Yahoo! for three years, and it is a great place to work. My technical knowledge has expanded a huge amount from working with such brilliant folks here. Also, the exposure to such large-scale endeavors is just plain cool. Coming from a small design firm previously, I found it just isn’t possible to prepare for the amazing amount of ideas, resources, and potential that enterprise work provides (not to mention that it is a good ego trip to know that your work is seen by a Yahoo!-sized audience)

Beyond the considerable professional benefits to life at Yahoo!, it is worth mentioning some of the neat benefits here. Free Coffee bar in every building (not a coffee pot… a full service coffee shop, but free), full gym, subsidized cafeteria, basketball courts, sand pit volleyball, and the corporate pastime, Foosball. We also have on-site DVD rentals, dry cleaning, convenience store, plus classes in personal, professional, and financial development. In the only-in-the-valley benefits category we also have on-site dental, car wash, oil change, massage, personal training, and *shudder* hair cuts.

If you are a talented Flash engineer, designer or both, and you are even maybe just kinda sorta thinking about looking for a new job, let me know. We really do have a wide variety of positions open, and besides, I just like getting to know my fellow Flash folks.

Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus

… and WHERE’s the check?

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liveVault promotion

John Cleese shifts from one dot com to another and does a hilarious job for liveVault.com at a promotional site heavily using Flash video, backuptrauma.com. Cleese plays Dr. Twain Weck for the Backup Trauma Institute guiding crazed IT professionals back to reality through solutions like liveVault’s data backup products. There is even a gag video that is pretty funny.

I’m not sure how much extra business will come out of this for liveVault, but liveVault seems happy. Let’s hope this encourages other companies to do such excellent work. Anyone out there know which agency worked on that? I’m guessing we will see it in some upcoming award shows.

Edit: This site is a product of Thunder Sky Pictures and Captains of Industry. Good job!

And whatever you do, don’t press the third button! :D

There are a few bugs in the site, so it you have trouble navigating, just go back to the hallway area.

You *admit* to designing paper towel prints??

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Brawny

Ms. Mary Engelbreit, do you realize that you just took credit for the design of a paper towel? While your style isn’t really one of my personal favorites, are you really excited as your site would have us believe that it is a good fit for paper towels, a bastion of poor design?

Certainly nothing says Brawny Man tough like illustrated florals! I’ve always wondered why paper manufacturers seemed determined to add these cheesy sort of prints to paper towels. Mind you, I’m not completely opposed to prints, I just find it cynical that the companies believe 90% of Americans are as tacky as to have kitchens in which the normal paper towel prints aesthetically work. Because of the types of prints available, I for one go for that trendy minimalist approach to my paper towels with just plain white.

I know for a fact that Georgia Pacific can recognize better design than this. Look at the website for Brawny, the brand of paper towel that the Engelbreit prints are going on. That is a pretty nice looking Flash site (notice also that the rolls on the site have no prints). Speaking of good design and marketing on brawny.com, you MUST check out the Brawny Innocent Escapes.

Innocent Escapes is a Flash Video campaign produced by Fallon New York where you can play out warped fantasies of the ultra-sensitive yet masculine brawny man. He comforts you when you’ve had a bad day and can be an oh, so good listener (a badly spliced video loop of “uh huh”, “interesting”, “uh huh”). The whole thing is too funny.

So, good design is good anywhere, but bad design can make me even think of what my paper towels look like. I don’t have the sort of brain cells needed for that, so let’s just agree here and now that its ok for paper towels to be blank so that we can all create pollockesque art form after you’ve cleaned up your spills.

Ray did ask for one caveat though. If Thomas Kinkade should ever want to do printed toilet paper, let him. It would be the perfect synergy of form and function.

New Media, Rich Media, and Jeff Gannon

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  gannon

Whew!, I’m so happy that “new media” stopped being the code word for Flash. Flash really isn’t new any more, plus “Rich media” is far more accurate. Now you are probably wondering about why I’m writing this in 2005 and not say 4 years ago when people stopped using “new media” as a common description for Flash. Enter Jeff Gannon aka James Guckert aka pseudo-military prostitue. From Wonkette I ended up clicking over to his site mostly from shock that he is trying to stay around after his 15 minutes were up.

Jeff Gannon has styled himself the “voice of the new media.” Thank goodness that isn’t us anymore! no siree we are “Rich” media now, and not a moment too soon. Luckily, having Gannon as our voice was probably not going to happen anytime soon anyway, certainly not with those PhotoShop skills. Take a look at Gannon in front of a flag (above). It seems the flag didn’t want anything more to do with Gannon than the rest of us. But really, a tip for the novice PhotoShop user: if you are evil, *don’t* include your dark aura in the picture! It scares the children.

It’s either that or he isn’t really bald. his hair just moves really really fast and even with high shutter speed it can only be caught as a diffuse blur.

Resource FLA: Flash Lite Key Broadcaster

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  Flash Lite Key Broadcaster

I’ve uploaded Flash Lite Key Broadcaster, a new source file (and first source file for the new blog!) that listens to all the keys for a cell phone and calls frame labels that you define. This is pretty much as close as creating key listeners for Flash Lite that I can get. By swapping out the strings containing the frames to call, you can redirect the functionality of the buttons during all of the different states of the application.

Pros for Flash Lite Key Broadcaster over making your own buttons:

  • Maintain all your code in frame rather than hiding the actions on buttons
  • Easily swap button functionality without trying to remove and re-instantiate buttons
  • Reduce clutter on the timeline by keeping all of the buttons in one self-contained movie clip

Flash Lite Key Broadcaster features:

  • Movie clip can exist in any timeline
  • Call labels can exist in any one timeline (can be different from the dial pad movie’s timeline)
  • Call labels can be changed at any time for any button
  • Only the buttons you want to use need to be assigned
  • The movie clip is completely self-contained. Your code stays outside the movie, the resource code remain inside and sets no variables outside the movie.

For information on how this movie clip works, please see the documentation page.

A Perfect evening of Anger, Ranting, and Finger Pointing

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Lewis Black

Lewis Black‘s comedy is angry, bitter, recriminating and perfect. Ray and I went to see him at the Warfield this evening. You can see Lewis Black periodically on the Daily Show though his off-TV comedy is far more biting and fun. If you haven’t heard him before, Comedy Central’s site has some video clips of his humor.

Tonight’s rants were about Washington DC, the religious right and people opposing gay marriage. It felt like a program made especially for me. ;) I couldn’t stop laughing the entire time he was on stage. The man is truly a genius. I was however a bit sad when he talked about how he performed for the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner a couple of weeks about and he sanitized his material. (I’m ordering the DVD so I can see how far off of normal it was. )

While he is using the experience for his material now, this mostly bothers me because this was for a journalism association which promptly wanted to censor his material!! Next in the “it bothers me” category is that Lewis Black was willing to do it. His humor is based on his anger at social problems and his willingness to say what needs to be said. When invited to take the podium before the Vice President of the United States, members of congress and powerful media representatives, he chose not to speak directly to the people that needed to hear him most, but to fall back on “I’m just hired to be entertaining.” Well, if this audience wouldn’t normally find him entertaining, why the hell did they invite him? Was he just a captive liberal on display for the conquering republicans masters to laugh at as he abandoned himself?

It’s almost enough to make my fingers double-jointed.