M Studio Labs

Harleqin Books just celebrated their 60th Anniversary at the OpenHouse Gallery in New York. The event showcased cover art from as early as 1949. We developed an interactive installation piece which allowed users to put their photo on the cover of a Harlequin Book.

Using motion-capture technology, the user first selects a cover from a handful of images. Then she positions her face over the cover art and a webcam takes a picture and composites the image. The image is then uploaded to a website and the user is given a passcode to retrieve it.

Check out the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Yly2DbPGw&feature=channel_page

The interactive presentation, webcam capture and image compositing are all done in Flash. The motion-capture technology was developed by EyeMagnet and the design by quizative.

We recently developed a handful of Flash modules for the newly launched ECG website, designed by Sisu.

Papervision 3D home page module
ECG Timeline
Brand Map and Video Player

Here’s a little utility that allows you to batch-resize or crop images and output as JPG — along with the source code. If you’re not familiar with AIR, you just need to download AIR first before you download & install the Image Resizer:

Download Adobe AIR here

Download the AIR Image Resizer here

Download the source files here

Also a few notes that might be of interest to developers:

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Adobe just released a couple of new products:

Adobe Flash Builder 4
Formerly Flex Builder, this is Adobe’s IDE — offered as a stand-alone version or a plug-in for Eclipse. If you just want the new SDK, you can get it here.

Adobe Flash Catalyst
Allows designers to add functionality to their interfaces after creating them in Photoshop or Illustrator. Catalyst files are then handed off to developers who add additional functionality. Personally, it seems like this creates more work for everyone: designers now have a new tool to learn, and more to do on top of the static design. Developers have more to do in rewriting Catalyst code. Why not let the designers design and developers develop?

Just ran into this today. I was compiling an AIR application and previewing it in AIR Debug Launcher and got the following error:

“invalid application descriptor: descriptor version does not match runtime version”

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Matt and I gave our Drupal/Flash presentation yesterday. Thanks to everyone who came out, we got some really good feedback from the audience. The link to the demo site and source files is:
http://fitc.sisutastic.com/

A couple of other really interesting technologies I hadn’t heard about before:

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Two of the projects we worked on for Sisu have been nominated for a Webby Award.

We also developed PNC Virtual Wallet for Razorfish which is an Official Honoree.

Sony CES 2009

For this project, we developed the home page which is an interactive timeline that allowed the client to make up-to-the-minute entries during CES. The user can filter/sort depending on his or her interests. We also developed a media player and product showcase app — both of which have the ability to be shared on social networking sites.

Nonesuch Records

We developed the home page news slider and the “think-map” on the Artists page. This project uses Drupal as a content management tool for the Flash pieces.

Relatedly, Matt and I are going to be giving a presentation next week at FITC Toronto regarding Drupal and Flash

The full list of Webby Nominees can be viewed here.

I like to be able to run the the project I’m working on by hitting a key-command, so I can make a tweak and then quickly re-compile. From my Flash IDE days, I’m partial to Ctrl-Enter.

This is one of the more useful features in Eclipse and every time I re-install or set up a new machine, I forget how to enable it.. so hopefully this will help others as well as my future self the next time I install Eclipse:
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We developed a handful of Flash apps for NYMag.com’s coverage of Fashion Week. One of the projects was a full-screen slideshow player which incorporated Omniture metrics and DoubleClick ad serving from within the Flash. Click the “View Fullscreen” below for a sample. Live links to the NYMag runways are below.

Click here for the runway slideshows on NYMag.com

De MonsterDebugger is an incredible new AIR app from De Monsters which allows you to debug AS3 Actionscript/Flex projects on the fly. With it, you can trace output statements, view your app’s tree structure, live-edit code and test methods.
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Just a quick note from the FITC Event Directors — you can still get early bird pricing until midnight on Wednesday Feb 18.

*Special M Studio 20% discount code: mstudio

If you want more info on the event or need to order tix, here’s the link.

Also if you haven’t seen the post below, I’ll be giving a presentation along with Sisu on Flash and Drupal.

To save on bandwidth, we often load transparent external images as SWF’s instead of PNG’s. It’s a bit more production work but it makes everything load a whole lot faster, as SWF uses JPEG compression on the image while maintaining the PNG’s transparency.
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I’m going to be presenting at FITC Toronto April 25-28 (exact date TBD). I’ll be presenting with Matt Ronchetti from Sisu about integrating Flash and Drupal. Drupal is an incredible, easy-to-use CMS framework (open-source too). We’ve been using Drupal quite a bit to pass data into Flash — there are a bunch of different methods for doing so, and we’ll cover the pros and cons of each. Looking forward to it!

If you’re going to the conference and want to meet up, drop me a line.

This sounds like a great free event, put on by flex.actionscript.it. The event date is conveniently set one day after FITC Amsterdam ends, so you won’t miss out on anything. Topics include:

• Flex Design Patterns
• Cairngorm vs Pure MVC
• Adobe AIR
• Tools (FDT/Ant)
• Flex integration with ZendAMF

For more information, check out event details here.

This is an error just about everyone runs into when loading data across a domain or testing locally. There are a couple of workarounds, which I’ll describe in detail in this post…
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Just a quick note, hopefully someone will find this useful as it took me forever to dig up, test, and confirm: if you are building an application that will run on a widescreen computer feeding to a 720p LCD, the resolution you want to target for the widescreen LCD is usually not the same ratio as the computer’s video output.

In my case, I was running a 1400×900 MacBook Pro with a 720p Samsung LCD. The Samsung’s resolution is 1366×768 (which is standard 16:9 widescreen). On the Mac, this 16:9 ratio converts to around 1400×787 — which means that we had to lop off the bottom 113px of the presentation.

If anyone has additional info to add, please pass it along.

We teamed up with Sisu again this year to build the Flash landing page and a widget for Sony at CES. The home page displays a visual timeline so viewers can get an up-to-the-minute view of happenings during the event. Users can sort the items on the timeline based on different criteria. Check it out here and here.