We launched Halo 3 Believe at AKQA and I wanted to give a shout out to the amazing team that worked on this; such a great piece of work. A real, physical Diorama was created in LA by a company called New Deal Studios. The AKQA team flew down there, captured some video (in analog) and brought it back up to SF to integrate in Flash. Crazy J from my very own Creative Development department developed the amazing loading/queuing system to handle the loading and management of all 200MB worth of video frames! Great work guys! JJ (John Jakubowski), Thiago, Hoj Jomehri, Kevin Hsieh, Joel Kaplan, Keith Hostert, Jason “Crazy J” Gatt (lead Flash), Caio, Alex, Matt and Rian and Kirk.http://www.halo3.com/believe

Stef found this a few weeks back and I have not had much time to look into it yet, although JP has checked out the API. “The RibbitPhone Component will give developers the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voicemail, as well as add and manage contacts.” I think that these guys will be presenting at MAX in two weeks? Combine this with the iPhone and you can be the first to use a phone as a website and use a website as a phone.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=495

Thanks to Keith for the advice I was able to finish up the nav system. I must say that I’m still a bit frustrated with how Adobe is handling this. I can understand not wanting to touch the time line if possible, but at the same time, one of the greatest things about Flash was it’s freedom to experiment with ideas quickly, give designers the ability to add contributions without having to have a computer science degree and, most of all, the power that Flash had to combine the software development world with the art/design world; that was magic. The goal of much of the work I do is to create strong application components, adhering to good software design concepts, while at the same time leaving freedom at the design layer for complete creative freedom: If we want to use the timeline for some funky animation, play with some of the IDE tools, I would like to be able to do this. We still can, but with AS 3.o it becomes more of a mess – kinda defeats the purpose.