We at The Iona Group concepted and designed a site that uses Flash, Video, Telephony, User Personalization and Email to create an e-card-like experience that has never been done quite this way before. We wrote, shot and edited together nearly 200 unique videos and payoffs that are very humorous and allow the visitor to stitch together a custom message that composites their voice (recorded and played back by Oddcast’s very cool telephony, keyboard or text to speech technology) with the actor on stage. The results are pretty cool and super funny! We’ve been working very hard on this site for some time and needless to say it hasn’t always been easy, but our designers and videographers at Iona, and the developers at Oddcast have all done a great job! Many thanks to the client for the opportunity to do this work, and we look forward to sending tons of Improv-o-Grams to friends, coworkers and family!

Take a look:

I’ll be posting some behind the scenes on how we accomplished some of the video/flash interaction later this week, maybe this weekend, if I get around to it.

For now, go check it out!

So the crazy hackers have managed to get Apache, Python, etc running on the iPhone. Why? Because they can. Forget the “But can it run Linux?” questions, it doesn’t need to!

Check it out here.

How useful is all of this? Probably not very, but it is fun seeing the developments and wondering what’s next… I really hope someone is able to create a GPS/Navigation application. Google Maps on it is nice, but not quite as useful as it could be without turn-by-turn and wayfinding.

It’s cool that MAX is on our neck of the woods this year. We’re just a couple hours outside of Chicago, so it makes a lot of sense to go. Lowered travel costs, etc. We have a group of 7 people from the Iona Group attending. Should be a great time, and with that many people we can cover just about every session, probably.

Well, 4 days into the activation  saga, I finally got a CSR who knew what they were doing… You know, some people I spoke to on the phone had no idea that the phone had to be activated through iTunes, some didn’t see my account at all, some thought I was a business customer, some thought because I had purchased my original Cingular phone online through a third party I couldn’t activate it, some thought I couldn’t because my wife and I had a family talk plan, some because I had combined billing with my home and wireless account… on and on.

I had to have my account deleted while on the phone with my CSR and then have the account recreated. That was it. My tech support hell is now over and can finally use the phone. Which is awesome, BTW. Just weird that it took so long to get through the process… not easy at all.

This is my last iPhone related post for a while. I promise. I have some great flash/work related posts coming this week… been doing a lot of work with Flash video lately.

I chanced upon an 8GB iPhone at the local AT&T store here and bought it. Things went downhill from there. The activation failed, and to make matters worse, my old trusty Sony Ericsson’s SIM card was deactivated. This left me with no phone starting sometime around 7PM last night. Can’t even access the voicemail. It would have been eaasier for me if I wasn’t already a subscriber.
Seems that if you  have home AT&T service and wireless service and just so happen to have them conveniently linked… you can’t activate an iPhone. Fun stuff. And convenient. So, today at 7AM I got my accounts unlinked and now have to wait 24 hours to get a chance to try to activate the iPhone again. Fabulous. A $600 brick.

If it doesn’t work  tomorrow morning, I will have to wait until Sunday night at least. I’m headed to my hometown to be in my sister’s wedding. Very cool indeed, but even cooler if my phone worked. At this point even if it was my old phone, it would be cool… I swear, if this doesn’t work soon, I’m dropping AT&T and getting one of those new TMobile Wifi Phones where you can make Wifi calls and save your minutes… then, I’m dropping AT&T for wireless and home. Booyah.

Did I just write Booyah?

The kooky hacking kids over at IRC channel #iphone claim to have gained full ownership of the iPhone filesystem. In an update titled “How to Escape Jail,” they highlight the technical steps required to enable custom ringtones, wallpapers and more for your iPhone. They have not released a tool for general consumption — yet –

From the Digg comments: “Now you can put a picture of The Arcade Fire as your background so that all of your friends at the organic grocery store will be impressed.”

And that my friends is just awesome.

read more | digg story

I ordered my phone last Wednesday, it now has a ship date of “on or before the 20th”. This is harder than waiting for Christmas! I have been comp[iling a list of must visit iPhone sites… Found a great repository at Rev2. I’m looking for other stuff for the iPhone, though, too… anyone have any preferences on cases, skins, sleeves? Found a good place to buy stuff for it. Any other iPhone must visits out there?

I wasn’t aware of this until I saw it on Digg today. This is pretty crappy if true. I use Kuler pretty frequently on my projects during the design phase, just for inspiration, ideas, etc… Seems it’s pretty much a copy of ColourLovers.com.

It turns out the basis of the sites are about the same, the pallette used in the sites’ designs are about the same and according to the owner of the ColourLover sit (a bit tongue in cheek), both have “Color Spelled with a “U”.

What do you think? Is it just a case of copying being a sincere form of flattery? Or is  it not giving credit where credit is due?

Many of my friends write Flash Lite stuff… They also are interested in developing content for the Wii… with the iPhone and the new Wii Ware SDK their interest in using Flash to do so may just have changed… especially with the new JQuery update.

I found this blog post especially insightful on what the mobile developer may need to consider on the iPhone and how it’s not playing Flash content might be better for everyone in the long run.