Director and Lingo Programmer Available IRELAND

in

HAVING COMPLETED A THREE MONTH SABBATICAL [re house building] I'm now available to undertake Director and Flash and Lingo programming work.

Need an interactive CD-Rom to showcase your latest product/service/show? Then I can do this for you. . .

My CD-Rom projects can:

-- Download latest information from the web
-- Scan user's hard drive and adjust settings to ensure optmum playback
-- Install to user's hard drive if required
-- Playback full motion video with no stutters
-- Fully Searchable
-- Install screensavers and marketing collateral [games?] to user's hard drive
-- Available for Mac and Windows OSs
-- Often fit on a small business card CD-Rom
-- Stings and idents created to polish the product - think of 30 second opening animations
-- Video shot and integrated into the CD-Rom if required

I am experienced in After Effects/Cinema 3D software/Illustrator/DVD PRo and Photoshop, so you get eye candy as well as a solidly programmed product.

Contact me HERE

 

E-mail to art gallery in an instant

in Innovation

Coming in from the BBC ::

Artists from around the world are being encouraged to e-mail their masterpieces to be displayed in an East London art gallery.

Graphic artists, designers and film-makers are all being asked to contribute to the Hype Gallery, in London's East End, with their digital pictures or short films.

The idea was developed with print giant Hewlett Packard, which has installed a range of equipment, from huge laser printers to projectors, in the gallery.

When a piece of art is received, via e-mail or on a CD, it is printed out on huge machines, mounted, then hung on the wall for all to enjoy.

Source: BBC Online

 

CD Wow agrees to stop selling CD-Roms from outside the EEA --

in Civil Liberties

I'd say it was a mighty blow against consumers - from the Register --

The British and Irish record industries have struck a mighty blow for [sic] consumers by forcing online retailer CD Wow to stop selling CDs imported from outside the EEA.

Upshot: customers will have to pay an extra £2 for each CD. Currently, CD Wow charges £8.99 for CDs. CD Wow's price increases could mean a big fall in sales for the company, considering that its prices will now be more expensive than many supermarkets.

And boy, is the music industry happy. "It is not the consumer that will suffer, just CD Wow's profit margins. They made a lot of money out of cheap CDs," one insider told the FT.

Source: The Register

 

in Most Wanted

"The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we willhave become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."

// Reading Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

 

Stop Motion Studies in Flash

in Interaction

Here's an unusual combination of a series of digital images, Flash and juxtaposition. Love the idea, I think that the creator has only scaped the surface as to where this might go.

Users are invited to reconstruct mini-narratives based upon the paths they take through the data.

Via Boing Boing

 

2xbrothers

in Civil Liberties

 

When only quads will do . . .

in Most Wanted

Well I thought I was on the Apple site - or at best a spoof site -- but it's absolutely genuine. Liebermann computers make what is the last word in high end computer systems [for WINTEL that is] -- take a look at the grand canyon display on the right. Apple's lawyers must be rubbing their hands in glee at http://www.go-l.com/home/index.htm

Get this - each logo on every computer is unique - fashioned from an individual [and different] piece of rock.

For producing our logos we use marble, granite, quartz, sandstone, conglomerate, breccia, volcanic breccia, pegmatite, porphyry, granodiorite, gabbro, ultramafic rock, syenite, diorite, quartzite, schist, gneiss, obsidian, chert, tuff, felsite, andesite, basalt, limestone, dolomite, shale, slate, serpentine, and talc among many others. They come from remote places like India, China, Thailand, Tibet, South Africa, Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, and Peru.

 

An Apple is for producers - and Windows for consumers ;/p

in Apple

What’s so cool about GarageBand is that it exemplifies the market that Apple is going after. People who want to use their computers to make cool things. People who want to be producers, not just consumers. If it’s possible to distill into a single thought what it is that makes Apple Apple, and what has made the Macintosh so enduringly popular, that’s it.

That’s why Apple’s industry-wide PC market share numbers are nearly meaningless. The vast majority of Wintel PCs are used as little more than modern-day typewriters. They’re just office equipment.

PC pundits pound their heads against the wall, asking why, if Apple only sells a small percentage of computers, the company receives such a disproportionate amount of media attention. The answer is simply that they’re selling the best computers, to the most interesting people. Maybe it is only two percent of the total PC market, but it’s the most interesting two percent.

via daringfireball.net

 

2004 Predictions - hot and not

in Innovation

The clock spins again and these are the predictions coming down the line for the year ahead -- the year where the digital hub becomes a reality

1. -- a slew of extreme wi-fi and bluetooth devices will allow users to stream music, video and photographs from a central server in the house to the television, a music center or individual computers.

2. Early adopters run Linux [or Mac] servers in their homes to facilitate this.

3. Grid computing starts to happen - three, four or five computers in a home are harnessed to number crunch.

4. Several portals will emerge streaming engaging content - be it imagery, video or text, which changes regularly - almost like a tv channel. Think meta refresh on steroids. These engaging portals will not require direct interaction from the user to navigate. Voice navigation will emerge [hello Macromedia Central].

5. NASDAQ ends the year above 2750 - 35% plus

6. A video i-Pod - the v-Pod? appears.

7. Ireland will be well on the way to a change of Government.

8. Personal spaces become so much more important

9. UK sees video via 3G - Ireland still waits

10. I get my Canon 10d digital camera!

 

Long Time No Post

in WebLog Publishing

Weblog publishing sometimes benefits from the team dynamic - I have been involved with a lot of freelance projects lately, and my blog posting is one of the casualties of this.

The upside is I have so many mmore things that I wish to write about - especially some of the great software that I have used to get certain things done recently - like the Sygate personal firewall, the AVG anti-virus software, or the new MX 2004 incarnations of Fireworks and Dreamweaver.

And new ways of working - OOP in PHP, the Open Source Midgard CMS, and CSS2 with XHTML Strict, and the wonderful new Netscape browser - 7.1.

 

Image Gallery Online

in webCulture

I decided to shift some of my photographs online and every day I will upload a couple more. Autumn has come to Lusk so you can see some of the spectacular days we're having H E R E .

 

GeorgeWBush.com :: Official Blog

in WebLog Publishing

GeorgeWBush.com :: Official Blog

"This blog will serve as your personal guide to the campaign to re-elect President Bush, with breaking news, grassroots updates, and posts from campaign leadership."

Realizing the popularity of Dean's blog, Bush has decided to follow suit. Dean's is more, uh, "blog-like", but Bush's is just starting. Interesting to see the political candidates leveraging technologies.

Oh, and they both appear to be using MovableType, although Dean's site is the only one to post a link.

(Peter Raymond)

[via Lockergnome's Technology News]

 

Ideas as Corridors

in Distance Education

Ideas as Corridors The idea that ideas are a corridor is like saying that ideas are situated in clusters; think of the corridor as being similar to a particular culture, environment or zeitgeist. New ideas, situated beyond the corridor, are resisted, and people adapt to them in the following stages: they ignore the ideas, they deny them, they reject them, they integrate them, and finally, they make the transition to the new world view. This final stage is very infrequent, and very disruptive. I like this article; it reads a lot like Kuhn in a nutshell. By George Siemens, elearnspace, October 6, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

[via OLDaily]

 

Must-link-to: ISSN and weblogs

in WebLog Publishing

Must-link-to: ISSN and weblogs More than a must-read, Joe Clark's Compatibility of Weblogs and ISSN is a must-link-to.

[via Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

 

Laundering on the iterative wash cycle.

in newMedia Design

AIRSIDE -- When you next use your word processing suite, are you really using the extra features that persuaded you to buy the new upgrade in the first place? Would you have accepted easier use over new features as a purchase decision? When was the last time a software maker said 'Buy this - it's easier to use than our last version'? Thought not.

We're all software junkies. Your addiction is part of their business model. We all wait in anticipation of the next 'fix' - the new release. And they have us by the short and curlies - they stop supporting older software!

The thought came to me as I was using an ancient copy of Office the other day - it integrated so well into my 'modern' desktop. The heavy revolutions of new releases were completely lost on this piece of software - to no detriment I might add.

Doyen of the usability police, Jakob Neilsen, calls for 'good software'. A better user experience - and bug fixes across all new releases before the addition of new features.

And what does make for good software? BFG's new intake of students will ponder this early in their course. For something that we deal with every day of our lives, a wild array of answers might be forthcoming - especially from IT professionals. To the uninitiated, a difficult front-end often obscures powerful software to the acolyte. The presence of contextual markers that strike for ease of interactivity - navigational waypoints by which users can refer - are often completely absent in new software releases and Open Source programs.

A fundamental understanding of software and how people use it - interactivity - lends to better usability, and in turn - better software. The easiest and simplest user interfaces are notoriously difficult to design, made more so in complex software [read 3D]. To what extent is an intuitive interface the foundation for successful software, especially in a medium with which the user might have no previous experience?

Much front end design follows convention - a user expects to see 'save' under 'file'. But don't expect to see many tabbed palettes; UI real estate is rapidly being snapped up by the patent lawyers.

Of course software sells like soap powder - each iteration is new, improved, and hangs on a fashionable meme. No-one bothers to question what they have been sold the last five versions.

The truth is, like soap, all software does pretty much the same thing. New iterations usually seek to merge features from other bits of software as people change the way they work. A future version of Outlook, for example, might offer RSS aggregation and syndication, much the same as newsreaders allow you to do today. This time its centralised and sanitised for the corporate desk. 500 bucks please.

But the new features coming at you in the next release of your favourite program might be obtainable elsewhere. Anyone looking for true value for money [it's usually free] and a sharper edge to the way they work should look towards the Open Source movement.

It is here that you will find genuine stars, years before they hit the big time on the Microsoft stage. Here budding usability experts get the chance to pay their dues, design and implement. Good design and documentation skills are always in demand. Without the spin.

Just say no ;p