No, I haven’t lost my mind. If you are visiting this site wondering, “What the font???!!!!”, well, yeah… This is in Comic Sans. October 1st has been declared National Comic Sans Day!
Read about it on John Wilker’s blog.
Oh, and if you want to learn about the origin of the world’s most hated typeface, read up on it here.
So, I’ve been fairly inactive here. Sure I’ve had time to tweet a bit, but by and large, I’ve been head down on a couple major projects. One, we just launched (I’ll provide much more info on that project coming soon. The other project is just starting to get fully underway, with wireframes and most of the definition docs created. Now, time for prototyping. We’re pulling out all the stops for that one… using robotics, arcade controllers, integrating augmented reality and leveraging some kick butt APIs like Google Earth! That doesn’t launch until March of next year, at a major Chicago area museum.
Beyond that, I am scheduled to participate in an upcoming exhibit featuring work by the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein. That should be a great time and allow for some real creativity!
I hope you are all enjoying a brief respite in your work right now for the dog days of summer and relaxing with a nice beer or iced coffee. I know I am. I just brewed an Imperial IPA, currently carbonating in the dark of my cool basement… first tasting, this week! Don’t know Imperial IPA as a style of beer… take a look at these beauties. My garden is coming in nicely, too, despite the Japanese beetles best attempts to eat it all!
How are you staying busy? What are you doing to blow off some steam this summer?
Thanks to all of you who attended my web meeting today. I appreciate that you took time out of your day to hear me blab about blogs and twitter! Anyway, here is the presentation I gave today, save in PDF format, enjoy! socialmedia101
Admittedly fishing here… but man is the new Flip Mino HD cool… you can even customize it… I made one with my CoolerKreator images on it. Hot! Check it out.
We have been heads down at work. We have 3 interactive exhibits set to go live this month. One at a corporate headquarters that uses Red5 for multiuser sync, motion detection and high definition video and moton graphics on 3 52″ LCDs. One that broadcasts live data streams detailing savings gained from a grey water reclimation system and overlays the infographics on high-definition video on a huge 1080p 120Hz display. The other project is a pair of kiosks set to be installed in Bermuda (no, I don’t get to go there to install 
).Once we have some photos/videos of the installs, I’ll try and post them.
Beyond that, we are exiting a first round of usability testing on a great new elearning development application we are building at doctumlearning.com. We used Silverback for our testing. It’s a really really cool tool for Macs that records a screencast and a video feed from the iSight to create a record of the test. Hard to argue with video evidence, after all. The app is coming along strong, feature complete and ready to build some training. We’ve put together a great interface and the Flash based content it outputs is pretty dang nice.
Related to that, I will be attending DevLearn ‘08 next week. You can catch up with my twittering and possibly blogging from there. Tim O’Reilly is giving the keynote. Dan Roam is going to be there speaking, as is Dr. John Medina. Should be really really cool. We’ll be demoing at demofest, showing of the work we did with the International Society of Arboriculture that uses the Doctum platform. Psyched!
There is a one day Adobe elearning summit going on there, too, I’m definitely hitting that one. Are you planning on attending? Let me know! I’m interested in meeting up with other developers out there, so track me down.
If you twitter, be sure to check out the dl08 hashtag on twitter search and the devlearn08 one as well. This blog post here has a list of fellow twitterers headed to devLearn. Check it out.
Sorry for not posting more recently… I’ve been buried!
I spent the last few days in Colorado, it was beautiful! I was the best man in a wedding there (in Estes Park), you can see some photos from the trip here. CO is a nice place with fantastic scenery and super tasty microbrews. Highly recommended.
While I was there, I got to meet Juan Sanchez, designer at Effective UI, and one of the main contributors to DeGrafa. He mentioned that Scalenine’s skin contest had completed. What a great pile of entries! I can’t wait to see the library grow and serve as the premier resource for Flex Designers on the web. How cool. Even cooler, was the fact that my Coworker, Heather Ford, was one of the winners with her DiscoType Theme! Awesome.
Beyond that, my students are begnining to build some mashups and make some progress learning Flex… Some recent ones they’ve made… GeekVahalla (a tech focused RSS Reader), TweetTally (a Twitter Tag cloud search). Dropped Passes (a sports focused RSS Reader). I hope to continue to post more as they pile up.
Finally, at The Iona Group, we are hard at work on our eLearning development platform, Doctum. We’re gearing up to launch and start talking to people/demoing it at DevLearn08. If you’d like to be made aware when we launch, head on over to DoctumLearning.com to get on our list of contacts. We have a full site launching soon with features, videos etc explanining what makes it different, but for now it’s kind of in a hush hush mode. Needless to say lots of work is going on and the system is shaping up to be pretty amazing, if I do say so myself.
Woohoo… subscribe to my feed! It’s in feedburner so it’s a snap to use. Do it!
For more info on RSS Day, check it out…
First a teaser back in December. Now a leak at a booth at NAB? Hmm. Weird. Come on already, drop the knowledge. Something is definitely coming out from Adobe soon, just go check out the various Twitter search engines and look for Adobe, you find a few tweets on it. Some big stuff on the horizon. Crossing my fingers! If nothing else, it looks like Mike Chambers and others at Adobe are working to get MXNA back up… lets go! Good work guys, need the MXNA for my daily Adobe blog fix.
I do love Technorati. Without it, I wouldn’t see that a couple blogs (here and here) have recently posted about my CoolerKreator app, one of them actually making a clone (a very nice one, too)… probably using the source that was included in Computer Arts. It’s great to see people enjoying something you make.
I hope to have some more time to build a couple more mashups and AIR apps soon, though work has been time consuming and the school semester is in full swing. I also recently had to take a couple days off of work to attend a family funeral, so I have been out of the loop a bit… Here’s to hoping for a productive Spring!
So, I just realized that I have been running this site for a year… Nearly a couple hundred posts, too! I plan on pulling some of my favorite posts out and revisitng them soon, but work has been too crazy to get around to doing that. So until then… enjoy my archive.
My del.icio.us
