Flash Platform Workshop cancelled; Q&A posted at Adobe

Events, Flash, Flex,
11/29/07

Unforeseen events have unfortunately forced the cancellation of the Flash Platform Workshop that was scheduled for Monday, December 3. Apologies for the inconvenience; if the workshop ends up being rescheduled I’ll post any information as soon as it’s available.

In other news, Adobe has recently posted a short Q&A between myself and Steve Anderson, associate editor of Vectors and director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts and Practice at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Check it out when you get a chance!

 

Upcoming Events: ‘Designing for Convergence’ Panel and Flash Platform Workshop

Announcements, Events, Flash, Flex, Interactive Design,
11/16/07

Wanted to bring a few upcoming events to your attention. First up: on this coming Monday, November 19 at 10:00 am PST, I’ll be joining Dmitri Siegel, designer, writer and art director for Urban Outfitters, and Peter Lunenfeld, media theorist and professor at Art Center College of Design, as part of a panel on ‘Designing for Convergence,’ sponsored by Adobe and the new interdivisional program in Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. This panel will be simulcast as an interactive online forum via Adobe Connect and you are welcome to join us! If you would like to attend, you will need to register first.

Two weeks later, on Monday, December 3 from 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm PST, I’ll be teaching a Flash Platform workshop focusing on programming in ActionScript 3.0 and MXML and at the basics of working in Adobe Flash and Flex (and how you decide when to use either one). This workshop will also be simulcast via Adobe Connect; I don’t have the registration link as yet but will post it when it becomes available. UPDATE: The Flash Platform workshop has been cancelled until further notice.

You can get more details about both events.

Also, I’d like to thank Scott Fisher for inviting me to speak at the USC Interactive Media Division’s weekly forum last night. ‘Seeking Eloquence in Interactive Space’ was the topic I tackled, and we ended up having some good discussion afterwards; got to chat with a few former students of mine as well. A pleasure.

 

A non-linear index for fiction and non-fiction RIAs, made possible with SpringGraph

Digital Humanities, Flex, Interactive Design,
10/25/07

One of the things I’m most excited about with this latest issue of Vectors is the inclusion of a new “interactive index” feature which gives users non-linear, bookmarkable access to the databases for the projects Blue Velvet and Nation on the Move. My hope is that this feature, which allows you to visually browse each database’s contents through a common ThinkMap-style interface which is completely independent of the ‘designed’ front end of each project, will bring some transparency to our authoring and design practice at Vectors. I can easily see such an index becoming a standard feature for future interactive works, both fiction and non-fiction.

Well-deserved kudos for the technology behind the index go to Mark Shepherd, a Senior Computer Scientist at Adobe who developed the open-source SpringGraph Flex component that made it all possible. Thanks to his terrific implementation, I got the first version of the index up and running in just a few hours. It’s quite easy to use and really stunning (and fun) once you get some data hopping around in there. 

The indexes included in the current issue of Vectors are still rather rudimentary, and any feedback or suggestions you have are most welcome. For future projects, I plan to integrate each index directly into the work itself, so it will truly start to function like the index in a printed book. I see this as just one component of an emerging set of user experience standards that will characterize fiction and non-fiction RIAs in the immediate future.

 

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