Yet another big project that I can’t talk much about yet as it’s in the early stages of product design. At R/GA SF we are helping to craft a new product (and a new business) from the ground up: user experience, user interface, branding, as well as the technology and development. For the tech details, I can say, it’s going to be a desktop app, a web app, iPhone app, and more, all talking together in real time…I know that doesn’t say much…but it’s going to be cool, I promise.  I’m excited about the entire thing – it’s great to be part of a new product from the very start and can’t wait until we’ve got a beta release (and I can talk about it more!)

My friends on the web team at Apple,  helped create one of the first uses of HTML5 video tags on a production site. The HTML5-video-fied videos are for the new iMac and Magic Mouse. Using a non-webkit powered browser, you’ll see the original QuickTime version. This is actually pretty significant when you think about it on the scale of apple.com. Accomplishing this for a site like Apple.com, with all the technical, logistical, and political hoops that must be attended to, is a big accomplishment. Congrats guys!This got me thinking more about HTML5, which, admittedly, I’ve only been watching from afar. I found this summary off some of the new features:1. Web workers. I don’t really get the naming of this, but it’s cool! Basically, the ability to create separate background processes that can run without bogging down the performance of your webpage.2. Video. Embed video without plug-ins as just done by Apple.com….but what about the codec?3. Canvas. Some people don’t see the value of this, particularly if you only reference the example given here. But I can appreciate the potential.4. Application Cache (probably most interesting to me) Store content for applications locally, without needing to beonline and connected to a database on a server somewhere.5. Geolcation. Location information  - via GPS, IP, WiFi, RFID, Bluetooth.

I’ve heard that Yahoo and others have started using Titanium as an alternative to AIR and WPF for desktop apps. With Titanium, you’ve got also got an easier port to Mobile too. It’s build on top of Webkit and Google Gears. Similar to AIR, you can develop using standard web technologies: HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby, Python. I’m just starting to check it out for a possible new project. So far, it’s looking pretty darn sick. 

I had some free time over the holidays and I made tremendous progress on my new Actionscript 3.0 Framework (that I’ve been yapping about for months now).  Although I still need to go back and change a few things (and fix a bunch of bugs), the majority of the base framework is complete. What I like about it is that is accomplishes exactly what I wanted: Something simple and flexible, providing a solid foundation for all the basics of RIA development (pre-loading, queuing, parsing, navigation management, data management, etc), while at the same time allowing for the main content areas and design features to be so flexible that any designer, with basic Flash skills can work independently enough and have his/her content seamlessly integrated with the rest of the application.

Super-Actionscript nerds please cover your ears: In order to allow designers 100%, freedom I wanted be able to broadcast specific events from the timeline to my main shell application. This gives designers the ability to create whatever they want within the regular Flash IDE, as long as they don’t mess with the 2-3 lines of code that I use to broadcast key events. I was having the darndest time getting this to work the way I wanted. I checked the blogs, the forums and Adobe. I ultimately ended up doing it the way I had started: By creating a custom event and then just broadcasting it from the timeline when I want. It’s pretty cool, but there seems like there may be a better way.

//from the timeline, event to signal that current section has finished fading in

import com.petercole.event.TimelineEvent;
dispatchEvent(new TimelineEvent(TimelineEvent.TIMELINE_FADE_IN_COMPLETE, true))

I don’t know about the new name? Apollo was so much cooler…AIR? What is Adobe thinking? Anyway, the Adobe AIR showcase has some interesting stuff – giving me some ideas:

MyMovieMatch. Filter over 50,000 films by genre, release status, keyword and your own personal preferences. Find just the right one, and add it to your Netflix queue or Amazon.com shopping cart with a single click.

Tweetr. Allows people using twitter.com to send and receive messages from their desktop in 140 characters or less.

Kuler Desktop. Search thousands of themes by tag, title, or creator ID. Browse the newest, highest rated, and most popular color themes. Easily copy hex values from any theme to your clipboard.

The power of web services allows us to access data from a client’s CRM database, marketing database, a custom database, maybe even an inventory database (NetFlix). The trends continue to be towards accessing this data, mixing and mashing it up, and presenting it back with easy and innovative user interfaces/experiences. Google Gadgets are another example of this specific for advertising and of course the gadgets/widgets for Windows and Mac.

We won! Cameron and Ian brought home the prize for AKQA (actually, they’re the ones who get the Xboxs!). Cameron (Interaction Designer) and Ian (Creative Developer on my team) had never used any of the new Microsoft Expression tools. They were trained in one day, and then given a project which they had to complete by the end of the week using the Expression tools; in our case using Blend to create a Silverlight experience. There was a party at 111 Mina in SF where each team presented their solution. You can read the whole story on Microsoft’s Will Tschumy’s blog.