Flash On The Beach: my session is online

The Flash on The Beach Jam sessions and elevator pitches videos are online. Yes!

John and the team have been working hard to get it all done and they did a great job.

My elevator pitch session is online too. Check it out here:

http://www.vimeo.com/7292596

or here:

http://www.flashonthebeach.com (scroll down and click Wim Vanhenden).

or here :-)

FOTB09 - Elevator Pitch - Wim Vanhenden from John Davey on Vimeo.

Cheers!

Flash On The Beach rocked!

Once again Flash On The Beach rocked!

Bottom line... FOTB is rock 'n roll...

If you are into all things creativity and programming you must at least go there once. The spirit of Jimi Hendrix lives on in Brighton people.

For a good and full overview please visit Flashmagazine, they have an excellent report waiting for you.

I was in the Elevator pitch sessions, which was very cool. 3 (yes three) minutes is not a long time to say what you want to say but all of the speakers did a great job. I met some very interesting people doing some great work!

It's been a blast to be a part of FOTB!

Check out some pictures and video of my talk. Thank to Dimitri for the video!

Thanks to John and his crew for doing it. Never mind the bollocks!

Flash On The Beach: Speaking @ elevator pitch

Yes! I will be 'performing' at the upcoming elevator pitch @ Flash On The Beach 2009.

The title of my session is: "Internet art: scrape, rip, steal and visualize"

If you are in the neighborhood stop by to cheer!

Thanks to John Davey and the FOTB team!

Session on Flash Catalyst

I just returned from a Flash Catalyst/Flash Builder session I gave at the Adobe headquarters in Belgium.

The always healthy Christoph Rooms, who is at this moment on a beach somewhere, asked me to. And who am I to refuse Christoph right? I got some help from my friend Maarten Cox and the people at iDA MediaFoundry. Thanks for that guys!

I must say Flash Catalyst is a pretty nifty tool... if you know what you are doing and even better, if you know what you are going to do.

Let me explain: If you buy a BMW 7 series, you don't buy this car only for driving. You bought it because it's exuberant and you want to show off. If you you are not into showing off and you just want to drive you would buy a regular car.

Now Flash Catalyst is your regular car. If you stick to that thought while working with it, you won't get any surprises later on. Don't expect it to do al the super fancy stuff. Then you should have bought the BMW 7 series, in this case a mix of more complex integration of Flash CS4, Flex and Flash Builder 4.

I really think that Flash Catalyst is going to be a great tool for the designer/developer workflow when it comes to interaction design and wireframing. It is perfect for RIA's and maybe even a full Flash website. But for the latter be aware of our car antology.

Instead of creating a RIA I tried to create a website example with one button and one extra page.

Thanks to Dietlev and Karel from Boulevart providing me with psd's and graphics and things.

Check it out here (click on the middle polaroid to go to another page):

http://www.wimvanhenden.be/catalystdemo/Main.html

By the way, this example, including scrollbars and stuff, is made with 0 coding, that is zero coding!

Conclusion:

If you plan ahead (there is going to be an intro...) and your photoshop file is well organised and without too many special features (remember the BMW7?) , merge as much as possible, you can create an example like this in about an hour:

http://www.wimvanhenden.be/catalystdemo/Main.html

Remember that Flash Catalyst is still in beta and the team is constantly improving it.

Useful links:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

http://www.digitalbackcountry.com/flashcatalyst/tutorial01/screencast/index.html

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashcatalyst/articles/building_datacentric_app_flashcast_flashbuilder.html

Michael Jackson Tribute Site

Michael Jackson tribute...

over at LittleMissRobot.com

Michael Jackson will outlive Prince!

Little Miss Robot

http://www.littlemissrobot.com

...stay tuned...

Flash and the HoloCube

I've been running some preliminary tests with my work 'We Are The World' running in a device called the Holocube. 

The Holocube is a fully integrated 3D projection platform. 

It is originally designed to display product presentations but you can project anything in it really.

I am using the FlashPlayer 10 3D capabilities to extrude the displayed text. 

And just a quick word of advice. 

If you want to mirror (the Holocube needs a mirrored image) a textfield in Flash do it like this:

var metrics : TextLineMetrics = _textfield.getLineMetrics(0);

_textfield.text = "Hello World";

_textfield.scaleY = -1;

_textfield.y = _textfield.textHeight + metrics.ascent + metrics.descent;

The Holocube and some of my other work will be showing at my exhibition at the Zebrastraat Art Center in Gent, Belgium. 

Opening next Thursday 07/05 @ 8:00 PM. 

You are now invited!

Muchas mega thanks to Jan and his crew at Holocube for the support!

Adobe's Alchemy and Mac OSX Tiger: not working?

I've been trying to compile the simple StringEcho example that comes with the Alchemy SDK, but without success.
Read more/dowload about Alchemy here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

Now I am working on OSX Tiger and I am pretty sure all of my settings are correct when it comes to following along the step by step tutorial at Adobe's website.
The strange thing is that I don't get any compile errors and the compiler returns an object file, but no swc... The log files do not show any sign of inconsitency...

I have had some help from people over at the Adobe forums, but the conclusion we come to at this time is that it's just better to switch to Leopard. And indeed no problems with Leopard.
Follow the conversation here:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1926352

Conclusion so far: Do not try Alchemy on Tiger, use Leopard.

Regular sunday morning at my house...

Princess Helena reminds me of me, all the time...

Get your degree in Computer Sciences for free!

Do you want to become a computer scientist or engineer and be up there with the pro's?

Do you wanna see how they do it at MIT, Stanford, Harvard,...

Here's your chance and it's all for free:

http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science

And one the best 404 not found pages I've seen in quite some time!

Belgian Adoube User Group Meeting: Inspiring evening

Yesterday evening the Belgian Adobe User Group meeting was great!

It was good to see some of the guys again. I had a few beers and enjoyed the great line up.

Gijs from Webwave also having a few beers... 

Cheers Gijs!

This time not so much about the tools or coding itself but much more inspiring sessions. More of that in the future if you ask me.

1. Volstok/Telefunken

http://www.volstok.com/

These guys are creating some fine pieces of video and animation. 

Already famous for their 120 episodes counting series called: De monsters. 

Monsters: 013 meisje wip from Volstok Telefunken on Vimeo.

They presented us with some very good insights about their production process. 

In their flow they animate one 30 second spot in 3 days using After Effects. (they are at episode 120..sic)

It goes something like this:

1. Live shooting with an actor

2. Character is drawn in Illustrator with the different body parts seperated

3. Shadows on the character with Photoshop

4. Animation in After Effects (masssive use of the Puppet tool and expressions)

2. Reginald Van De Velde

http://www.suspiciousminds.com/

Reginald practices the art of Urban Exploration. 

Basically this is entering abandoned buildings and taking photographs. 

All of this is done with a set of rules and respect for the sites explored. 

When it all comes together, the story behind the location, the right atmosphere, the light and a good photographer some amazing photographs, whom truly form an heritage for those to come, come out of this.

Check out Reginald his website and see for yourself...

3. Mike Van Cleven

http://www.mikevancleven.com/

This photographer based in Belgium is mostly known for his fashion and editorial photo-shoots. 

Among showing numerous of his pictures and how he did it, he also talked about where he came from creativly and where he wants to go. 

For me that was one of the most important topics in his talk.

Mike started a project called the collaborative. This is an effort to bring creative people in various fields together. The first project kicked off with is a calendar where Mike provided only pictures of naked girls on a white background. 

Then the photographs are handed over to digital artists to do post production without any creative rules except that breasts and the pubic region should be covered.

This results in some very inspiring result. Check it out on the collaborative.

It was a great evening and very inspiring. 

Thanks to the AUG crew!

Boulevart: New Blog Online

Yes! The Boulevart blog has found it's way into the virtual world. 

Special thanks to Thomas and Erlend for working very hard on this one.

Exciting things happened here at Boulevart the last couple of months. We went through some changes, developed exciting new things, won awards, …
A lot to talk about but as you might noticed, we did not really communicate much lately. Not that we did not want to, we were just waiting for the right timing.
Together with our re-styled blog we think that time has finally come. We gave our online communication platform a fresh new look and feel, but that’s not all. From now on our blog will no longer act as just a technical lab, we felt that it was time for something bigger.

Read more here:
http://blog.boulevart.be

Thomas Joos: Mobile from concept to development

At the last dutch Adobe usergroup meeting my colleague Thomas Joos did a very interesting session with some inside looks about mobile development.

In this session, Thomas will give you an inside look at what exactly happens before they launch Flash and start developing mobile applications. Having a cool idea is a good start, but it's not the only key to a sucessful application. You will get some tips and tricks that will help you to work out your concept more properly.

His talk in his dutch but I'm sure if you contact him he will answer all your questions.

Check it out:
http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/site/list_messages/237

Also check out Serge Jespers session where he dives deeper into the new possibilities of Adobe's mobile platform.
http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/site/list_messages/236

How about that: I won an FWA award!

I am really excited about winning an FWA award for my portfolio website http://www.wimvanhenden.be

I've been working quite some time on it, changing the concept over and over again. 

I wanted to create a very experimental website which would focus on user input to build up the site not using any other graphical assets, except for text.

I stayed close to my initial idea for a long time but even most of my colleagues couldn't grasp it at first (no offense guys :-)

So considering it is a portfolio site and at some point people need to access some data, I remodeled it, to make it a bit more conventional.

But working on websites and concepts like this is a never ending story.

I am working on some stuff with the guys from HOLOCUBE, so stay tuned for more...

I would like to thank everybody at Boulevart for the support, Valentijn for his wisdom and the FWA team for having the FWA.

Enjoy!

http://www.wimvanhenden.be

I got featured in new book by Taschen

I am very proud to announce one of my websites got featured in a new book published by Taschen. The book is called Web Design:Navigation and showcases websites working around new concepts of navigation.

The site in the book is the website showcasing my work We Are The World.
Thanks to the crew at Taschen and Julius Wiedemann in particular for being out there and focussing on art and websdesign.

Win last tickets for FITC (sold out)

The lovely people from the Adobe User Group Netherlands have some extra tickets for you to win.

Just fill out the form and maybe you’ll get lucky:
http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/enquete/

Cheers!

Adobe Flash in episode of USA version The Office

Very weird conversation about Flash, Acrobat and Quark in an episode of the usa version of The Office (episode 7 of season 5).

The writers completely missed the point but lesson learned: Flash is everywhere!



Sorry about the bad framerate, but it's the message that counts right :-)

Happy New Year! How to f**ck up 20 million dollars

Happy New Year everybody!

To make you feel good during these harsh times, check this out:

This is the story about Riot-E. 

In the year 2000 a few guys started a company for creating mobile concepts. They raised a budget up to 20 million dollars (coming from Nokia, News Corporation, etc...) and then they screwed it...

Good documentary about ego's, bad decision's, manic depression and liars.

http://www.joost.com/33f7z91/t/RIOT-ON!-Riot-On!?channel=33f7o4w#id=33f7z91

Read more about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot-E