Steve over at mintyhunter.com has am assortment of excellent tip/techniques for syncing your flash ‘lips’ to a voice track, good stuff! the tweaking of the timeline to show the actual mouthshapes is an excellent suggestioon, and one of those flash features that is almost never mentioned.

enjoy and happy syncing

I’m not suprised that there is a market for seamless video, but I am suprised that it’s being marketed as FLA’s and SWF’s just strikes me as odd.. all that aside you have to admidt that the interface over at advanceflash is pretty snazzy.

So would you ever see yourself using any of this stuff? I would think it would be slightly more usable in quicktime so it could get imported into motion, after effects or some other video compositing app, i just don’t see a huge use (or market) for this kind of thing in flash.

so are you using this kind of thing? if so for what?

So it’s Monday, everyone starts Monday morning with hope of productivity, well, let me apologize now because this link is the black hole of productivity, Chasm a beautifally conceived and crafted game from the folks at transience, as part of the Gameon/ Film Victoria multimedia production accord a South Australian program to promote innovative digital media.

you can read more about the initiative and Gameon here
you can play Chasm here (give it a try)
if your more intrested in the making of Chasm than the playing of Chasm, make sure to check out the  production sketches & photos

have fun.

Odd but neat periodic table of elements nicely flashed over at chemsoc.org. I’m not quite sure what the little symbols actually symbolize, but it’s neat none the less.

If you know the conecction to the underlying element — please clue me in.

Here a link worth it’s weight in pixels, a series (9 actually) of whitepapers on usability:included are articles on accessability and the color blind, font-sizes and column widths.. excellent stuff from the folks at Human Factors International

In the blackhole that is my bookmarks RUSTBOY has held special meaning to me for a really long time, not only is the site well designed, well built and interesting, the site is a project diary of sorts for Brian Taylor to chronicle his short film ‘RUSTBOY’ .. he started way back in 2000 I think (possibly earlier, but the site goes to 2002 which is when Brian received funding to work on the project full-time (it had been a hobby-project up until that point)— the cool thing about the site is that rather minimal tools and zero budget Brian managed to put together brilliantly cinematic and lush 3-D animation, by processing animation frame by frame with photoshop. In your average animation only a scant few frames are intresting, in Rustboy it seems every frame is better than the last.

The Rustboy story is great, Brian’s story is great, and it’s the kind of thing that keeps me going on tough days.

This may be the only FLASH 4 site I’ll ever link..

In my quest to provide a link to a tutorial/introduction for everything flash — devmx.com has a great introduction to dataGlue — dataGlue is a controller class, which allows for a RecordSet object to be bound to a UI control.

happy glueing!

I’m sure YOUR code is always perfect, that YOUR functions that expect strings only ever get passed strings and that nothing every fails in YOUR world, in MY world, stuff happens..constantly, and when it does I’m pretty happy to have something like Try Catch, if your unaware of TC, it’s a very handy thing indeed.

simply:
The try…catch…finally statement provides a way to handle some or all of the possible errors that may occur in a given block of code, while still running code.

Consider the following simple example:

function myFunction():Void {
   throw new Error(”Some error”);
 }

 try {
   myFunction();
 }
 catch(errObject:Error) {
   trace(errObject.message);
 }

kind of a silly example, but it illustrates the concept, of course the ‘myFunction is going to throw the error every time, and when it does the error is ‘caught’ by the catch portion of the the try command that called ‘myfunction’ —

For a much more detailed explaination — stop by Joey Lotts article on the subject.

Really intresting article over at ‘Creating Passionate Users’ about how anything that is engaging to the user is so, because it has a element of continuious challenge and an opportunity for growth, it’s a really intresting perspective, and pretty great read.

I found it very eye-opening

If your going too launch a site these days you really need a hook, great content, fancy smancy photo’s,  ear-catching music, something..but how about ‘The Worlds Smallest Webiste?’ — I suspect it’s been launched by the good folks at lenscrafters, because after trying to navigae the site my eyes are killing me, it measures a portly 18 pixels square and is available in HTML and Flash, on the flash side of things they have what must be the worlds smalled game of PONG.

It’s odd, but noteworthy… oh FYI — the image above is shown at actual size.

Am I the only one who’s really annoyed at how MSN’s new search element on msn.com is constantly grabbing focus? it’s relentless.. on a positive note — it’s a prett decent search

this amazing Flash-based  (subscription-based — although it’s free) newsletter from IBM is just amazing, all kinds of nifty content all wrapped up in a tasty publication format.. nice little interface touches — go to the bottom, expand a bottom section - click on a bottom article and you scroll to the top to see the video — very nice.

great speed as well..

I don’t really know much more about this game than what the title of this post suggests it arrived in my email this morning, it a race game it’s branded by uniroyal, and it’s absolutely awesome, gameplay is spectacular, the course is really challenging and the visuals are dead on.. I’t’s really tough to create a true environment in flash and this game does a great job of it.

I’d be curious if anyone out there actually can win their race, it’s tough.

I’ve done a ton of show-and-tell type posts of great sites, a few posts of painfully bad sites, but the new Adidas tennis site is IMHO neither — now before you get your collective briefs in a bunch let me explain  — Adidas is a sportswear mega-giant, as is Nike, IMHO the flash work that nike has put online is without compare,  in concept, design and execution it’s exceptional. Being as Adidas decided to launch a site that [IMHO] feels very Nike(ish) I can’t help but compare them. And when i do, the Adidas tennis site feels slow and non-responsive, that not to say that it isn’t an exceptional piece of work, it is, but it falls short in when compared to most Nike sites.

From a marketing point-of-view it’s got to really suck to compete against companies that spend millions on marketing (like Nike or Apple, Ford etc.) because very quickly every idea becomes derivative of something else.

This link has been on my bookmark bar for ever… makes me laugh, it’s the perfect stress beater, a clever little flash toy by Hoss Gifford that boasts 750,000 downloads in it’s first weekend online. Hoss also happens to be one of the hosts for Flash-in-the-can 05

This type of hilarious well executed (viral) flash is a great example of how to gain virtual fame without leaving the house.

I occassinally have clients who want marketing pieces done to ‘become-viral’ it’s way harder than it looks..

oh..my best score is 390 MPH..that monkeys butt must have stung!