Ok, so I have been shooting any masterpieces. It’s just the wildlife I happen to share my house with, two wild animals named Sophia and Liam. I borrowed a Sony HDR-SR1 from a friend and coworker and have been having a blast with it. I have a camera. It is an 8 year old Sony Digital 8 I bought to use with my Graphite iMac DV SE. Had some fun with that too… Just got tired of the tapes, remembering which were used, losing them, wearing them out, accidentally shooting over top of them, etc. What a pain! Shooting to a hard drive is a lot more freeing. No rewind to review, cue, etc.¬† Digitization is a snap , too… And with my TimeCapsule (Which is awesome), I have no worries for hard drive storage space, yet. I may need to pick me up one of these! Brett, sell me this one!

I’m sure I’ll get back to posting some stuff about some of the bigger projects we have going on soon, but for now, they are still in the planning stages and can’t really be divulged. One is a video postcard app powered with a Flex frontend using Flash Media Server, the other is a 3 screen synced 1080p interactive installation, and we are also discussing a couple presentation system content management RIAs as well, for a couple different clients. Could be some great stuff coming up. On top of that, we are just days/weeks away from relaunching our companies website. What a busy summer.

Thought we’d have some time for play, but no rest for the wicked.

Last week at RIAPalooza a number of the presenters mentioned the use of animations in the design and development of RIAs. No one got very specific, but nearly everyone agreed that some amount of animation was helpful in assisting users with cues on how to use the application or letting them know that they have affected something. In general, I would agree. In my opinion, before you go off and idly start animating those widgets or state changes, though, it would pay off to think through the applications design and goals and make sure that those animations streamline the user experience, or in some other way ease the use of the application making it more pleasurable to work with. Read on for some helpful tips to consider. (more…)

Attending RIAPalooza this weekend and seeing Michael Labriola and Josh Holmes present on what to do and what not to do when designing an RIA, I got to thinking a bit about this video… take a look.

I think that pretty much says it all. One choice modal dialog boxes? No clear cancellation, overly friendly, but still not helpful expert system? Ouch. I think I squashed all the humor out of that video by explaining it, but, in your opinion what are some other big NO-NOs in making RIAs?

My coworker Mark Tovey and I got back from a 1.5 day event in Chicago, RIAPalooza. (For the record I pronounce it “arr eye ay”, not “reeyah”) He’s already written his recap. I’ll give it my shot here.

The event’s site described the event as such:

RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and “PowerPoint-Free” zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.

Overall, it delivered as promised, the informal, community feeling was definitely there. The Friday night session and the QA that followed it were lively and really quite good. I’ll give a brief overview of each session. (more…)