Somebody help me! My new AS 3.0 navigational system is almost complete (I will be posting the code shortly). All I’m trying to do now is come up with a way to access a library MovieClip for the button graphic and functionality. I wanted to make the system “designer-friendly” so I’m using a MovieClip as my base object. A designer can go into the physical clip, edit the graphics, animation, etc and as long as he/she leaves the frame labels alone, it will all work as usual. As you know, there is no more linkageID in AS 3.0. The MovieClip is associated with the base navigational Class: NavItem. NavItem handles all the logic for a single button. I can add these in my NavMenu class:

var nItem = new NavItem();

But what if I want to have a different button design for each button on my menu (NavMenu class)? Does this mean I must have a different NavItem class for each button? How lame is that? I just want to be able to use NavItem class on ANY MovieClip library item that may be a used as a button for my nav menu. (Flash requires that each item in the library be associated with a unique class). I’ve looked in to other ways of doing this, including ways to just access library graphics as Keith Peters describes:

1. [Embed(source="library.swf", symbol="star")]

2. private var Star:Class;

But this seems like more trouble than it is worth for what I am trying to do.

Does anyone understand what I’m saying? If so, can you help a brother out?

Tony Terry and I attended the iPhone tech talk yesterday. First off, let me say that the food they provided was exceptional; I could not believe how good it was. The presentations were equally great. I really liked the way we spent the first half listening to the Apple team talk about general specs and design concepts, and then the second half we were encouraged to work on our own apps while the team walked around to answer questions. Both Terry and I had already started some development on our first (and very basic) iPhone applications. As I discovered in my early development efforts, the real key to creating apps for the iPhone is in understanding that they are indeed compact “applications” (maybe call them widgets or gadgets) and not websites. The challenge is not in understanding the technology (assuming you already grasp web 2.0 concepts) but rather coming to grips with the design characteristics (limitations) imposed by the iPhone app format. Again, think widget, gadget, dashboard app; compact bits of specific funtionality rather than pages of information.

Things one my wish list:

More integration with native iPhone apps. About all we can do now is make simple calls to mail(mailTo:), maps (maps:), sms (sms:) and phone (tel:), as well as show full screen video. In addition, I find the user experience with some of these very odd. For example, i when I make a call for Google Maps, it appears in place of my current iPhone app; and there is no “close” or “back” button. If I want to get back to where I was, I need to go back to the home menu of the iPhone and then click on Safari (the web) again. With mail, there is a “done” button I can click to leave mail and jump right back to where I was in my iPhone app – nice. As well, I’d like to see integration with the native iPhone apps: Calendar, iTunes, camera.

I am a big fan of Rick Mathieson; I read his blog regularly and re-use (steal) a lot of what he says, for inspiration. Recently he posted something about Mobile Ads that really captured my attention; mostly because the gist of the article touched on what I believe is going to happen in the digital (marketing) world: More useful, relevant “tools” – that are likely data-driven(think web service model) – and create engaging experiences and provide value back to the user. (Has Google written all over it). This, instead the more traditional, static (think broadcast, rasterized graphics, heavy video), fancier, flashier, ads we have come to know the ad biz to be. This does not mean that things like video and animation and great design will go away at all, just that the focus will be to use these in conjunction with real, dynamic data/content.

As the article below points out with regard to Mobile, I think the same will be mirrored on the web and will continue grow with all the free/cheap “Web 2.79z” (or whatever) services that give us access to data and applications like never before. According to the Programmable web, a new web service API was released every day so far this month!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17
/AR2007081701164.html

Saturday’s Washington Post features a story on how brands like Nokia and McDonald’s are moving away from push-style text and display ads to what can be more accurately described as mobile apps that enable consumers to (for example), find the nearest restaurant outlet or retail store. Other apps are unrelated to a brand, but sneak in a branded nugget, ala Yahoo’s mapping service and combines search and location-based mobile technology. Enter a keyword or search, and advertisers registered on Yahoo’s database pop up as features on the digital map.

HP, disenchanted with Web-style advertising transplanted to the mobile medium, is looking at a major new mobile launch next year along these lines. As Craig Davis, worldwide chief creative officer for JWT tells the post: “We should all by now (know) that doing boring TV ads aren’t much appreciated….Doing annoying things is no way to seduce people that your brand is for them.”
-Rick Mathieson

I will be presenting at the FITC Hollywood Oct. 22,23. I will be talking about one of my favorite projects, the multi-channel Palm Treo project: Mobile controlled kiosk/digital billboard and website. Along with the specifics of the project, I will be exploring the dynamic between the various parties involved in producing complex multimedia creative and technology solutions.

http://www.flashinthecan.com/presentation_detail.cfm?
festival_id=21&presentation_id=549

“In this presentation we will look at some recent work from AKQA including the Palm onTreo Digital Billboard and Website. This multi-channel project integrated video production, Flash development, web services, mobile, a physical installation, and Print design. We will discuss the creative inspiration, the development process and the challenges we faced, focusing on the workflow between the various team members. What did we learn about the technologies, the process, team collaboration and how to manage all the moving parts?“

I’m excited that I was able to get a seat at the next iPhone Tech Talk in San Francisco; it happens next week:

http://developer.apple.com/events/iphone/techtalks/

In preparation, I’ve been digging around for info on iPhone development and have found some useful resources. One of the biggest has been Joe Hewitt’s iUI framework: http://joehewitt.com/iui/. This is amazing and without it I would have toiled away for days trying to get something going. One major problem I have run in to is related to the event.preventDefault() call he has in his “click” event listener. It seems to prevent “click-to-call”, links to Google Maps and links to movie files. To get around it, I added a hacky check (indexOf) to look for “tel:”, “maps”, “.mov” – but it only seems to work on “tel:”. Is that the strangest thing? Must be doing something wrong, unfortunately my JS chops are a little weak these days. Anyone have any thoughts?

I know that I have seen this Face Recognition stuff before; I’m quite sure there is an app/widget on Face Book that does this (perhaps they are using the technology outlined below). The company My Heritage offers a powerful and fast face recognition solution:
http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/celebrity-collage.php

http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/tryFaceRecognition.php

Apparently Rei looks most like Neil Diamond, Jet Lee, Beyonce and Bob Dylan:

and PJ looks like Frank Zappa, Alfred Hitchcock and Fiona Apple

And I look like John Ritter, Tom Cruise and some old dude names Linus Pauling?

After getting your results you can output a JPG collage (with you and all your look-a-like celebrities) and add it to your blog and/or email it to your friends. They have automatic hooks into to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Photobucket, etc. You can also create a “celebrity morph” which morphs you with another celebrity. This can also be emailed to a friend and embedded on a bog, etc.

I cannot find any information on their website regarding developer access/web APIs, etc, so I’m not sure how to tap into their service…does anyone out there know about this? If you wanted to use them for some custom applications, perhaps you can contact My Heritage and work something out. Perhaps we can point the application to a custom photo database (as a social network would). My Heritage has a preset number of collage templates; perhaps we could design our own, or have users design their own. If there is access to a web service, perhaps we could mash the My Heritage service up with another service. Maybe we could use the Merge technology to merge our own images.

More info on face recognition technology:
http://blog.opsan.com/archive/2006/01/14/21352.aspx

http://www.c-vis.com/htd/frt.html

I found them! These are the other guys working with voice recognition for cell phones: http://www.dialdirections.com/. I have not tried it yet myself, but if it works, it could be very cool. Just dial, tell them where you want to go, and they give you back the route to get there via text message. Just think of the potential for this. I would be interested to know more about how it works, and if there are any open web APIs to tap into. Very cool.

More information:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/317727/
_dial_directions_service_send_directions.html.

Has anyone seen this “Augmented Reality” stuff? I saw an in-person demo of it last Friday. It is “Real-time interactive-3D-video” that connects up with Print, Web and soon Mobile. It has the ability to track movement, including facial expressions, and can recognize physical objects (people, print) and interact with 3D objects, characters or environments all in real time. In the past it was targeted to outdoor installations and broadcast, (if you watch sports on TV, you’ve likely seen a version of their technology at work: Overlaying 3D objects on top of the action), but it also hooks up with desktop, the web and soon mobile.

This is a link to a crappy and limited video presentation- but you really need to see it presented in person to get it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Eycccww6k

Company site, more examples:

http://www.t-immersion.com/video_gallery/main.asp?idf=a0#

Because it’s all networked, we can track the user journey, hook it up to a database as well as integrate it with other digital touch points or mash-ups via web services. Maybe a user’s physical interactions can be captured and tracked to a back-end that mirrors, enhances or mashes the experience up with a web service (maps, weather, YouTube?) We could tap into an asset database to consistently keep the experience fresh and updated with current graphics, etc. It supports 3D models that we work in (i.e. Objects output from Maya).