Nick's Blog

Have been looking at this website lately, www.hbovoyeur.com
It is a really interesting take on multiform narrative. There are a number of stories going on at once that you can watch and see how the characters interact in an apartment building. The only annoying issue with it is that it uses a lot of bandwidth and so often will play for about 15 seconds and then start buffering again. Definitely worth checking out though.

I have been looking at some video tutorials about the new features in flash player 10 lately and it looks like there is some very cool stuff coming. If you look at the first few videos on the site http://www.gotoandlearn.com/ you will get an idea of how these new things are going to work. One that looks very impressive is the ability to move movie clips and images in 3D. In the video you see how simple it will be to setup movie clips in 3D space and be able to move through them with a virtual camera.
The beta of flash player 10 is already out so you can play around with it now however there has not been any update to flash yet so publishing the content is a little tricky at the moment. Hopefully there will be an update to flash soon as it looks like there is a lot of exciting stuff coming.

Just found this funny post on Engadget that shows even the big laptop companies use stock photos, it also shows that there photoshop skills aren't all that crash hot.

MSI Wind

Original stock image

I have been playing with a set of classes for flash this week called Flashr.

http://flashr.kelvinluck.com/

It allows you to connect to the photo sharing site Flickr and use the information in a flash project. I have been experimenting with bringing in a number of thumbnails based on a search term to create a montage of images that can then be rolled over to give a little bit of information about them.
It makes the process of collecting this data far simpler than it otherwise would be. I also found some handy tutorials that make the process even easier. One that is interesting is at the website:

http://petitpub.com/labs/media/flash/petikr/

It guides you through how to create a 4x4 grid of thumbnails that then link to the full size images on the Flickr site.
Its a really powerful addon for flash that I recommend you check out.

Today while I was browsing the internet I came across this cool site about the "Emergency Party Button". It's basically a big red button that when pushed turns this guys apartment into a party. Everything from strobe lights and lasers to smoke machines turn on and they are all synced to msuic as well (What is love by Haddaway). Here is a video of it in action and a link to the guys website where he explains how he built the system and what parts he used. Very cool.



http://www.plasma2002.com/epb/

I found this very interesting post on http://www.gotoandlearnforum.com which explains how to use a PHP script to generate an XML file based on a folder of images. Basically this means you can upload a new image into the folder and when flash goes to find the XML file listing the images it runs the PHP script. This script then looks through that folder and generates the XML that flash needs to see the image. It may sound a little complicated but it means you dont have to update the XML file yourself if you want to add a new image to your site. Instead you just have to upload it to the correct folder on your server. Very handy.

Finally got to see U2 in 3D last week and it was well worth the wait. Compared with what we saw at the Virtual Room this was at a whole new level. The sheer size of the screen combined with the 3D was incredible. It really felt like you were at the concert and at times like you were up there on stage. There were some amazing shots from in the audience where it looked like you could reach out and touch the people in front of you.
Personally I am not a huge fan of U2 but I still thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Definitely a must see.

Well it's been quite a while since my last post, been very busy with uni and work. In the small bit of time I have had to relax I was going to go and see U2 3D which is currently showing at Imax and looks really cool. Unfortunately when we went though we were informed that tonight it will only be shown in 2D as one of the projectors had gone down and the only bloke in Australia who could fix it lives in Brisbane. Hopefully by now it has been fixed as we plan to give it another try this week. Fingers crossed that next week I will be able to post something more interesting about how great U2 3D was.

Well it's been a while since my last post, mainly due to being away over the weekend at Semi-Permanent so I thought I should do another post. After seeing Alex Trochut at Semi-Permanent I've been really inspired to do some research about typefaces and fonts. In doing so I have come across a couple of sites that list a number of the best fonts available.

The first is http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/great-fonts-for-web-2.0 which lists what it regards as some of the best Web 2.0 fonts. I found it really interesting as it shows you not only the fonts themselves but some sites and logos that use them. Out of all the fonts listed I must say my favourite is Frutiger. It is very clean and has some nice variety in the different weights it comes in.

The second site I found is http://www.fontshop.com/features/newsletters/jan08a/ which has the top ten typefaces of 2007. The selection here is a little more interesting than the previous site as it contains a mixture of serif and sans-serif fonts as well as some based on handwriting. I really like the ARS Maquette font as it is very clean and stylish. I also like FF Meta Serif, a really nice looking serif font and Armchair Modern, a very fine stylised sans-serif font.

As I mentioned before I was really inspired by Alex Trochut's work. Before seeing him speak I had never thought of typography as interesting. I particularly liked his piece called rolled gold and would love to experiment with something similar myself.

Today I found an interesting article on creating hybrid websites made up of flash and html content.
http://www.thefwa.com/articles/hybrid1105.html

It is a great way to include advanced animation and interactivity while still having the accessibility that you get with html.

Been a while since my last post (been very busy with the website assignment) but thought I would tell you all about this great website http://www.gotoandlearn.com/. It is a site dedicated to video tutorials for flash, everything from creating a simple button roll-over to creating some pretty advanced real-time 3D. Best of all the videos are all free and you can download them for later reference. I highly recommend you take a look.

I have been looking into adding a tab style design to my website and have been doing a bit of research into ways of achieving this through a combination of html, css and javascript. Two very interesting sites I have come across are

http://www.barelyfitz.com/projects/tabber/

http://creativepony.com/journal/scripts/sliding-tabs/

The first link is to a project called tabifier which is a very clean and simple implementation of tabs. It is dead simple to use and is very easily customizable. The second link is a bit more interesting though. It creates a similar interface however when you click on one of the tabs the content area slides to the corresponding content instead of just changing. It creates a really nice look which is similar to the design of the Coda website http://www.panic.com/coda/.

I watched the latest episode of Lost on Sunday night and it was one of the best episodes I have seen. In my opinion it is the best show on television at the moment. The story sometimes gets rather confusing with one question being answered and another 3 being asked but it is this mystery that makes the show so compelling. A little spoiler for those who have not seen this weeks upcoming episode, an old character will be returning. A must watch for anyone who has been following the show.

Continuing on from my last post about mootools I have found some really nice examples of it in use. A really nice one is the this image menu which if you didn't know how it was made you would think is flash.

http://www.phatfusion.net/imagemenu/index.htm

If you would like to contact me feel free to do so by either leaving a comment on one of my posts or by emailing me at the address below.

Email - old_timer101@hotmail.com

Welcome to Nick's blog. I have set this blog up because I have to for uni, but I will be posting here on a regular basis about both research for my assignments as well as other interesting things I come across on the web that are related to the design industry. There isn't much here yet but hopefully that will change over the course of the year.
Feel free to contact me by either leaving a comment on one of my posts or by visiting my contact page by following the link at the top of the site.

I have been researching some javascript code lately as I wanted to create some flash like menus and image galleries on my site without having to actually use flash. A great javascript framework I have come across is mootools. It allows you to tween divs just like you would tween a movieclip in flash and is fairly strait forward to use if you can understand the code. The website is http://mootools.net/ and there are some great examples on the demos page that show you what the effects look like and also what javascript, html and css code are involved.

Today I found a nice site that gives you a good overview of how CSS works. It takes you through a practical example and is fairly easy to understand. Definitely helpful for this first project.

http://www.csstutorial.net/

Today I found these very cool HDR images. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is defined as "a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques". Here is a link to a bunce of these images. The first one of the fire truck is especially nice.

http://abduzeedo.com/20-beautiful-hdr-pictures?=main

My first post. wow.