Credit where credit is due

Design: WERK

Flash development: Swiff

3D: Claudio Salas

Last week Thursday 27th was the inauguration of Swiff’s ‘Byråpingis’.

We invited a handful of agencies here in Stockholm for a fun and relaxing evening of table tennis competition.

The winning prize was the newly released Adobe CS5 Master Collection software suite worth US$2,599 – with all the software you’ll ever need to run your own agency .

Credit where credit is due:

The evening was graciously sponsored by Adobe Nordic – special thanks to Mariah Andén!

We’d like to thank our former Art Director and creative extraordinaire, Lorenzo, for his amazing hard work in designing and putting together the exclusive custom table tennis kit. Also to Rickard Berggren, our former intern and ‘data-barn’ extraordinaire for his involvement on this project at the outset.

The event ended up as visualized on this clip:

Until next time,,, practice !

More pictures can be found on my Posterous blog.

We’re just back from New York where we attended the first FATC conference. FATC stands for ‘Flash And The City’ (for the uninitiated).

As they had some major issues with the dedicated WIFI connection at the event, I’m writing down my thoughts on this blog instead.

The event was put together by Elad Elrom and friends. These guys are developers by profession, so they deserve huge credit for pulling off such an amazing event.

They had the following vision for FATC:

They really delivered and I was so excited about this formula that I spoke briefly with Elad and told him that we should definitely collaborate on a franchise-type-of-thing for Europe. Imagine ‘Flash And The City’ – Stockholm! (Elad, if you’re reading this, expect a proper email explaining my ideas with a proposal soon

We landed at JFK from München, Germany at around 3 pm and although a bit tired from the long flight, we jumped on one of those “hop on, hop off” double decker tourist buses and got to see most of Manhattan’s main attractions. My favorite was all the LED display signs at Time Square. Apparently, Time Square has close to 9,000 square feet (836 square meter) of display space!

We stayed at the slick Millennium Hilton in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street, just opposite “Ground Zero”, 3 minutes walk from the event.

source: wirednewyork

Here are the sessions I enjoyed the most:

Day 1

After the introductory keynote, we saw some fun break dancing.

The first session was presented by Adobe’s Ryan Stewart.

Geolocation and Mapping with the Flash Platform

I’m familiar with Google Maps and Yahoo’s API, so was happy to find out about Ryan’s own work on the subject with other lesser known apis.

And even happier when I saw most of his work was shared through Github: http://github.com/ryanstewart/

Quick notes below, slides here.

ESRI
Google Maps
AIR 2.0 (multi-touch, gestures with GoogleMaps 3D API, overlay PaperVision3D)
Modest Maps Project (opensource, as2,as3) works with full Photoshop PSD on the Map, Zoomify
Dealing with Geodata
GPS data, KML (same as the one Google uses, ability to draw shapes (polygons etc)
GPXAS3# – http://github.com/ryanstewart/
GPSBabelOnAIR – An ActionScript 3 wrapper that exposes GPSBabel through the NativeProcess API in AIR 2
http://webkitchen.be/geolocation – demo

Package ‘flash.sensors.Geolocation’ (where the goodies’ at)

Reflex: The Future of Rich Internet Applications, Ben Stucki

Reflex is a neat framework that works with both As3, Flex and Air projects. Really flexible and with a size footprint of only 40 k(!). Definitely something to look into as it matures.

After lunch we walked to Battery Park and jumped on a ferry boat to Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty

This is one of the reason, I think the FATC experience is difference from other conferences I’ve been to, where you normally just sit inside for 3 days and don’t get the chance to experience the city you’re in.

We had fun at the Liberty Island. Though we thought the Statue of Liberty was a lot bigger (don’t get me wrong, she was huge, but gives the impression of being a lot bigger in films and on TV).

In the afternoon, we attended a session on streaming video by Lisa Larson-Kelly, called FMS: Streaming and Beyond!

Later on that evening around 9 pm we attended the Bar Hop in the Meatpacking District Manhattan

They had a special 20 dollars deal for ‘all-you-can-drink’ for 1 hour and then move on to the next bar. As we had planned to get up early to attend Lee Brimelow’s session as well as plans to go partying the next evening in Williamsburg, we declined the offer.

Day 2

As mentioned, one of the reason we went to bed early was so we could get up early to attend “Touch Me Baby” presented by Lee Brimelow of Adobe.

As you’ve probably noticed multi touch is all the rage right now, and Lee’s session didn’t disappoint anyone. He went through the most important part of the Adobe AS3 API and showed some really cool examples. I was especially interested to learn the difference between “Gesture” driven touch and “Multi point” touch. The latter is more powerful and goes beyond just simple gestures.

The device pictured below is the sh*t when it comes to supporting gestures and multi touch points – Lee showcased it registering up to 60 points without breaking a sweat.

Go to my blog for more: http://johanlopes.posterous.com/3m-m2256pw-10-finger-multitouch-display-hands

Branden Hall and Joshua Davis are two old school ActionScript/Flash gurus. They wrote HYPE, the new As3 framework which aims to bring creativity and playfulness back to the Flash community.

HYPE: Combining Creativity & Code

Matter of fact, I’ll be introducing this framework to my lecture this fall at Broby Grafiska, College Of Cross Media.

In the evening we were taken on a cruise along Hudson river, which forms the border between New Jersey and New York. It was fantastic as we got to see the beautiful New York skyline during the night.

Day 3

Flex 4 Component Lifecycle Best Practices

I’ve seen Aaron Pedersen & James Polanco doing this presentation at Adobe Max in Milan. They’ve now updated this to include the Flex 4 Spark components. If you’re into Flex development make sure to grab their slides from here or even better grab any of their up coming books on the topic.

Getting Git by Simeon Bateman was really good. Thanks to this session, I’ve now got all the information I need to move from SVN to Git.

Day 4

Stacey Mulcah aka “BitchWhoCodes” Developing for the Social Media Douchebag – An introduction to Social Media APIs

Hilarious presentation which gave us a good laugh. Stacey is an amazingly entertaining speaker with natural comedy timing.

Between her jokes, she managed to give everyone some valid pointers on how to keep sanity while development for the fickle platform that is Facebook and Twitter.

Chris Allen of Red5 fame showcased some amazing work they’re doing with their latest collaborative platform for mobile gaming.  Brass Monkey, Seriously Fun Control. I want to get my hands on their platform. They haven’t taken a definitive decision on which licensing model to use yet.

Jobe Makar’s session Predictive Movement in Multiplayer Games was really cool, albeit the topic was a bit too complex to be tackled in a such a short session.

One would’ve wanted to him to delve a bit deeper, but I guess one can go through all of his material in one’s own pace as he’s just released a new book entitled “ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds” – btw it’s receiving rave reviews. His source code on the stripped down tank game he presented can be found here: http://www.electrotank.com/lab/FATC/Files.zip

Commissioned by Milagro, the UI/Flash client was developed using Adobe Flash Builder 4 taking in particularly advantage of the new text engine framework in Adobe Flash Player 10, which delivers ‘advanced, easy-to-integrate typographic and text layout features for rich, sophisticated and innovative typography on the web’.

Campaign Studio allows  anyone to easily create their own content based on a set of predefined templates to produce posters, postcards as well as Flash-based banners – supporting animation and all the trimmings directly online.

While working on this project, I wrote a blog post entitled “The Flash Player Knows Enough About Itself To Generate Itself During Run-time“.

We think it’s high-time now for such a feature to be built-in in future version of the Adobe Flash player.

Wouldn’t it be neat if the Flash player could allow users to save ’swf’ files directly from a Flash website?

Well, ‘Campaign Studio’ allows you to do just that – among other features. You create a simple banner and it ’spits out’ a “swf/Flash banner” for you directly on the browser.

Design/Art Direction/UX by: WERK

Client-side architecture, UX, Technical Direction and Flash development by: SWIFF

All Back-end, server-side architecture/development by: Milagro

Commissioned by IK Stockholm, the campaign website allows prospect clients to find out which of the TDC Get-together video conferencing solutions best suits their needs.

Design/Art Direction: IK Stockholm

Built by Swiff using the Adobe Flash Builder 4 and featuring client-side PDF export through Alive PDF.

http://campaign.tdc.se/tdcgettogether/

Look very closely in one of the screenshots below and you’ll see someone trying out our Augmented Reality/Adobe Flash project for Synsam/Cheapmonday, from last year.

At Swiff, our unique selling point is to always stay ahead and be the first to embrace the newest emerging technologies and apply them to online marketing.

The project is one of the many cutting-edge/R&D collaborations we’ve done with the talented guys at WERK.

At last, the LG ‘Save Energy” campaign website is now live.
Commissioned by Volontaire, the site is jam-packed with tips and suggestions on how to save energy in your home – by using energy-efficient appliances from LG.
Current version is in Swedish only, but the system supports all Scandinavian languages.
Swiff developed using Adobe Flash Builder 4
3D design by Johnny Vex
Sound design by MindFunk Productions
Back-end by Qiui

We were commissioned by IK Stockholm to develop a microsite as well as banners for TDC.

The site is a B2b campaign effort developed using Adobe Flash and advises businesses on choosing the best telephony subscriptions for their organizations.

The site is in Swedish only.

We just got back from the yearly ‘Flash On The Beach’ conference in Brighton. As last year, the event was fantastically well produced courtesy of John Davey and his team. The quality of the speakers was amazing, especially on the last day. Though the event is called “Flash On The Beach”, the organizers has made sure to also cover all other aspects of Digital creativity to suit both designers and developers, heck even UX, motion graphics and other topics was added to the mix.

Swiff was invited to Adobe’s ‘Agency 2012 Dinner and Debate’. Johan Lopes, Swiff’s Technical Director thought it was very interesting to take part in this forum where he briefly shared some of his thoughts and experience with other digital and creative luminaries.

The wonderfully chilled out place that is Brighton with its sea side atmosphere gave us yet another inspirational couple of days away from the office. It was great catching up with old colleagues and making new friends.

Below are a few interesting links from various speakers (just a braindump from our notepad, go to the FOTB profile site of respective speakers to download their presentation slides).

Day 1

Lee Brimelow - ByteArray examples, links, and slides

http://theflashblog.com/

Keith Peters - Game architecture

BIT-101 Flash ActionScript

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/

Domain-driven design – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design

PushButton Engine – Modular Flash Game Development

http://pushbuttonengine.com/

cocos2d

http://cocos2d.org/

flixel

http://flixel.org/

Chuck Freeman – Ribbit, getMicrophone()

getMicrophone()

http://www.getmicrophone.com/

Ribbit

http://www.ribbit.com/

Merapi

http://merapiproject.net/

Day 2

Grant Skinner, Quick as a Flash

Grant Skinner’s talk on optimizing ActionScript 3 code. If you are serious about code optimization then get his slides and follow his 100 tips like a bible: http://gskinner.com/talks/quick/

Joa Ebert, Leaving the Sandbox

Unfortunately, we missed this session. I’ve followed Joa’s work since I saw him at Spark Europe in 2005 – he is doing some r e a l l y amazing work.

Last year I was amazed by his speed coding skills (which we got to see again this year)

He is the core developer and Software Architect of the award winning Hobnox AudioTool. He is known for a lot of projects including WiiFlash, popforge, AS3V, ActionScript Wiki, PBDT and many more.

His talks is very technical blending raw computer science theories with creative ActionScripting.

www.joa-ebert.com

blog.joa-ebert.com

www.hobnox.com/audiotool

Richard Lord,  Application Frameworks: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Excellent talk, sharing his experience on application frameworks (Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate, Swiz)

@Richard_Lord

ELEVATOR PITCH, 3 Minute Wonders

Aron hallborg, Rotoscoping 2.0

Cool animation techniques from a Swedish dude.

Trevor Boyle, AS3 ‘Generative Art’ Framework

ARTionscript.com

@robert_t, SQLiteWrapper for ActionScript 3

@swingpants, How to make a game in three minutes

swingpants.com

Conrad Winchester, ASAXB 2-way Metadata binding

Tired of writing actionscript code that converts objects to XML and back again? If so then this library may be for you.

http://code.google.com/p/asaxb/

Bartek Drozdz Pinball game

everydayflash.com

RestfulX, RX, The RESTful Way to develop Flex and AIR applications

http://restfulx.github.com/

http://blog.mrhenry.be

Dr. Woohoo!, Cybernetic Art Revisited

http://blog.drwoohoo.com/

Day 3

Andre Michelle, Kling Klang

Andre is vocal in the community in regards to pushing Adobe to bring proper audio processing into Adobe Flash.

(read his critique of the Sound API here: http://www.make-some-noise.info/)

He is the chief developer of the www.hobnox.com/audiotool online music application, r e a l l y pushing Flash to its limit.

blog.andre-michelle.com

lab.andre-michelle.com

www.hobnox.com/audiotool

http://twitter.com/andremichelle

Julian Dolce, Fuel ANT Tasks

http://deleteaso.com/fuel-ant-tasks

Colin Moock – MegaPhone and Unity Platform

Union Platform

http://www.unionplatform.com/

ClockMaker Demos

http://clockmaker.jp/blog-en/

MegaPhone

playmegaphone.com

Colin Moock’s Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend DVD

oreilly.com/go/law

Ralph Hauwert, Research Realtime graphics with Flash 10

Ralph talked about PapervisionX and announced he’ll be quitting as core developer of Papervision 3D.

http://www.unitzeroone.com/

@UnitZeroOne

Joshua Davis, Space

http://www.joshuadavis.com/

Download the slides to his amazingly funny and inspirational presentation here

To coincide with the launch of their new eye-wear collection exclusively available at Synsam we were commissioned by Synsam/Cheap Monday to develop a microsite where users can try two of their latest models using ‘Augmented Reality‘.

Print out the marker and try it out here: http://www.synsam.se/cheapmondayclairvoyant

Credits:

Design/Art Direction: WERK
http://www.werk.se

3D modeling: Claudio Salas
http://www.claudiosalas.com

Technologies used:
FLARToolKit, Papervision 3D
Adobe Photoshop CS4
Adobe Flash Builder 4