Category Archives: general

10 years of Flash

Posted on by

This month marks the 10 year anniversary of what used to be known as FutureSplash Animator. Back then it was just a little animation tool, and has a pretty interesting story behind it, including being turned down by Adobe.

As it grew close to shipping time, we changed the name of our software to FutureSplash Animator to focus more on its animation capabilities. We also were growing tired of running a company that didn’t have much money to spend, and began trying to sell our technology. After an unsuccessful pitch to Adobe and turning down a bid from Fractal Design, we shipped FutureSplash Animator in the summer (May) of 1996.

So how do you celebrate 10 years? Well, there were a few things happening on Monday that are pretty big news: We saw one of the biggest US Television networks go online and offer streaming versions of their shows. This was exciting for me because Schematic designed the UI for the ABC player, and acted as a Technical liaison (with our VP of Multimedia stuff Robert Reinhardt heading that side up). A while back I was asked to help out with a motion test/technology demo for the 3D rotating images, and after a few hours of messing around with Andre Michelle’s the excellent DistortImage class by Thomas Pfeiffer (based on Andre Michelle’s code), we had a nice little working prototype running. It’s very basic, but you can check it out here if you want to see how the animation progressed as the ABC folks built the actual player.

Then Adobe redesigned their site — killing Macromedia.com in the process. At first I thought ‘sure another website, blah blah,’ but then I looked under the hood and noticed that they are using SWFObject to embed the Flash movies on the site(!). It’s a customized version, but the base functionality is all there, and they even left in my namespacing, so if you search the js file for ‘deconcept’ you’ll see the code show up. Pretty cool.

There’s one other big project that was launched on Monday but I’ll save that for another post.

What the hell am I doing?

Posted on by

It’s been a while since I gave an update on what I’ve been up to lately, so here goes:

About 5 months ago I left The Chopping Block and started as a Senior Software Developer at Schematic. I’ve been working on a few really cool projects, including some work on Vongo, and a Windows Media Center site for GameTap. There’s a ton of other awesome projects in the works that we’ll be launching soon, so watch this space. Also, we’re always looking for good AS2.0 developers, so if you or someone you know is looking for work, or even just more fun work, drop us a line.

I’ve also started teaching a class on XHTML and Flash at The Cooper Union, which I’m very excited about.

Katrina: how can you help?

Posted on by

Aside from the usual Red Cross website, here are two other websites that may be of interest to everyone:

I’m OK Registry – Enter the phone number of a loved one to see if they have checked in, or ask questions about a person by entering their phone number and posting a message. This is an excellent resource for people who may have relatives in the area and are wondering if they are ok.

Displaced Designer – A resource for those in the creative industry recently displaced by the on-going situation in New Orleans and the surrounding region. Offer up desk space to a designer who needs a place to work, or find a desk if you are a designer who no longer has a place to work because of the hurricane / flooding.

Please help spread the word about these sites. If more people see them, more people can help.

Starbucks vs. McDonald’s cage match

Posted on by

There’s a post over here about Starbucks store density. Pretty interesting that there are 165(!) Starbucks stores within five miles of my apartment.

Naturally, I wanted to see how this compares to other retail chains, so I went to mcdonalds.com and plugged in my address. McDonald’s website doesn’t let you see how many total results there are within a certain radius, so I just hit the ‘show more’ button until I hit five miles. It turns out there are only 119 McDonald’s restaurants within five miles of me.

Wendy’s store locator gets the award for Most Useless Interface: when I put in ‘new york city’ and my zip code, it said there were no locations. After removing the city name and the zip code (only choosing New York from the state dropdown) there were 226 in the whole state of New York, but when I finally got it to tell me how many were in ‘new york city,’ the number was only 16.

So I guess Starbucks wins. Whatever ‘wins’ means.