Project Bluebird

http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/bluebird/
This online ABC series is an interesting experiment in a new form of internet based story telling that utilises on line video, social media real documentation, and even has the characters interacting with the audience. Bluebird is a fictional story about climate change and geoengineering. In my opinion anything like this requires an effort to get into, but one of these days someone will come up with the right balance to make things like this work. Still working out if this does.

Bernard

Ipad applications

And I think I really do want to make ipad applications. Iphone doesn't do it for me but Ipad, yes. I think it will appeal to a different demographic than the iphone and now is the time to think about making applications for it. This is not simply because I like the look of Ipad, though from a design point of view it is possible to do something quite beautiful and interesting I think. I think it is a whole new medium and I have an idea for something which will be something half way between a book and a game, with some animation and strong narratives, which is such a good idea that I am not telling anybody too much just yet.

Example links:

http://developer.apple.com/ipad/sdk/

http://mattgemmell.com/2010/03/05/ipad-application-design

Unfortunately, taking a deep breath, it means learning to program, and I have no idea where to start with that just yet.

Bernard

HTML 5

I am planning to research what is happening with alternatives to flash like html5. Though incomplete it seems pretty straightforward so far. I figure that this will be pretty useful in terms of internet stuff over the next year or two. I think this is at the core of the debate between Apple and Adobe. In the end the non proprietary thing will win I think, at least in terms of performance and quality, and you will be able to make it in a wysiwyg way in dreamweaver and flash anyway.

Here is a link to the first HTML 5 and CSS3 capability add in for Dreamweaver.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/html5pack/

And this link has code snippets for video and audio in the html 5 format.

http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp


Just click on the specific tags to get more code and information on how to apply it.

It seems that HTML 5 video, so that no plug in like flash is required will be well supported before too long, with options for it already in vimeo for example.

I understand that not all browsers have much support for the basics of html 5 yet. Still I think it is worth working towards where things are going rather than where they have been. Otherwise it is a matter of learning things that are obsolete before I have chance to work with them in a year or two.

It seems from this comparison that it is primarily internet explorer that is the prime problem (as usual).

http://caniuse.com/


Bernard

Apple V's Flash getting serious

This post from Steve Jobs made it clear to me that I won't be developing apps for ipad with Flash

Thoughts on Flash

Bernard

Overview of assignment 1

Okay so this is the wrap up for the first assignment:

Blog:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/

Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernsul

Blog post about flickr:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/delicious.html

Delicious:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan

my post about delicious on my blog:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/delicious.html

I wanted to use the blog and the other sites we were asked to prepare so that they continue to be useful to me in "real life" - not just for the assignment. I couldn't get into the assignment for the assignment's sake. Taking this approach I have taken my interests and tried to depict and develop them over the length of the assignment task.

BLOG - 18 posts

I have had a blog before, but I felt this was a good opportunity to start again. Previously I was using my blog as a diary site without any expectation or wish for an audience. Now I am beginning to get a feel for the distinction between personal/private life and a professional/public profile that a blog is an important part of, and I am beginning to think of my blog in those terms. I have made a number of posts in my blog. I put up some video links to animators whose work I admire. After my initial enthusiasm for this I realised that there may be bandwidth problems, and from now on I will focus more on links only to external videos which seems more polite.

I have made a couple of posts about blogger. One was about discovering blogger in draft which allows for easy though still limited customisation of blogger blogs. Subsequently I refined the look of my blog with it. The post related to that is here.

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/03/better-template-support-for-blogger.html

I know in wordpress it is possible to customise the code for a blog a lot, but I have never been able to work out how to do it to any great extent, in Wordpress, or in Blogger. So I am looking forward to learning more about this later. In blogger in draft mode I did discover the page for editing the code for my blogger site. It is a little complex and not a lot of straight html involved.

I have also made a post in relation to flash and ipad which I think is relevant for this course - to me anyway:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/ipad-flash-and-interactive-books.html

I have made a post in my blog to some of my favourite sites:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/if-i-was-to-talk-about-my-favourite.html

I have also made a number of posts regarding flickr images that I have posted on my site. Which I have linked to below:

Some examples of links and images that I have placed on my blog from flickr are:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/photos-from-colombia.html

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/venice-shop-windows.html

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/india1.html


I have made links to people's blogs including as listed below. The blogs are interesting - the comments are not so much.

http://beckygsmpiclassblog2010.blogspot.com/2010/03/week-3-posting.html

http://mymel-odrama.blogspot.com/2009/01/beginning.html

http://nicholas-davlouros.blogspot.com/2010/04/tagging-pages.html

http://benwotton.blogspot.com/2010/03/walk-cycle-update.html


FLICKR - 54 items

My flickr site is at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernsul

My blog post on flickr is at:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/flickr.html

This is an edited version of that post:

I have found flickr good to use. I haven't used it before for my images. I have just come back from some years overseas. Beginning to organise some of the photos has been kind of therapeutic.

I have noticed some features which are useful on top of the obvious. One in particular I think I will use is posting directly to blog.
I like the idea of placing things in sets. I tend to think this way and it will help me show the images in a positive way. I am beginning to work out how to make blogger and flickr work together and I am looking forward to developing this as time goes by. I can see how flickr will become a professional promotion tool.

DELICIOUS - 58 bookmarks

My delicious site is at:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan

I have book listed all the student mpi101 blogs that I could find. I got 32 counting my own blog and the main course blog.

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan/mpi104_2010

Here is a link to my post on delicious on my blog:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/delicious.html

This is the text to the blog posting:

I am taking the task of building up my bookmarks in delicious seriously. In the past I have just had a huge jumbled list on my browser and this seems to be much better as I may actually be able to find stuff in the future because of the tagging system. I think it will be particularly relevant for listing tutorial sites and examples of animation and illustration that I admire.

Other sites that use folksonomy include:

http://digg.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://www.propeller.com/

http://www.reddit.com/

Here is my bookmark for a few favourite/ most visited sites. Some comments are in the delicious description:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan/favourite_sites

Here is my blog post on the favourite sites:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/if-i-was-to-talk-about-my-favourite.html

I have used tags for delicious and for my blog primarily based on my areas of interest. I look for tags that I will use more than once but not so often that they form too big a group to be useful. I think of it as a filing system. I also try and not have similar words so that tag lists are not split up in an arbitary way, and so difficult to find.

Delicious

I am taking the task of building up my bookmarks in delicious seriously. In the past I have just had a huge jumbled list on my browser and this seems to be much better as I may actually be able to find stuff in the future because of the tagging system. I think it will be particularly relevant for listing tutorial sites and examples of animation and illustration that I admire.

Here is a link to my delicious account:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan

ipad, flash and interactive books

I have been watching what has been happening with apple and Adobe in relation to the launch of the ipad and CS5. I was hoping that they would get it together and flash would be made available to seriously create applications for the ipad and iphone. It hasn't happened. Apple have more or less banned flash from them. This seems to be because of how power hungry flash is - so that it overloads the phone or the ipad operating system.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/apr/09/apple-adobe-flash-developer-row

I am particularly interested in this because I have a background as a book designer, see example above, and one reason I am back at uni is because I presumed it was probably a 20th century profession that will fade away and I better move along a little. ipads in particular and other digital tablets in general do seem to offer the possibility of a new and revitalised form of book reading and I think this could be interesting for people with my background. So I am thinking about what I would need to design ipad apps. I was looking for a way around learning some serious code, but that doesn't seem likely for some time now.
Bernard