Text messaging – retarded.

Ok, it’s one thing to watch tweeners wet themselves over their new cell phones and their first text messages, it’s quite another thing to watch a teenager squeal with sophomoric tones that only a dog could hear, and it’s yet another level of “idiocy” to see some teen/twenty something texting while driving. I’ve nearly come unglued while watching a teenage girl with less driving hours than texting hours weave in and out of her lane as she frantically types with two thumbs and drives with her knee. Talk about a complete freakin idiot.

I had to endure an unforgettable day in high school – the day after a friend of mine died in a car crash the night before. The driver was changing the station on the radio, it was raining, and my friend wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The incident took less than 5 seconds, and bam, he was gone.

Now, a new experience in teenage retardation – text messaging in a movie theater. I’m sitting there watching probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen (Batman: Dark Knight) and right in the middle of some of the best scenes, here’s this brainless wonder 2 rows in front of me flipping open her phone and texting. Ok, one time, i can let it go. But 7-8 times?!?! She’s lucky I didn’t take her phone and chuck it across the theater. I nearly did. How brain dead do you have to be to text someone DURING A MOVIE?!? Is it that FREAKIN important that you communicate your adolescence wisdoms (Yes, thats dripping with sarcasm) right then and there?! First, it’s completely self absorbed that you’d think you weren’t bothering anyone. Don’t be that stupid – Please. All I can hope is, you don’t have the right to vote. You’d likely be the type to vote for the “popular” candidate – not wanting to waste your vote on a perceived looser. no, I’m not backing either candidate – I’m just making a point as to how mindless it seems our youth are today. It’s really pretty sad.

Anyway, if I find someone doing that again, I AM going to yell, complain, spill and probably assault their phone.

GRRRRR.

If you’re an avid “texter”, here’s how stupid you look:

microsoft: Did they have a hand in it? I’ll say…probably.

I was just heading over to Hank’s article on the situation with EcmaScript 4.0. The short of it is: it’s been drop kicked for good, leaving Adobe with decisions to make. As you read, Adobe had put alot into being standards compliant with AS3 and for obvious good reasons. The speculation is, however, that microsoft has had something to do with it’s death. As I read through Hank’s observations, I have to say, it seems pretty obvious, but I’m sure there are other factors. When you consider Silverfish (microsoft’s attempt at being a flash competitor), this makes almost too much sense.

One of the replies to the post suggested that Adobe seriously consider adopting haXe. I have to say, I see some real reason behind that at this point. Its already open source and has a great community behind it.

What’s interesting to note is that, when Nicolas emailed the open source flash list and introduced the concept of haXe (over updating MTASC to be AS3 compatible – thus creating his own language), I *got* the concept and even understood his reasoning, but didn’t necessarily feel like this would happen like it did (ie: es4 being tossed out). I literally thought it was a standard, but apparently, I wasn’t paying attention. Looks like Nicolas was a bit of a visionary I’d say, and now we’re actually living out what he suggested could happen.

And dood, that’s some serious apples right there – write your own language?? are you kidding me? And there’s only 2 people I’ve ever told on this blog who have big apples

Anyway, some interesting developments for sure are coming down the road – it’ll be very interesting to see what pans out. Personally, I’d love to see haXe adopted and basically hand microsoft their ass later on. Who am I kidding anyway, WHATEVER Adobe does to call microsoft’s move, I think i’ll be right there to support em’.

What’s even funnier is: it seems that both microsoft AND apple have it in for Adobe and Flash – what the hell gives with Apple and iPhone/iTouch not supporting Flash? The funny part is that Job’s used to be the leader of an underdog with ideals that matched his gear, and now he’s showing signs (and getting reactions btw) of the company he sought to dethrone (yes, that would be microsoft). Remember this ad? He might soon find himself as “the man behind the glasses”

PS> if you’ve been emailing me or im’ing me, and I haven’t replied, it’s because I finally contracted pneumonia – Dr says “you have a touch of it” – whatever that means. I feel like crap. But this got me mad enough to sit up in bed and say something

Flash on Tap conference

You know, i’ve been to quite a few Flash conferences ( not as many as Grant or Keith however ), and I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to put on a conference – what would I do with it? How would it be different and, for love of God – why another one?!

I mean really, do we need another conference? People already have a pretty big selection and usually can only swing one or maybe two with their company to pay for, so it’s really a task to pick very best ones! There are 4 one day workshops, and Andy Zupko and I are teaching Papervision3D at one of them. Andy will be teaching Effects/layers and I’ll be teaching optimization techniques.

Ok yeah, FOT is put on by IR5 along with the guys at influxis (we love you guys!!), so it’s natural I’d show up for this one conference. BUT, what’s unique is that this is a conference BY Flashers FOR Flashers. I have a feeling we’ll see some inspired work for sure, given the atmosphere is zero pressure and it mixes beer tasting from local brewery’s. It’ll probably be one giant “sit back and relax with some flashin’ and friends” party.

Anyway, this one you won’t want to miss – it’ll likely be a one time wonder where everyone had a mindblowingly good time, and nothing like it will ever occur on the face of the planet like it again – ever.

http://www.flashontap.com/fot/index.html

BaywoodGallery – a little somethin’ for my parents

You know it’s pretty sad when your parents have to beg. But it’s shameful when they’re begging you for work you do on a daily, if not a nightly basis!

So, since they’re heading out to do a show in California in a week, I had to get something out there. I’d intended to just throw up another iTunes coverflow app, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Then I thought that doing a triple carousel viewer would be cool, but thought it would be 3x’s as bad as all the other carousel 3D gallerys that keep hitting the web. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine way to present gallery’s, I just wanted to do something that was interesting and possibly different.

I’d had this idea to do an “outer gallery” for a while, so this was the perfect time to flush it out a bit. The concept is that instead of being an “inside gallery” that you walk through, this is an “outer gallery” that conforms to the way you might rotate it around for the best view. You’ll notice that the paintings have a particular rotation that would indicate the best viewing angle. As you rotate around, other paintings and pictures are revealed and are already in the rotation you’re currently at.

One thing that makes this work is that Z rotation never happens. You can invert the model for sure, but it never “rolls” on the Z axis, and that keeps the model at angles that make sense as you rotate around. It’s not a “new” way, it’s really very close to how 3D studio Max or Maya handle the free rotation – just without the ability to roll

But because of limiting that Z roll, the model never gets to a rotation that’s completely out of control or upside down and controlling it with the mouse seems pretty intuitive to even the lowest end users I’ve tested with (you know, graphic artists, and lead singers). I’m just kidding, I love graphic artists.

It’s not perfect, and I would like to clean up a few things. I’d really like to flush out this concept further, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out initially. All told, it’s 3340 polygons and runs pretty smoothly. The biggest hurdle was creating an intuitive structure for this and then dealing with planes sitting over the top of the center model and fixing sorting issues. What keeps this demo running smoothly is the fact that I don’t have to rely on some run-time tessellation. Because of that, I have much more head room in terms of # of poly’s in the scene.

Check it out! [ www.baywoodgallery.com ]