An opponent of proposed $250 million wind farm sought Monday to show what the project would look like from his point of view. Are others out there using free tools like this to help their cases in community forums, meetings, etc.? Seems like a great use of technology.
I really like the ability that these tools give the user. The integration between the two is fantastic. Real world visualization that would have bene prohibitively difficult or expensive can now be had by anyone with some time.
A little less personal than my last “Looking Forward” post, but also important. It’s difficult for me to sometimes separate the work I do, and what I am interested in in my spare time. I really like what I do, it’s true. So when things like this are set to happen, it just spills into everything else in my life.
So what I am I looking forward to in the year 2007 for the web design and multimedia world? Here you go.
New OSes! - Woot! So OSX and Windows both have new versions coming out. Vista is out, OSX Leopard to follow in the spring. New OSes mean new features and new ways for people that consume the media I produce. This is almost always a good thing. The OSX Dashcode beta and the new Vista sidebar have lots of cool possibilities for new delivery platforms for the desktop RIA and cool widget-y toys everyone loves. It’s just a matter of time before clients start wanting custom apps made to run in dashboards and sidebars.
Adobe CS3 – The first Adobe branded version of Flash will be coming out this spring/summer. I have dabbled in Flash 9 or CS3 or whatever they are planning on calling it and I have to say I am excited. Looking forward to Actionscript 3 and hoping that some other cool new designer features make it into the app. The authoring possibilities for mobile devices and the fact that the Nintendo Wii browser comes with Flash and the iPhone is also going to play Flash and I am pretty psyched to put some content out with this new toolset.
Adobe Apollo Platform and FlexBuilder for Mac - Its a bold new world for the SWF. Branching out into RIA development a couple years ago with Central was a good try. Sort of. It had licensing issues and the runtime situation was confusing. Add to the fact that developing Flash RIAs with the Flash IDE isn’t easy and you have yourself a situation. The Adobe Apollo project looks like it will solve those problems and allow us to develop full fledged apps for the desktop without an external tool like Zinc (which I do use). Hardcore developers have long been using MTASC and Eclipse to develop apps and advanced SWF charting, etc. I guess I just wasn’t hardcore enough. I found using external compilers and opensource IDEs to be confusing and a little more than clunky. Did I not give it a good enough try? Maybe. I think its more likely that I just had too much bilable work to do to spend a few weeks testing out new workflows. Flex builder helps me (being a pretty mainstream Flash developer) get things done quickly without having to cobble together an IDE and complier setup. It just works. I have played with it and can’t wait to use it on a client project.
Webkit Everywhere - The Engine used to render HTML in Safari is an opensource project called Webkit. Webkit is pretty decent. Fair rendering of CSS, nice typography (Drop shadows, etc.) The iPhone most certainly uses it. Adobe’s Apollo uses it. The opensource project looks to have some steam building up and it most likely will only be a matter of time before additional vendors use it. The more devices with browsers that are good, the better.
Web2.0 Buzz subsides - Will the craze of gradients and rounded corners ever die? Sure. Will the thought that if you tag an item or add a taxonomy to a site give way to a dose of realism that not everything has to be social. I recently tried out me.dium. Blah. I don’t think I want to chat with other random nerds out on the WWW. I know enough nerds in realspace. I like that people are excited about the web again. I worked in 1999. It was fun. 2001-2002 pretty well sucked to be a web designer. Don’t want to go back there, but can we please not have to say, “it’s like flickr mixed with digg but with a folksonomy layer delivered via webservices.”
Anyway… thats some of the products/events, etc, in the web world I’m looking forward to. How about you?
Really cool animation, fun music, great art… All in all a very solid flash game! Lots of fun.
I have built puzzle games, exploratory games, quiz games, side scroller race games, but never a platformer. Maybe I should try one once. Anyone need a platformer game out there?
I do miss the days of the 2D sidescroller. Hopefully with the Wii’s Virtual Console success we’ll see a resurgence in the old school mechanics of a good ole’ scrolly game.
The year 2007 is sure to be a great year for me and my family. We have some really awesome things about to happen. Some very exciting landmarks and life changing events.
It seems in the time since I have graduated from school things have accelerated, though I don’t feel as overwhelmed with life changes as I used to. I guess I was too self absorbed or over analytical. Maybe I’m getting mellower, I don’t know. Had things like this magnitiude even happened to me several years ago, I probably would have flipped out.
So what exactly am I looking forward to?
My new son – Just as Sophia changed my life and my relationship with with my wife, parents, in-laws and friends, I’m sure that when Liam gets here my life will be changed as well. I’ll now have a boy to teach and play with, to hope with dream with. And of course to buy Star Wars and Lego toys for! In just under two months from today, he will probably be here and I’ll be exhausted. Renee will be ecstatic and even more tired that I. Sophia will be wondering just what happened to
her little world. In short… nothing will be the same.
My Sister’s Wedding – Jessie has been dating her fiance Joe for about 2 or maybe even three years. They have a beautiful home and a great dog Maizy(sp?). And soon, they’ll join the club of old married people like me and Renee. We’re really looking forward to being part of their big day and hope the best for them!
My Brother In Laws daughter - Finally! A first cousin for Sophia and another grandchild for Renee’s parents. Something tells me Christmas is going to be crazy come 2007! Maggie is going to so fun! We can’t wait.
My parent’s new house – For the first time in thirty years, my parent’s will be moving. They are actuallly planning on leaving Southwest Wisconsin to move to Northwest Illinois. They’ve assured me that they are still going to be Packer and Badger fans. I’m really excited for them.
So, four main things… no big top ten or anything, but some really great stuff. I really am hopeful all of things go smoothly and will be very thankful with the passing of each and every one of them.
So, I am planning on making a series of posts that will detail some of the things that I am waiting for/anticipating, etc in the year 2007. Many people make a list of top ten albums, movies etc that they enjoyed at the end of the year, but I guess I’m kind of flipping that around. I will be posting a list under each of my blog categories. (At this time: Family, Fun, Industry, School, Uncategorized, Work). Probably won’t be in that order. I think I’ll probably post in whatever order I formalize my thoughts in first.
I would ask that if you are reading this, you think of doing the same. What will you be thankful for at the end of the year? What new toys will you be playing with? How will your work, life, friends, etc. be different or, better?
Keep checking this site. I’ll be posting about every other day on this topic until I’m done.
I am kind of torn on articles like this. I realize photoshop/illustrator is a very useful tool for producing designs. A necessary tool, even. I also realize that Imageready/Fireworks are needed to compress the images to make them web friendly. I’m not above using Dreamweaver when needed to bang out a quick design or two as well… but call me old fashioned. I don’t like the XHTML/CSS output by design tools like Imageready.
Using the argument that this is for mockups/prototypes will only get you so far, in my opinion. Why not just send a JPG? An HTML page with a JPG placed on it? A flash prototype, anything… why am I so against this… I guess it’s cuz I know most people just won’t go up and clean up the CSS or the HTML and we’ll just end up witha junk markup, non semantic, non search engine friendly page.
So, I haven’t really played a Zelda games since LOZII:The Adventure of Link. Sure I have dabbled a bit with Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. So a couple of weeks ago I gave in to temptation and bought The Twighlight Princess for my Wii. And like these glowing reviews, I’m in gaming heaven.
Aside from a couple annoying little platform-y segments where you have to jump like a madman, everything is just so cool. The combat, characters, the art, the controls. Just great. I feel like I might have been the last person on earth to buy this, but if you have a Wii and you don’t already have this. Go buy it. It’s fantastic.
The list is hilarious, but I feel they missed a couple of my favorites.
1. Good guys use Macs, bad guys use PCs.
2. Fingerprint scanning systems have really cool GUIs that show not only the print they are currently scanning, but also the number of matching points and the photo of the person the print is currently being compared against, for just a split second.
3. No one uses windows. Everyone uses some sort of OS developed by a Flash developer or some sort of KDE/Gnome theme.
4. When you connect to a remote system you have to call it something cool, like “uplinking”, or “jacking in”.
5. Even broadband connected computers have to go through a connection routine akin to dialing in via modem.
6. All systems at CTU have keyloggers and remote access/VNC on them.
Whenever I watch TV with my wife and I notice these, I usually can’t help but let out an amused snort.
