Kevin Stein – On Being a Nielsen Family
A video of Kevin Stein giving background information on his poem, “On Being a Nielsen Family”. Recorded at the show opening at the Hartmann Center for the Arts, Bradley University.
What a great night. Lots of people came out to show their support and my piece didn’t even crash. Win win!
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.
I’ve written a couple posts on the subject of books I read and collect regarding web design, RIA design and other technology topics. It’s been awhile, though and I have added a number of great books from O’Reilly Media to my shelf. A couple of these, I am currently using or will be using soon in my web design classes at Bradley University. I used to buy books from a lot of presses, but grew tired of quality issues, etc. Typos, factual errors and other things just seem to be a lot more rare in O’Reilly titles than other publishers.
Visualizing Data by Ben Fry ‚Äì This book is a mind blower. At the same time, it’s a real clarifier. Visualizing rich data sets is no doubt a very deep, heady and amazing beautiful discipline. Most books about it float around in cerebral land, never giving you tactical steps you can make to clear up your charts and make your presentation really pop. This book is fairly Processing focused, but the code is close enough that you can see parallels on how you could maybe achieve similar effects in Flash (if you can get around the slightly less powerful Flash player’s CPU/Memory limits for things like this). The Treemap (a sweet visualization technique!) and data acquisition (useful for mashups) sections were particularly cool in my mind.
Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer ‚Äì I really think this book kicks ass. Great pictures, some awesome tips on how to storyboard and test gestural UI and much more. This is a somewhat self explanatory discipline once you get deep into it, but the photo reference in it is worth the price alone. Some reviewers on Amazon were pretty harsh about the book not having enough code or something in it, but really, if you want API specific code samples on how to do deep interactivity go buy some books on that specific API. I’d call those reviewers dipshits, but that would be rude. 
High Performance Websites by Steve Souders ‚Äì Not surprisingly, this is pretty much YSlow in book form. Steve Souders was once Chief Performance Yahoo! and is currently web performance evangelist at Google (and one of the chief minds behind YSlow). This book is fantastic and since its a super short read and written pretty plainly, it can often be used to start off client or management conversations regarding misconceptions they may have about website performance. I highly recommend this title for it’s concise writing, inexpensive advice and a clear ROI it brings your sites. I guess he has a new book out that goes a step or three beyond this, but I haven’t picked it up yet.
Painting the Web by Shelly Powers
– This is a dense book, covering virtually every aspect of graphics on the web. From server side image creation to graphic prep. Tips on achieving some contemporary styles are covered, though this content will undoubtedly date the book sooner than much of the rest of this otherwise very fine title. The book does need a second edition, though, covering a bit more HTML5 and hopefully some FXG to become a true must must buy.
Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter 
‚Äì My only non-O’Reilly pick in this list. Why? You gotta love an easy read with lots of pictures and simple points you can actually remember. This is one of them. Not only that, but this is a book you can share with your managers or your marketing folks and not scare them. No code, no psuedo-code, even… Just pure social web design from one of the industry’s brightest minds. Easily worth the 4-5 hour read that it is.
Mobile Design and Development by Brian Fling 
– This book is a home run. A history of the mobile space, a great overview of the current mobile ecosystem (devices, providers, OSes, etc), and an entire design and development/implementation guide. Wow. 300 pages of must read mobile content for right now. What happens in 6 months? Well, maybe some of the book will be a little out of date, but the reference info on device targeting and ROI is pure gold.
Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
‚Äì If you took the Porter book and smashed it together with Jennifer Tidwell’s excellent book, “Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design”, which is a goldmine of UI help, you would get this book. 100 UI patterns dissected, with images and how and why you should use each one of them all handily indexed. It’s like a print version of Pattern Tap focused on social interaction and devoid of any filler or self promotional crap.
So, there you go, the most recent books I’ve added to my collection. I’m always looking for ones to add to my library, what are you reading now that you would like to share? BTW, I need a Kindle. My shelves are getting full! Hook a blogger up!
Please join myself and my coworkers from The Iona Group at our upcoming Peoria Ad Club event. You can sign up here.
From the link:
The Iona Group engages with a wide variety of clients using the latest communication strategies and technologies. Join us for a discussion of trends in digital advertising, audience engagement, and online strategy. Iona Group will share recent work and research and development; including killer wireless robots, eye bulging video installations, incredibly sticky phone applications, and websites that will make you scratch your head and wonder, “HOW?”.
We’ll be covering our latest work, sharing some stories and drinking a couple cocktails. Come talk shop with us and raise a glass.
Puppet Fun!
Originally uploaded by RocketSeason
We’ve got stuff cooking. More info coming. Can’t wait to unveil this one.
As most of you who visit here know, I love Flash. Pretty much always have (Flash 3 baby! I ditched Director as quickly as I could.). Sure, we’ve had our differences on and off again over the years, but overall, I continue to be a strong advocates for the technology and love to use it whenever I can on projects for myself and clients. Many of you are probably also are aware that I am also an Apple geek. I have owned over a half dozen Macs myself, and used them long before I was able to get my parents to finally pick one up for me at the end of high school.
Usually, this works out well together. Adobe/Macromedia software pretty much always runs on Apple hardware, with only a few exceptions. A big one happened a couple of years ago with the advent of the iPhone. Here I was, lusting over the phone, but a little heartbroken that the “real internet” as they put it in the first ads for the phone would be missing a key component, Flash. I bought the phone, and yes, at first, I did miss not having Flash on the mobile Safari browser packaged with the phone. More than a little.
Tease after tease, rumor after rumor, here we are, two years later, two major hardware and software revisions later, and still no Flash on the iPhone. The desire to actually have the plugin on the phone, though, at least for me has greatly waned. I’ve simply moved on. It’s not that I wouldn’t welcome it, but with YouTube encoding the videos in H.264 and a lot of other sites out there doing the same, it’s less important to me. Furthermore, many sites have mobile optimized versions of the site available for iPhone users, so browsing the “real internet” isn’t really relevant as an argument anymore. When you add the app store and all the specialized apps for viewing box scores, Twitter, Facebook and the rest, I actually find myself opening Safari less and less with each passing month as an iPhone user.
Beyond the adaptations that content producers have gone through to make their experiences better on the iPhone, there are just as many things that haven’t been “optimized” for the iPhone actually makes the experience even better. In two years surfing using mobile safari, I have yet to be harassed by an annoying Flash banner ad or crazy iframe popover atrocity. That’s nice, if you ask me!
Now, on the flipside, I as a content producer would love to be able to bring some of my creations to the best small screen platform out there, the iPod Touch/iPhone combo. Of course challenges like multitouch, and lack of a hover state for UI feedback among others would need to be worked out. Who wouldn’t love to hack together some sort of GeoLocational Augmented Reality Papervision freak out awesomeness? With the addition or accelorometers, compass, live Google maps and so many other nice things that phone has to offer, building Flash on the phone would be a ton of fun…
But then again, we’d get so many ad banners. I don’t know about you, but when you sometimes have little control over your mobile bandwidth (eg. dropping to Edge, getting fewer bars than 3, etc), I’m not too keen on giving up those precious bits to some video banner being crammed down my narrow little pipe.
The sheer amount of fun stuff built in Flash would add a ton of great content to the phone, from casual games, to chat apps or even Acrobat Connect. It’s very likely that the App store is the reason that we don’t have Flash, think about how many $0.99 apps would be obsoleted the instant that Flash hit the phone. That is a lot of income that Apple would lose. This is all but obvious, and widely discussed amongst the Apple and Adobe faithful alike.
What are your thoughts? Miss Flash? Not so much? Why is it on virtually every other major mobile platform, but not iPhone? What would you build in Flash for the iPhone that would be a perfect blend of the hardware’s capabilities and the software’s strengths?