This Wednesday at 5PM marks the opening of an exhibit I am lucky enough to be a part of. Kevin Stein, poet laureate for the state of Illinois will be featured in an innovative collection of digital poetry, design and installation work done by a variety of other Peoria area artists and Bradley faculty.¬†The pieces I have seen thus far are fantastic. The work is just great. The event is going to be held at the Hartmann Center Gallery on Bradley’s campus from 5-7PM on Wednesday. More info is available here.

My piece is a Quartz Composition that combines curated television clips, dynamic generated static and test patterns, and an interactive camera all composited with the poem and a waving star spangled banner. I hope you can make it! This was a fun project to put together, something that introduced me to a new tool and opened a world of possibilities to me creatively as far as how I could envision building an interactive experience.

Depeche Mode – Fragile Tension (music video) – OpenFrameworks at Work

I’ve recently been looking into realtime video compositing and effects and chanced on this video after popping around at memo.tv and various other Quartz Composer focused sites. This is some really beautiful work here. Truly amazing when you read up on how it was made, too.

• A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources
  Wireframing is one of the best parts of starting a new web design project. You have a blank canvas and you are allowed to let your creativity rein free. Your design may eventually be spoiled by the clients added input… but for that short time…
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• Concerns on CSS Validation and iPhone targetting
  Using the media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" value in your link to the CSS file will cause a failure in the W3 validator. How can you fix that?
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• WWW FAQs: How do I design web pages for the iPhone?
  Another detailed article on targeting the iPhone via Conditional Comments and CSS media type attributes
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• ClickTale Blog ¬ª Unfolding the Fold
  Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.

• WireLust ¬ª Blog Archive ¬ª AS3 port of JZLib
  AS3 port of JZLib – A project that uses FZip to decompress zip files in flash. Pretty nice stuff if you need that kind of thing.
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• SEOmoz | How to Ruin a Web Design – The Design Curve
  So true.
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I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, begins the real work. The work of consolidating the notes, following up on the contacts made (some virtual contacts finally made real… I always love when that happens) and trying to make some steps to implement the great ideas I picked up there and talked over with new and old colleagues. (more…)

I’ll have a full recap on the conference later, but for now, here is our presentation deck. Enjoy!

Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them:

The eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference is rapidly approaching. DevLearn 09 is sure to be a great event with keynotes from Leo Laporte and more. The conference this year is particularly interesting, with a complete ARG being played around a “Zombie Apocalypse” scenario. Teams, points, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more are all coming together in a very fun interactive way. It’s been great so far! I’m looking forward to see where it goes once the conference gets started.

The Iona Group will be going, with myself, Mark Tovey and John Feser all attending. Mark and I will be presenting. Our topic is about the use of APIs in eLearning. It’s a topic that is pretty dear to us. We have learned quite a bit about this through our experience getting Doctum up and running. The concept of building a resuable, sharable codebase is very prevalent in web and interactive development, but we have found that in the eLearning community it is relatively unheard of.

This could be due to a number of things, but by and large it appears to us that this may be in large part due to the fact that eLearning tools are not focused on separating content from presentation and behavior.

This practice is the foundation of of OOP and implemented in all of our work at The Iona Group. We’re happy to talk to others about it.

Here is the link to our presentation… check it out.