Whoa.

Massive Attack-Splitting the Atom-directed by Edouard Salier from edouard salier on Vimeo.

Director : Edouard Salier
Commissioner : Svana Gisla
Production : Scream Park, Paris
Executive Producer : Anne Lifshitz
Post Production : Digital District
Post producer : David Danesi
CGI: Jean Lamoureux, Rémi Gamiette, Kevin Monthureux, Jimmy Cavé
Art & Compositing : Julien Michel, Xavier Reyé.
Flame: Christophe Richard

What do you do when you aren’t writing classes or managing assets on a timeline in Flash? How do you expand your knowledge or exercise your creativity? For me, if I still feel like tinkering on a computer but not really doing any *real* Flash/HTML/CSS work, I like to find new tools and try them out. Sometimes I produce stuff worth sharing, sometimes it’s just tinkering and playtime.

As a professional, it can sometimes become more about the day to day. The grind. You need to take a step back every once in a while and experiment. Like these guys…

Read on.
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It’ll be here soon. It’ll be widget making time. Woo hoo.

Ahh… that time of the year again. Time for everyone’s top ten end of the year lists. I used to write ones for record albums or movies, videos games etc. Here I am taking a slightly different slant. I haven’t ever put one together focused on the industry that I work in, the web/rich internet app design space. This is my attempt at that. These aren’t really in an order or “awesomeness” or anything… I welcome comments and your additions. Please feel free to shoot down my suppositions or add more!

• Google Releases Galore – The list was staggering. I couldn’t possibly get them all here, but some notables were Voice, Chrome, Chrome OS, new Android devices, Wave, and major revisions to the Maps and Earth APIs. A really strong list of stuff, and virtually all of it is highly useful and usable. They are definitely on a roll now. Are they making good on their promise to “not be evil”? It can’t be easy with that many outlets.
• Twitter Goes Main-Mainstream! – When Twitter’s publicized race between CNN and AK to reach a million followers hit the mainstream press, that was a wake up to virtually every media outlet out there. Twitter was for real. Now, you can’t even watch your local affiliate, pick up a small town paper or even talk to your aunt without them telling you to follow them on Twitter. Numerous high profile magazine covers on Fortune and other “old media” stalwarts have signaled a changing of the guard, if you will.
• People Finally Notice Facebook Privacy Settings – Facebook has taken some heat in the past for Beacon and various other advertising techniques they have employed to provide users with targeted content. With later 2009’s changes to the privacy settings page and a note from Zuckerberg to all users about the changes coming soon, it obvious that Facebook’s privacy policy is on a lot of people’s minds. I know I’m not too keen on my wall posts showing up in Google searches or things like that, and I have had a lot of novice FB user friends and relatives ask me how to restrict their content so that only close friends can see things. Now, will this help people finally realize the difference between a private message and a wall post!
• Oracle Buyout of Sun – “The database giant swallows the beleagured server system maker”, lots of headlines like that spun out after news of the buyout. Most, if not all missed the simple fact that Sun controls the MySQL Open Source Database. Even the Oracle press release neglects that fact. Since a large majority of notable Open Source projects use MySQL as their database, this has a large number of people in the community apprehensive and readying thei exit strategies. Will it result in a fork of the DB? Stay tuned for this one.
• Piratebay Rollercoaster – Is it up? Is it down? Are they in jail? Ever since the fateful day when their offices were stormed, the future of the tracker had been in question. They went to trial and all were found guilty, sentenced to jail for a year and a hefty fine was leveed. These convictions are all in appeals now. Then in the summer, Global Gaming Factory X AB announced they were intending to purchase the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world. The deal fell through. In November, they announced they would be shutting down the tracker portion of TPB, stating that it was unnecessary in today’s technological world of torrent distribution. While not technically a “web design topic”, it is important due to the huge amount of content trafficked via Torrents (estimated to account for up to 25% of all bits travelling the tubes.)
• Flash and Silverlight Play Feature Tag – No question about it, I’ve been tough on Silverlight. It’s too be expected, I’m a long time Mac user and a Flash developer. You couldn’t hardly expect me to jump on the bandwagon of a plug-in that directly competes with my favorite one and doesn’t offer proper development tools on the platform I spend all of my time on. This year at PDC, however, the newest version of Silverlight was unveiled, and man, does it look sweet! It finally is reaching a new feature parity of Flash. It still has no Mac dev tools, though. One thing is certain with all of this, it is really pushing Adobe to make Flash better. The 10.1 player update is bringing massive memory and performance updates and the AIR 2.0 update is bringing a ton of great improvements that will allow it to get a lot more powerful as an app development platform. I’m really happy to see the 2 way competition here, it’s good for everyone on the web.
• IE9 Announces Hardware Acceleration For The Browser – I have really mixed feelings on this. No actually, I really don’t like it much after further review. The features it will bring to websites are going to be amazing, no doubt, but with it being a Direct X implementation, there is little question that it is going to lead to a further forking of the web. Will anything programmed to take advantage of these IE9 features work on Firefox? Safari, Chrome? Older version of IE? In all likelihood, no. It’s probably not possible.
• OGG Theora Not Chosen for HTML5’s Media Format – This really put a crimp in HTML5’s ever shining hope. A single, dependable unified system agnostic video codec would be a huge thing for the W3 to get pushed through. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be. At least not right yet. Too many vendors, PC makers, software developers and everyone else are still squabbling for turf. They seem to have hit an impasse at this point, but Mozilla says they have no intention on giving in.
• Firefox Surpasses Any Single IE Version As The Most Popular Browser - Granted, Firefox has taken a beating lately by Webkit in many performance tests, but the venerable open source browser has recently overtaken IE as the world’s most widely used browser. Most impressive. From the linked article: “As of last week, Firefox 3.5 claimed 21.93% of the market, edging past IE7’s 21.2% share. That said, Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 still collectively hold over 55% of the pie.”
• With Smartphone Success, Comes a Mobile Version of Everything! – Smartphone market share keeps growing, and with it, mobile data usage. As this market continues to develop, content developers are caught in a very interesting pickle. Create a mobile version of their site for use in the handheld’s browser or build custom tailored apps that accomplish the user’s goals. Seems as though most major providers that can swing it are hedging their bets and building both. ESPN, New York Times, LinkedIn, Twitter, the list goes on and on. Will this continue? It doesn’t seem like a sustainable model to me, with development costs skyrocketing with each new device or platform coming to the markets. Luckily with a great SOA back end, building the new discreet UI for a device is only a marginal cost, relatively speaking, but there is only so far this can go.

So, there you have it. My list, what do you have on yours? I thought I did a pretty job scouring back through my feedreader and various other sources, so I feel pretty good about the list, but I really am looking for insights from others on this topic, too!

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.

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In addition to these titles that have been on my shelves for a few months, I recently added two brand new books that are so far big winners in my view.

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.