Spreading the word

I started contacting people about bildr yesterday, and it looks like it is working.

I contacted only about 30 people, and 70 have watched it. Not to bad. But I know it is going to start tanking soon. I need to find a way to keep this going. But it’s going to be hard. Though, I have been contacted by a few people about it, looking at how they can help out. So it is getting exciting either way.

I will be setting up a forum soon so that we can start figuring out what needs to be done and how we should approach this. But as I remember from starting theGiant, it’s hard to get anyone to talk without a critical mass.

Anyways, other than starting the crusade, there really isn’t too much to talk about. Some cool stuff is coming up at work, but we will see what I am actually allowed to talk about.

Where have I gone?

Well a lot has happened since I last posted.

I got married. Back in tucson. So I think that is a pretty good excuse for not posting. Right?

bildr videos

45sec version

Full version

Coming down to the wire

Just a quick note: I don’t  think most people know, but “down to the wire” actually refers to tires.

So tonight while working on the bildr video, I thought. This is kinda long, and it starts to change tone here. So I am splitting it up into 3 videos. So i should have it all done by tomorrow night. I decided to make a short 45sec one with it. It’s actually just the first part of the video, but it seemed to work so well on its own.

It took over 90 illustrations (many very small) to make this happen. But I believe the aesthetic came out very nice, and I think people will like it.

Let’s just hope it compels people to help make it real.

But bildrs’ not what’s coming down to the wire. In just a week I will be headed back to Tucson to get married. Wow did this sneak up on me. Ill be gone for less than a week, and im sure it will feel like the blink of an eye. I really just help it all comes together as well as I see it.

At work: I just hired a developer to take over the majority of that portion of my job so I can focus more on the design of the product. Right now it is so hard to know what will happen in the next few years, but I have a really rare opportunity for someone so soon out of school. Im in a position to really lead the design vision of a company. It’s a little scary in a way, but more liberating than anything. I hope years from now when I look back Im amazed at how much has happened and how much I was involved in. It’s been almost 3 months, and I already am.

update, and flash-javascript

So im not as far along with the video as I would have hoped to be by now. It’s really time consuming to figure out what to draw/ animate for the video. That and I had some stuff come up that slowed me down.

I was able this weekend to make my first flash/javascript connection. Something I was doing in javascript required me to be able to control a flash video. Thankfully, mootools was to the rescue. Sadly mootool’s documentation on how to make it happen was way less than par. It took me a while to find out what I had to do to make it work, but in the end, a nice blog came to the rescue. So for anyone wondering how to get mootools’ SWIFF remote working here is some code:

Swiff.remote($(VarNameOfSwiffInstance), 'NameOfFlashFunction');

TRUST ME! You need: $(VarNameOfSwiffInstance)... it must be wrapped in the $()

Im not sure why you need it in quotes as well... But it is what worked. So there!


People with boxes

So im back to work on bildr. Well the video that is. I recorded the audio a few nights ago and have already animated the first minute of it. I forgot how long it takes to draw all the things needed and animate them. It is so much easier to just record my screen like I have done with all the others.

I hope to have it done in the next week. Until then, here are a couple of screenshots!

From Flash to Flex

Just over a year ago I started learning ActionScript. At the time it was actually to develop multi-touch applications for the table I had made. Back then, I did everything in code, and there was no real interface aside from the black background. For this, flash was great, I just did all my code in a document class, and it worked very smoothly.

Well nowadays Im building AIR applications and have been using flash for it. Building an interface in flash it like doing it with cutout pieces of paper. Seriously. But like that, you can never get everything in the perfect location. It drives me crazy coming from a web development background. Things in flash have no structure. Things can easily overlap. If you move one element it does not affect the elements next to it,  meaning you now need to change all of them. And there is no super simple way to do it numerically (all done with the mouse), making it even harder. (if you change the size of a movie clip you stretch it’s contents so you can’t just readjust size from the info box)

So the company I am with just bought Adobe Flex  and I am starting over in it. I really like building interfaces in it a lot more than flash, except coding in it is not as easy. This is what I find really funny. Adobe creates a program for flash developers, who want to just code everything. But in the end, you need to do a lot more before you can start coding.

Someone at adobe needs to take a closer look at how javaScript works. Let me have my interface in one document, and my code in an other. Let me name elements and directly talk to them from code. In flex, you can do either one of these, but not both, and that’s not cool. Even flash let me do that, and you claim it is for designers. Well I guess that’s it. I am a designer, but I also like hard structure.

Then again, I have used flex for 1 day. Give me some time.

But if I had to say, I still think flash is the worst applications from adobe now. It tries to be like illustrator, but does not act the same. The key combos are not the same as all their other applications. And it wont behave in the OS like it should (mainly hiding).

I had no clue

I had no clue it had been so long.

Ok… so I have to say. I hate moving. Maybe worse is unpacking. Im here in my new place typing this in my own room. I call it the studio/ office/ lab. It’s pretty full of junk right now, but I think it is going to be perfect when im done setting it up. I may actually have real space to not only work on my design/web work, but a completely different table to work on electronics.

So the real reason for no update has been the move/ unpacking. The last 3 weeks have been dedicated to only that. Not to say that work hasn’t sucked the life out of me, but I managed to take some of it back, and it looks like most nights will be mine to work on my own stuff for once.

At work, I guess I can say, I should be able to at least, I am working on the development of the software for our product. It is being developed in adobe AIR so we can write once and deploy on what ever platform you want. It is basically flash for the desktop. So I have an application with a real icon who actually updates, opens ands saves files, and does everything an real application should do. It’s pretty nice.

Because of it, I have been learning a ton of new action script stuff, and if I ever get time to write some multi-touch apps again it should be much easier.

Once the product is out there I can tell you more, but we will be offering a product in the field of Affective Computing, AKA the ability for computers to interrupt human emotion. It’s a really cool field of research started by Rosalind Picard (who happens to be my boss) to expand the field of artificial intelligence.

People look at Spock from Star Trek as this perfect example of a perfectly logical human, and how smart they are. We often think of emotion as getting in the way of decision making, or at least messing it up.

Well, it turns out that people with too little emotion actually have a hard time making decisions. Imagine going to a restaurant, your favorite one. Maybe you look over the menu and see a few things you like, but end up going with a old favorite. Your emotion kicked in and helped with that choice. If you had been perfectly logical you would have considered 1000 things about the food (from taste, ingredients, health etc) before making a decision. Ultimately, you would spend more time and possibly end up with something you would like less in the end.

So if humans need a certain level of emotion to make better decisions, what about computers. If people want to make computers act and think more like people, then they too need to have some emotion. That is what this area of study is all about.

sadly small update

It’s just 7 days after my last post but I feel I have to keep going even when I have very little to report. In the coming week, I will be moving (just down the road) and with work and the wedding planing, I have had no time for my own projects. I know that I am a little behind schedule for bildr, but sadly sometimes work must come first.

I can’t really say what I am up to (I think) but I figured it was fair to show you something I came up for what I am doing. keeping with the box theme, and adobe’s AIR icon, I came up with this guy. It will be a download icon for what I am doing.

I guess that is all for now… hopefully more soon.

bildr Code update

Any spare moment I get, I have been trying to finish up  the bildrCode beta, but as I get closer, I seem to slow down. The last 10% takes 50% of the time right?

One of the major things I did was not even on my list of things needing to be done. Someone finally wrote a good article on mod-rewrites, and I had to take advantage. For those of you who don’t know…

When you go to http://www.adam-meyer.com/blog/ you are going to my site, and requesting the folder called blog. If you went to blog/this/that, you are going to a folder called that, who is in a folder called this, who is the blog folder. And so on.

Well this Rewrite thing changes all of that. You can have adam.com/400 actually go to adam.com/includes/files/api/index.php?fileId=400. So I took this idea and made the bildr code URLs much nicer. Before you would download a file and it would be like code.bildr.org/includes/php/download.php?id=82 . But now is actually code.bildr.org/82.zip . I made a rule that when you see the .zip extension, that the person actually wants “/includes/php/download.php”. This is also good, because now hovering over the link, the person knows they are about to download a zip file. I did the same for the dynamic java script files used to embed the bildrCode into the wiki articles. code.bildr.org/includes/php/render.php?id=795 is now code.bildr.org/795.js . I actually went a little nuts on the last one and actually made the page output a legit javascript file where before it thought it was html.

I also cleaned up/ rearranged the site a bit. Added some icons. Oh icons, what a pain you are, and how I wish I had a graphic designer to work with. All mine seem to be shots in the dark until I hot something. New is the ability to commit your session and comment on it. This is a change from before where you your session was committed automatically. I think this change makes it a little more like SVN.

So speaking of Icons, here are some boxes I was working with. Feel free to use them if you can. There is a PDF link below.

PDF here