Patrick Clair

Love this animation style from Patrick Claire an aussie designer/animator who has worked for ABC and MTV. Nice one.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Myspace SOLD!

So myspace.com was sold today to a company called Specific Media for approx $35million.

Significantly News corp bought it for $580 million in 2005. A dramatic loss of users led to it's current demise.

Specific Media look to be teaming up with Justin Timberlake to reinvigorate the site and change it's angle towards being more a music, video, art site to increase the site's customer and advertising base.

It will be interesting to see if it can be reinvigorated.

Source: http://specificmedia.com/press/159

Google+

Google+ launched today - looks like a good community/networking tool, stripping away the much of the clunky narcissistic properties of facebook into a streamlined nice looking tool.

The circles feature is something that is integral to this new release and is a obvious, yet smart logic feature.

Check out the video below.


www.google.com

Google's SWF to HTML5 converter - Swiffy

Google have unveiled 'Swiffy' a swf to html5 converter. http://swiffy.googlelabs.com

Here is how it works:

"A SWF file is converted in two phases: the Swiffy compiler (which you can use on this website) processes the SWF file and generates a JSON file. A client-side JavaScript runtime loads that JSON file and renders it using HTML, SVG and CSS."

It looks like creating html5 animations is another thing Flash can do better than other programs.

This html5 thing is getting pretty boring with features designed to jump on the coat-tails of flash and not really providing any real innovation. With more than 99% of browsers supporting flash and increasing numbers of mobile devices I think it will be but a matter of time until Apple devices realise their mistake.

G-Speak platform - revolutionary new user interface

From the looks of things Oblong industries have been making solid progress on their g‑speak OE (spatial operating environment). If you have ever seen minority report and thought that was futuristic the systems they are building are looking set to rival the realtime data analysis tools that are seen in that movie.



Source: http://oblong.com/

White Noise generator website

I came across this website recently, in a nutshell, it plays 3 variations of white noise. 

www.simplynoise.com/

I thought it a gimmick but it does actually help you focus if there is sound around you that is distracting, and is an interesting concept.

Webhosting company hacked.

A recent attack on DistributeIT - has left that company reeling after they announced that they had also lost backups of many (possible in the thousands) sites in the attack. 

I find it hard to understand how a company can lose tape backups which I would expect any webhosting company to provide. However I have also lost a site from different hosting company in differing circumstances, where they stated they only backed up a weeks worth of history. 

This should be a firm reminder to always take care of your own files (at least in backup form) and not rely on others servers or cloud environments as the pin may be pulled by either negligence or maliciousness.

You can follow this story here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1711718&p=60

Interface design made in chocolate

Sagres a portuguese beer maker have released a promotional site for a new chocolate flavoured beer. 

http://www.sagres.pt/sagrespretachocolate/#/homepage 

What's interesting is the site entire site is made from chocolate which is then photographed and animated in Flash.

stopAllSounds in AS3 - Flash

The old stopAllSounds() method from as2 is easy to replace in AS3 using the following code:

import flash.media.SoundMixer;

SoundMixer.stopAll();

Using Firebug to troubleshoot dynamic web pages.

When building a site troubleshooting why images, scripts, xml files aren't being accessed can be a bit difficult. The solution I am using at the moment is a combination of FireBug for Firefox http://getfirebug.com/ and Fiddler for everything else including Flash CS5 IDE.

Firebug when activated allows among other things a NET tab that shows all incoming and outgoing data transactions from Firefox - very handy is the red highlighting of broken links - e.g xml files, images that are missing or in the wrong location.

All of these incoming/outgoing data requests are turned into hyperlinks allowing you to get access to individual elements on a page.

Firebug also allows you to change the code on a page on the fly to test if changes will work, an example of this is going to a site hosted by someone else and changing the background or the style that controls the colour of text on a page. Although these changes are not saved they are displayed in the browser. Another useful tool is the ability to select an area of a page and see the code associated with that area be it a div, table, TR, TD, iFrame etc.

Fiddler has the same capabilities it allows you to change code on the fly see incoming/outgoing traffic and also includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler is freeware and is available here: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

Web browser penetration - 2011

Current browser usage percentages worldwide..

Below is a chart showing percentage of browser penetration by version, showing that IE8 clearly has the greatest footprint as of May 2011.

 

 Interestingly looking at stats showing penetration by brand as opposed to version firefox has a clear advantage over IE and Chrome with Safari and Opera trailing well behind.

The below stats show the percentage of users worldwide who have javascript enabled in web browsers:

Sources: 

www.w3counter.com

www.w3schools.com

Changing artboard dimensions in Illustrator CS5

Here is a common task that can be a little tricky.


After setting up your project in illustrator - you may need to change the dimensions of your workspace - this common task is not very intuitive.


1. Click "Document Setup" in the top menu bar

2. Click "Edit Artboards" in the popup panel

3. Edit the dimensions in the top menu bar

Voila!

Google Art Project

A very interesting use of streetview technology and information architecture by Google. Documenting many hi-res photos of paintings from some of the top Galleries around the world - interestingly the photo viewer is  built in flash 10. A nice feature is the ability to save your own collection of paintings.
I'm sure the interface will be updated to be a bit more user friendly in the future as it is a little clunky and non-intuitive at the moment.
Google is definitely on their way to creating a great art compendium.

http://www.googleartproject.com/