Here’s a link to another project that went live a little while ago. I built this site while working at my old job with ieMedia. The site was built entirely in Flash, and incorporated a lot of pre-rendered 3D video elements to allow the user to explore the virtual apartment. It’s about as exciting as cat food gets!
It was a great project to work on. I was the lead Flash developer, and took it from the concept stage through to the final implementation. Josh Djuric and Justin Zajac also helped out with some of the Flash work for the site content. You can thank Mike Perry and Josh Djuric from ieMedia for the site design and graphics.
Check it:
Chad Udell has a new post on his blog looking at the (alleged) reasons why Microsoft Silverlight will fail. It’s a one-year-later follow up to an original post of his on the topic, and it’s an interesting read with a lot of good points, which you can find here:
http://visualrinse.com/2008/05/15/update-why-microsoft-silverlight-will-fail-1-year-later/
I’ve been interested in Silverlight since it appeared on the scene, but I was never interested enough to actually bother learning it or looking into it much. I mean, the advancements in the Flash industry seem almost exponential these days. Flex 3 (and 4), flash player 10, pixel bender, papervision3d, the list goes on. Who’s got the time to look at Silverlight? I think I’ve got more useful things to invest my time learning.
I started working on a new project yesterday, building an IRC client using AIR. The basics are working, although it’s pretty ugly at the moment so I’ll put some screenshots up soon.
I’m basically only making it to get more familiar with Flex and AIR development, but I have a few ideas about functionality which I think would be great in an IRC client, the main thing being dynamic content previews. For example, when a user pastes a link to a web site or an image, that content would be displayed in some kind of preview popup using the image loader or the AIR HTML component. Users could then follow that preview link through to the actual content item if they want to see it.
That’s the basics of it for now, but I’ll post more updates when I find the time to make some more progress on the app.
A project I’ve been working on for the last week has just gone live today. It’s an interactive Flash magazine for the Sportsgirl website, which allows users to ‘fly’ through the latest Sportsgirl magazine using interactive Flash video and images, and read articles, watch videos, and follow links through to the online shop.
I worked with Citrus on this, who developed the rest of the Sportsgirl website. Cheers to Craig and Chris at Citrus who were great to work with.
Click the image to check it out:
My mate Phil has just released a widget he wrote which syncs up to your iTunes, and pulls a matching video from YouTube to play along with whatever you’re listening to. It’s only supported on OS-X now, but is still a cool little app.
The only drawback (feature?) is that because it pulls the first video result from YouTube, you sometimes get very bizarre/disturbing results. But hey, that’s what the internet is all about!
Check it out here: http://philipandrews.org/blog/itube
A couple of my latest projects have gone live recently, check ‘em out!
Repco Navigator - Built a top-down driving game to showcase Repco’s new online delivery tracking system. Inspired by the original GTA, the player has to pick up and deliver packages around the city and beat the time limit.
ANZ Regional & Rural - This is a promotional site for a new ANZ campaign which invites people to vote on and make suggestions about improvements for their local ANZ branch. I used the Flash8/AS2 version of Papervision3D for this to allow the user to interact with a 3D cube with different content on each face. While AS2 PV3D is fairly limited compared to the AS3 version, it was still suitable for this site and turned out well.
I worked on both of these projects with the interactive team at M&C Saatchi Melbourne. Always a pleasure to work with those guys!
Flex Builder 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0 were released yesterday! I guess this doesn’t really change anything much, as most people have been using the beta versions of the software for ages, and I don’t know of any major differences between the beta 3 versions and the new ones. But it’s great to see it ready and available as a proper release.
Links! -Flex 3 - Adobe AIR 1.0
This is the first time (and hopefully not the last) that I found myself in the list of credits for a Playstation 2 / PSP game, and it’s pretty cool to see. I spent a while contracting for ATARI Melbourne House, developing the UI system for a game called Test Drive Unlimited.
It was a great experience, and it’s also very exciting that Flash is becoming more and more standard in the game development industry for in-game interface design and functionality.
Red Bull Flugtag
The most impressive Papervision3D site I have come across so far. Pretty much everything about this site is mind-blowing. The editing/creation tools are the best part - smooth, seamless with a great design. I think the actual game-play is the weakest point of the entire site. Playability/game controls seem quite unintuitive and difficult. Or maybe I just suck?
Either way this is an amazing site, mad props to the guys at LessRain for their work.
