managed objects

'Unlimited', the 'worlds longest webpage' project I worked on last year won the peoples choice for Visual Design / Aesthetic at this years Webby's... Not bad.

We're also up for a D&AD award for Unlimited and my other big project from last year, SpotTheBull. Hopefully we'll do all right on the night...

Application Economics
Will interactive agencies please make themselves useful

Read here

thanks Tom

schulzeandwebb.com

Lots of good thinking and smashing ideas.

Via the OpenScreen project... see here and here

Maybe we'll see some sort of high performance hardware-accelerated Flash player on the iPhone one day after all?

So I've started to check out what's involved in making games on the iPhone, you know like OpenGL ES, Open AL etc - the usual stuff... In amongst my fooling around, I've started to create a Vector class for doing some basic physics. While I was researching how to do that correctly, I came across a realization. The ARM processor of the iPhone and iPod Touch doesn't have an FPU (Floating Point Unit) so to get any decent performance out of a game, i'll have to get to grips with Fixed Point maths (again).

If you're looking to get up to scratch on that too, this might come in handy.

There's a helluva lot to learn for anyone making the move from the desktop to the iPhone... Well it's not as simple as a lot of people have made it out to be.

I think this is the most geeky post i've ever written.

Google Code page and download

Google Mac blog post

First let me say that Flash™ and I are friends, I have built my career on top of Flash (in part) for the last 10 years but we are having issues... Just had to make that clear.

Ok, so there's been a lot of speculation about Adobe bringing Flash to the iPhone / iPod Touch. Besides some basic problems with the idea (like no analogous plug-in architecture for Mobile Safari, have you noticed how Quicktime movies play?). The biggest problem is that Flash is a resource hog. It can't render vector content using available specialised hardware and it doesn't make very efficient use of other resources such as memory.

Adobe (and before them, Macromedia) have been slow to take advantage of modern ways to draw 2d graphics in Flash. Most modern desktop computers and some modern mobile devices have dedicated hardware to speed up the drawing of 2d graphics to screen. Desktop operating systems have Quartz (on Mac), WPF (on Vista) and XGL (on Linux) but Flash still uses the CPU to grunt its way through beziers, points and fills. Newer versions of Flash have tapped hardware to improve video playback by leveraging H.264 decoding in hardware but Adobe has relied on improvements in CPU speed to deliver better 2d drawing on the desktop and now they face a problem... Well, a couple of problems

1. People are getting used to higher quality 2d graphics and high frame rate animation on the desktop and on games consoles. Flash's CPU bound rendering performance is falling behind.
2. Browser makers are beginning to integrate native (very high performance) implementations of the commonly used javascript convenience functions that manipulate webpages. That makes competing, web standards based website vector graphics technologies (like SVG) far more attractive to content makers.
3. Content makers are increasingly using technologies like Processing that can be embedded into web pages and can access hardware to render graphics and produce far higher quality interactive experiences.

I think that it's about time Adobe invested some time in making use of platform specific 2d libraries (Quartz, WPF, XGL) for rendering flash content. Then we may see high performance Flash on devices.

are you listening?

Very cleverly done...

I think it taps into that same thing that makes us fascinated by personality tests and the like. Like when you were a little kid getting an eye sight test and you secretly hoped that the doctor would tell you that you had x-ray vision or something. What? You didn't secretly hope for that?... I'll get my coat.

Actually no, you get your coat - this is my blog.

Cheers for the link Asi