Diffusion Curves: These would be Pretty Cool in Flash

This isn’t the latest news, but if you haven’t heard of diffusion curves, watch the video. A diffusion curve is defined as “a bezier spline that stores colors on each side of the space it divides.” Neat.

Adobe was part of the paper, so I’m not sure if they own the technology or not. Here’s hoping they get the rights to it and include it in Flash in the future. Animating individual curves would lead to some great effects.

Check out their images (pepper, lady bug, woman) that you can rollover to see the how simple the underlying curves information is.

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Dropbox is About to Have a Price Cut

Dropbox is great. I’ve been using their basic/free plan for a little while now. And I’ve been very close to upgrading to a paid version for more storage, but thanks to Google, I’ll be waiting a bit longer to make that jump.

Google is offering storage at $0.25 per GB per year; that’s $25 with Google vs. $240 with Dropbox for 100 GB. Now, Dropbox has more features with auto syncing and version history, but there are already 3rd party apps working with Google Docs so we’ll probably see similar features down the road.

My guess is Dropbox and ZumoDrive are about to get cheaper.

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Computers are Cool

You believe this is all CG? Amazing. Make sure you watch it in fullscreen.

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Hello Design Kitchen

After a couple great years at VSA, I’ll be hawking my Flash wares at Design Kitchen starting today.

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Google Launches Sports Calendars, iCal Still Better

I just noticed the alert in Google Calendar saying “New: Sports Calendars.” I gave it a look-see, but decided to stick with the iCal (.ics) format that I already added manually. In the image below, the red is the iCal format I already had for the Ohio State football schedule, and green is the new Sports Calendar version from Google.

Google vs. iCal

Google vs. iCal

The little football icon is cool, but otherwise I think the title offers too much information, cluttering things up and chopping off text. I already know the Buckeyes are playing in the game as that’s the point of the calendar. All I need to know is who they are playing, where, and when. What TV network I can watch it on would be nice too though.

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Tweening to a Relative Position using a Variable in TweenMax

This isn’t too complicated, but it’s something I hadn’t come across until a few days ago. If you want to tween an object relatively, but the new value changes and needs to be a variable, just cast it as a string.

// Your everyday absolute tween that moves movieclip_mc
// to 100 on the x axis, taking one second to do so
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:100});

// A relative tween that moves movieclip_mc to a
// position on the x axis 100 units/pixels greater
// than movieclip_mc's current position
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:"100"});

// An absolute tween like the first, but passing in
// the new value with a variable
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:newX});

// A tween that casts the variable as a string,
// thus making it a relative tween
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:String(newX)});

If you’re not using TweenMax/TweenLite, do yourself a favor and give it a try.

Posted in Flash, Tutorials | 1 Comment

Worst Company Name Ever

Good company names can be hard to find, but terrible names should be easy to avoid. I wish I was at the meeting when they came up with this one.

so unique we're uneek

Can you use it in a sentence? Could I have the language of origin?

There are so many things here that I disagree with. With spelling and layout alone:

  • The first letter is not capitalized
  • They’ve taken out a space and crammed two words together
  • The second word is capitalized when the first isn’t
  • There are on-purpose misspellings everywhere; “ee” instead of “i”, “k” instead of “que”, “f” instead of “ph”, and “x” instead of “ics”

The meaning is just as bad as the layout and spelling. Calling yourself unique doesn’t make it true. Nor does applying any of the cliches above (actually, 4 misspellings might be original).  Nothing in the name links to a memory or feeling you might have. It doesn’t create a new space in your mind. There’s nothing memorable about it except for how bad it is.

And they’re using the ® symbol? I seriously doubt they paid to register this mark. Look out uniquegraphics.com.

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Surf’s Up: The Branding of Google Wave vs. Microsoft Bing

Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.

Last Thursday, tech giants Microsoft and Google each had a big announcement. The former officially announced its new search engine Bing, an announcement that the tech world knew was coming, as its latest attempt to reverse the tide of Google’s search dominance. The latter surprised its audience of developers with a deluge of information in its preview of Google Wave, an amalgam of email, IM, wiki/document editing, photo sharing, etc., all done in real-time, that according to its creators “is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Google’s tsunami of an announcement drowned out Microsoft’s news for the day and as the swell grows its easy to forecast that the storm isn’t over. As developers join the flow and create their own applications, we will all feel the ripples for a long time. Never content to ride out a current success, Google seems ever capable of looking over the current crest for the next opportunity to catch more momentum. Bing’s release though, instead of being the watershed moment hoped for by Microsoft, may only turn out to be a drop in the bucket.

Ok, enough of that. In case you missed the point, I crammed a boat load (another one!) of metaphor into the preceding paragraphs to illustrate the branding effectiveness of Google Wave. which I think is a great name especially when compared to Bing. A great name attaches itself like a barnacle (again!) to thoughts and feelings you already have thus making it more memorable. Wave does this fluidly (I can’t stop). Bing does not.

Take note of how a product is launched and you’ll see how confident a company is in it’s branding. Google Wave is introduced and the developers are wearing some cheap tshirts; Bing is annouced with an $80 million advertising budget. A good name “has legs.” It’s easy to talk about. A bad name has an advertising plan while a good name IS the advertising plan.

Branding aside, both products look nice. I did a few searches on Bing and the results look fine. But I’m so tied into Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc. that I don’t think I’ll be spending much more time getting used to it. I also watched the video of the Wave presentation, and it looks like another home run for Google.

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Delete Cookies?!

delete_cookies

From a djdownload.com Newsletter.

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Thematic Photosplicing by Peter Funch

Peter Funch has some great shots from NYC where he takes many, many pictures from the same spot and then splices them together based on themes he finds among the individual passersby. Looks like a tedious process but the results are worth it.

funch_jumping

funch_times_square

funch_suspicious_eyes

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