Came across this post while doing a bit of searching on Adobe CS4… Just trying to see what might be coming down the pipe for ‘08. Geek Glue: Adobe CS4 : RIA Premium ?. This package sounds unlikely, because I haven’t ever seen a strictly “developer” tool/IDE like Flex Builder bundled by Adobe/Macromedia (back in the Director days for example), but it certainly would be a cool way to purchase the apps myself and my team members need. I’m sure there are other teams out there composed like the ones at my work, too. This would be a great way to ease the purchasing situation for small and mid size teams and businesses.

Somewhat related topic, I guess… but I’d love to see the Dreamweaver team roll out an SDK that could just be used in the FlexBuilder IDE… I love working in Eclipse and have dropped Dreamweaver in favor of using the Aptana plugin in my FlexBuilder, if for no other reason that I already have the application open and it’s integrated with my SVN server, too. For my smaller HTML/CSS stuff I still use BBEdit.

So this is my son’s first Christmas… My Daughter’s 4th. Having kids really changes this holiday, that’s for sure. We are having lots of fun spending time with friends and family. The kids are enjoying having me home for an extended stay, and I haven’t been working at all.

We took a trip up north to visit my parents in their new beautiful home. Played some Wii with my sister and had some nice meals.  And for the kids, lets not forget the presents. Oh Jeez. The presents. We drove home through a terrible patch of near whiteout weather between Dubuque and Davenport that took nearly 3 hours (about double the normal time). I’m sure my wife will be posting some images today at her Flickr account… Sophia rode on a sled downhill for the first time yesterday and it was a blast. The pictures are great.

We have a video wall project we are conceiving right now that involves 32 40″ plus sized HD Displays… we are trying to build a sound reactive real time system that samples from webcams and integrates with some motion graphics effects. This is a conundrum for us. Usually we use Flash for pretty much everything, but this may be out of Flash’s capabilities. We conceived with Flash this would require a Flash media/data server, and 32 Mac minis. In this scenario, we are looking at nearly 60-70K in hardware costs alone, never mind the design and development efforts.

If we were to move to VVVV or Processing or something else… what is realistically the hardware configuration needed to take real time video, add motion graphics and type, have it be reactive to a sound track and allow interplay from one screen to another (some images or videos may need to move from one screen to another)… All at 720P resolution.

Do we need 32 computers? Do we need a server? What kind of cameras should be used?

Moving to a node based authoring system from ActionScript 3 is daunting, but we don’t want to over extend our selves on Flash, obviously.

Any advice out there from Flash devs doing large scale shows? Alternative authoring tools are certainly up for grabs at this point…

Just got a note from Adobe on this…. In addition to Thermo lowering the bar for Flex development, it looks as though Adobe has a tool coming out to compete with Swish, etc… Very cool!

Adobe Bordeaux is the codename for a new product for graphic designers, art directors, creative directors, and others who don’t need all the capabilities of Flash Professional and want to create flash content easily without knowing ActionScript or programming.

Bordeaux enables graphic designers to efficiently create site openers, rich media banners, microsites, portfolios, and other small-scale Flash projects. Art Directors and Creative Directors can use Bordeaux to add interactivitym motion, and video to Photoshop comps or InDesign layouts to create interactive moodboards and concepts, making it possible to communicate ideas more efectively to clients and design teams.

• Easily create buttons, menus, slideshows, video controllers and other interactive components
• Customise the look and behavior of interactive components included with Bordeaux
• Visually convert artwork to interactive elements without coding
• Trigger actions and events from markers you add to your video and audio
• Create multi-page microsites as easily as dragging and dropping
• Make objects and text move, spin, resize, reveal, slide, bounce, fade, and more without using keyframes or code
• Easily control how motion responds to mouse events
• Import, trim, and encode video files into FLV
• Add audio and trim and adjust levels
• Import native Photoshop files as layers
• Import InDesign files with pages and objects preserved as individual elements
• Output efficient SWF or Adobe AIR files

This sounds great to me. I have had a post or two on the topic of Flash’s learning curve being a bit high for the newbie. As an educator, I really like this. As a developer who has to get Flash .fla files with prepped art from designers who aren’t too AS savvy, I really like this… absolutely perfect. Hope it’s not too expensive.

Actually I don’t know about that, but looks so in the video here. His new site UVNTv.com is NOT using it for the video channels. There is a ton of Flash content on the site, but the TV portion of the site is a Sliverlight application. It sorta worked on my computer, but I got a ton of errors while surfing it. Take a look…

At least there is a place to go use this plugin I have installed… I found it interesting in the video they had to point out several times it works on a Mac. I frequently hear Flash developers say the same thing. Oh wait, no I don’t.

Snarky, eh?

Why, you ask? Why not, I reply.
A little more playing with the AS3 drawing API.

I think I can find something useful to do with this, but until then, I’ll probably make a few more little pictures. I gotta admit, I’m liking the AS3 drawing API.

I’m currently downloading the Flex Beta 3 and the new Air SDK. Woohoo! I have a H.264 project I need to run through it. Just in time for my deadlines.

UGH. Seen it? Black, 60GB… custom engraved. Blarrgh!

I gave a presentation to the Introduction to Multimedia Class (MM113), the title was “Multimedia as Art”. In 50 minutes, I had to cover Dada to Joshua Davis. Whew. A tal order, but overall, it went smoothly. I have the slides notes in a PDF for you here.

Without checking the hyperlinks and seeing the accompanying media, it might be a bit dreary, but the art shown was of course pretty fantastic.

We talked about Charles Csuri, John Whitney, COSA, the early Demo Scene, Director, Flash and the newest trends in generative art and realtime graphics created with Flash, Processing, Context Free, and VVVV.

Thanks to Scott Cavanah for inviting me to come talk.

Thanks to the admins at programable web for making Kuler Creator mashup of the day for December 7th, 2007… very cool indeed! have I have a few additions planned for the Kuler api, so stay tuned… Keep making compositions… I love seeing what people are getting out of the system. If you are a PW member… go there and vote.