LA Flash February meeting: Stateful applications and Wii installations

Animation, Events, Exemplary Work, Flash, Flex, Interactive Design, LA Flash, Wii,
2/22/08

Los Angeles-area Flash aficionados were lured out under Wednesday night’s lunar eclipse to attend the monthly gathering of LA Flash, a great local user group. Sam Rivello (whose blitting seminar I attended at last year’s LA Flashapaloozastock) gave a solid overview of various techniques for maintaining state in Flash and Flex applications, including one technique (custom namespaces) I’d never heard of before. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else out there is using custom namespaces to manage state, or for any other purpose. Afterwards I got to thank Sam for his seminar last year, as it inspired me to build a blitting engine as part of the forthcoming Precision Targets project I’m working on with Caren Kaplan.

Next up was Patrick Matte of BLITZ, the interactive director behind the amazing “Creativity Conducted” multiplayer Wii remote interactive installation. Gasps of “wow” and “cool” were heard from the crowd as Patrick deconstructed the development process, which utilized WiiFlash. The biggest revelation for me (although it’s really kind of a no-brainer) was the fact that the Wiimote won’t generate mouse events; Patrick ended up using the VirtualMouse class from Senocular to connect each remote to its own virtual cursor that sent the appropriate events in response to button presses. I saw this piece on plasma screens at FITC last fall, but wish I could have seen the more immersive “holographic” version when it debuted at MAX (a new iteration is reportedly in the works for this year’s MAX). Great presentation, and great to hear from another WiiFlash user putting the server through its paces. Now if we can just get a Mac version…

 

‘Designing for Convergence’ panel archived at Adobe; includes Wii remote discussion

Events, Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Wii,
2/17/08

Adobe has posed a Connect archive of the ‘Designing for Convergence’ panel I was on with Dmitri Siegel of Urban Outfitters and Peter Lunenfeld of Art Center College of Design back in November. I enjoyed this panel—Dmitri showed a selection of his recent projects with Urban Outfitters and Peter spoke about some the ideas in his forthcoming book The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. I showed some recent work, including Swing, SpringGraph database visualizations for Vectors, and a sneak peek at the Wii remote-enabled interface for Blood Sugar, the follow-up project to Public Secrets I’m currently working on with Sharon Daniel. We also got into some interesting discussions about professional vs. amateur creative output on the web and ways in which the Wii remote could be used to make experimental interactivity more accessible in installation or gallery settings. Take a look at the Connect archive here; there’s also a page featuring archives from other discussions in the series.

 

Flash Platform workshop rescheduled for February 25

Announcements, Events, Flash, Flex,
2/5/08

The Flash Platform workshop that was originally set for December has been rescheduled and will now be held on Monday, February 25 from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Flash as a platform is a huge topic—I’m going to be concentrating on the Flash and Flex authoring tools, how you know when to use which, and the many ways there are to create content in both using ActionScript 3.0 and MXML.

Anyone is welcome to join this free workshop virtually via Adobe connect. Click here to register. Hope to see you there!

 

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