Carlos Pita, aka ElPitaMan, has posted some one of his work on You Tube. It is an animated holiday ecard created for the clients of Televisia. He not only does the animation, but also does all the voices in his creations. Dude is incredible.

My other bud, Ansar Sattar entered the Animae Caribe Animation and New Media Festival, and won the Best Caribbean Animation award. He took on the difficult task of alerting Trinidad audiences to the threat of dengue fever borne by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, and made the presentation a funny informative cartoon. Dang! He actually pulled off making that topic interesting and fun. Awesome work!

Ansar in the News: Ansar Sattar drawing attention with Trini-style fine tooning

DCF

I honestly have been jumping through hoops to get Flash type stuff running, but dealing with the command line, really has not been that difficult. I can pretty much do what I need from a text editor and compiling from the command line via the SDK . I really don’t need all of the frills at this moment. To me, that is amazing. I can actually write some code with minimal graphics, and pump out a prototype, that pretty much skeletons the project. So I don’t necessarily have to go out and purchase Windows again for my home system. Don’t get me wrong, if I did not have Windows and Adobe products on my work computers, I’d be buying Windows, but I can get by with Linux for the moment when working at home. This is really all new to me since I’ve always had Windows, and never considered going without.

How to set up the Flex SDK on Ubuntu

-DCF

My brother sent me this link a few days ago. Some interesting points are brought up in this video that coincide with Obama’s initiative for stimulating our economy via re-starting our technology initiative and pumping up the broadband. If this happens, then the points made in this video will inevitably come to pass. The old ways of making money are failing. The Information Age is definitely upon us, and those that can adapt will prosper.

In Don Tapscott’s 1995 book, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril In The Age of Networked Intelligence he spoke of this day coming. He spoke of what he termed the ‘digital haves’ (those who will embrace tecnology), and the ‘digital have nots’ (those who can’t keep up with technology), and the economic gap that would ensue as a result. We’re not quite there, but it is coming. When we are now talking about the prospect of Rich Internet Applications, and mass broadband distribution, we are not long from another Internet boom. Just hope it happens in time.

Also check out The Digital Economy Fact Book, a free pdf by Thomas Lenard and Daniel Britton for a more current perspective.

The Currency of the Future

-DCF

I noticed that we can now play Galaga in Flash since I have gotten back. Mame has now been ported to Flash. This is an amazing feat! Mame stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It is a project that essentially takes all the video arcade machine games of old, and allows them to be played or emulated on the PC. Since the flash player is a virtual machine, a flash version of the emulator could be written.

It runs pretty slow for some games, like Galaga, but who cares as optimization could easily fix this. What matters is that Flash actually could pull off an emulator. That is freaking awesome and further proves that Flash has come a long way. Still, Flash player 10 is coming up and is even more powerful and will hopefully be able to address the speed issues. One thing is for sure, Flash can do a great deal more than animation these days and may now be taken seriously as a development platform for the web. (see fMame for more info)

-D

Not that this has much to do with Flash development, but it does have to do with Rich Internet Applications. Here is one of Microsoft’s entries to the RIA front and it is a darn good one. The WWT app is  a “Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.” The WWT is a media  rich application portal that accesses terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive experience. This is just the beginning of where RIAs are going. The possibilities are endless. Let’s just hope the signal to noise ratio is low, because the potential for lot’s of gratuitous crap is very possible with this technology just like the days when everyone had a cheesy Flash intro that invariably got skipped.

-DCF