R/GA has recently released their 2007 Interactive Holiday Card. I spent a good bit of time over the past few weeks working on it with a team of talented folks here at R/GA.
Tattoo Santa takes advantage of the performance improvements in Flash Player 9 to warp an image onto a mesh real time. By combining this with video playback, we are able to insert content into a video real time. I’m guessing that this basic technique is going to be pretty common place in the next few years as it has a wide variety of applications (besides the obvious one of putting tattoos on Santa).
Figure 1. Tattoo Santa offers 6 different tattoo designs which incorporate a custom message from the user.
I managed to get my hands on a Chumby a few weeks back, but due to a heavy workload, I wasn’t able to play with it until recently.
For those unfamiliar with the Chumby, it’s essentially an internet enabled alarm clock. While that description doesn’t do justice to the Chumby’s full capabilities, it does quickly conjure to mind the Chumby’s basic form factor and suggests where a Chumby would sit in your home or office. I’ve now had the chance to spend some quality time with my Chumby, both as a user and as a developer.
Figure 1. The Chumby is about the size of the average alarm clock.
This was a quick piece I banged out last night. It started out a bit different than what you see here, but I’m fairly satisfied with the result.
I also ported over a DrawingManager class from AS2 to get the arc drawing done. It neatly packages up a bunch of drawing utilities and can be used in place of making calls on the graphic object of a sprite directly. Once I’ve had a chance to test it more thoroughly, I’ll release it here.
The standard way to generate a random number in Adobe Flash is to use the Math.random method. I’ve found Flash’s random number generator to be perfectly sufficient for all applications I’ve used it in up to this point. Unfortunately, the Math.random method does not allow you to “seed” the random numbers it generates; this is problematic if you want to generate the same random numbers repeatedly.
Since the announcement that the Opera web browser on the Nintendo Wii would support Adobe Flash, I have been curious as to which version of Flash it would support. I haven’t been able to dig up any official announcement, if anyone out there on the infomesh has seen something which I missed, please let me know. You can see the Opera browser in action on the Wii website as well as in a preview presentation on the Nintendo Japan website. It seems to work well enough, and you can catch it playing a flash animation on the Japanese Super Mario Brothers DS website as well as playing flash video on what appears to be a website for a Nintendo DS based cooking guide.
I tried a little bit of amateur sleuthing to try and uncover the version of the Wii’s mysterious Flash Player.
Nike has relaunched it’s online store as a completely Flash based RIA. Besides a slick visual refresh of the old HTML store, there are some significant architectural achievements as well. Highlights include fully functional deep linking and bookmarking support as well as a robust back button implementation on all of the major browsers. The site is also fully search engine accessible.
Check it out at: http://www.nikestore.com
