You can follow along with Indigo’s adventures on her blog here

you can also find her on twitter @indigoindigo

Indigo’s next local show will be “Paint Your Faith Vancouver” April 21- 28.
Follow @paintyourfatih on twitter or check the facebook event

We will be working to create a simple visualization that will emulate pixel snow on a tv. Cam will take you through the process of writing a simple bit of code to create this visualization. Please feel free to take this code and modify it to make your own visualizations. We would love to see what you are able to create using this simple bit of code.

You can leave us questions or comments using the comment form below

Or by email L S B at LiFT Studios dot ca

Or on twitter

You can download processing here

You can download the tutorial files here

The processing language reference can also be found here

Twitter
twitter.com/liftthis

Email
lsb@liftstudios.ca

Phone
604.568.5438

Or by using the comment form below

Thanks again from the entire LiFT team for helping make LSB such a success.

You can find all sorts of interesting details about Kerry and the fabulous work he does, on his website reasonid.com

You can find this post at Kerry’s blog www.kmore.net

Kerry was kind enough to share his thoughts with us on this edition of LSB.

We are very much interested in hearing your side of the story! Tell us what you think of this podcast and Kerry’s thoughts on social media using the comment form below.

This process of documenting talks about Interaction Design has another purpose other than our LiFT Studios Broadcast. We are submitting many of the best ones to the IxDA 10 conference.

If you feel you have a strong opinion about what Interaction Design is, drop me an email haig(at)liftstudios.ca. Maybe we can have a skype call to put you on the next broadcast in this series. I’m serious!

In this episode we explore the high level strategy which has fed into the design and development of the new generation of interactive kiosks, as well as the process of working with all parties involved. We will also take some time to examine the creative process which has led to the design and development of these kiosks.

Jeff Heywood is the Manager of Content Production for the Vancouver Aquarium
Chris Stone is the Senior UX Designer for Nitobi Software
Cameron Lee is a designer and developer for LiFT Studios

Central to the conversation is the on-going corporatization of media and how the corporate powers have flubbed the single biggest opportunity they’ve ever been given: the Internet. Todd explains how Big Media’s desire for a “Pleasantville model” of copyright, where dough-eyed and naive citizens happily follow the rules and nod to the cues of expected behaviour without ever questioning why, has turned the corporate media industries into vast institutions largely devoid of ideas and innovation. In short time, the conversation hops from the establishment of blogging platforms (such as LiveJournal and Blogger) as innovators in user-generated content to a frank discussion on why rigid copyright terms and treating your audience as criminals is marketing (and coprporate) suicide. To fill in the gaps, discussion of Facebook‘s constant (and possibly criminal) mishandling of their user’s content, why Michael Geist is a national icon, South Park‘s cheeky and clever insistence of function before form, the Dadaist nature of the contemporary music industry, Girl Talk, how the legacy of The Beatles’ music is now in the hands of Rock Banders and mash-up artists, and why Radiohead‘s re-invention of music distribution turned bold experimentation into sleazy marketing.

Not solely to harp on the pitfalls of the RIAA, Facebook, et al, Todd offers solutions to some of these problems: copyright control at the hardware level of camera equipment, allowing user communities to subtly dictate the laws of the land, understand the mediums in which your product thrives, and ditching 5-figure per song lawsuits for customers who simply want to enjoy their favourite music. With British governments looking to cut-off illegal downloaders from the web for good (and legendary musicians such as Paul McCartney, Elton John and Damon Albarn appropriately calling shenanigans), it seems this dilemma is far from over.

Thanks again, Todd (Twitter). We look forward to having you in the studio for round three.

Cameron worked closely with set Aileen, Danny and Tanus, to come up with the concept and look of the visuals. Ultimately we ended up with a highly stylized night sky, which fit in perfectly with the set that Aileen had created.

Ultimately the show was a big success and LiFT was proud to be a small part of that success!
Congrats to everyone who helped put on this show, and thanks for making us a part of it!

If you have any photos of the event that you would like to share please feel free to send them to cam at lift studios dot ca

For some time now news has been released about ‘the new internet’, the information has included techie tidbits about the type of technology being used to develop the next generation of world-wide communication, as well as some of the potential rich media content we will be seeing on the web in the years to come. But nothing prepared me for this article passed to me by a co-worker. Take a minute and read this for yourself, I can guarantee it will paint a very scary picture of the future.

I have been noticing some very scary trends in our global society these days, in particular the growing commoditization of our planet’s resources. This article led me to realize that it is not only our physical resources which are being hungrily snapped up by corporations, but now increasingly it is our intellectual properties and freedoms which are being consumed to raise profits. This is a perfect example of corporations trying to take over something which should be inherently free and unregulated.

As a heavy user of the net, I am somewhat of an idealist. I have always been one to believe that the internet would be a force to help unite humanity and promote free speech globally. Unfortunately over the past decade or so we have watched as slowly but surely the internet has been taken over by corporate pimps and pornographers. Whether it be Google selling out to the Chinese government and helping them to censor the net, or the 260 new porno sites that go online daily, the Internet has been the most revolutionary communications tool of the past century, and for the most part we have squandered it’s wealth of information and communication tools.

As an example check out this video from GOOD Magazine, as it has some interesting statistics on internet pornography.

The fact that the corporate machine has now set its eyes on the wide open spaces of the web is a scary thought for me, especially as a web developer. The idea of moving the internet to a subscription-based model would destroy personal freedoms, while lining the pockets of ISP’s worldwide. Gone would be our ability to freely and openly communicate. Our ability to access information outside of the normal media outlets will be utterly decimated.

If the mere thought of this doesn’t scare you, it should. This is the type of Orwellian big-brother like control we have all been warned of. In a time such as this, when our world is succumbing to the ravages of environmental degradation, soaring food and fuel prices, and ever increasing levels of conflict in countries around the world, freedom of speech is more important now than it ever has been before. Free and open communication inspires innovation, and putting a corporate stranglehold on the freedom and flow of global information leaves little hope for this.

Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst, Consumers Union:
“The network neutrality nondiscrimination principle, which protects competition, maximizes consumer choice, and guarantees fair market practices, is one step closer to being abandoned with the Senate Commerce Committee’s vote. This endangers the most important engine for economic growth and democratic communication in modern society. Nondiscrimination made possible the grand successes of the Internet. Its removal can take them away.”

Whether you are a regular user of the net or not, you cannot deny that the internet has helped promote global communication and free speech. As many people around the world have fought for their own personal freedoms and liberties, we too must fight for our freedoms.

Where can you start? Well, start at places like savetheinternet.com, internetfreedom.org and by simply making yourself and others aware of the issues. Please share your thoughts and insights with us all.

The book takes place in a world which has been ravaged by war or some type of natural disaster, and this leads me to my only criticism of the book, which is that I was left wanting more! The circumstances which lead to the decaying world in which the story is set is what interested me most. I also found that the setting for the story helps immerse the reader in a frightening and unknown world, much as the characters themselves see the world around them.

I do not want to give too much away about the book overall, as I don’t want to ruin it for any of you who may be reading it or are thinking of reading it. What I can say is that it was an excellent read, and a poignant tale about the inherent goodness all of man-kind has inside. My only hope is that it doesn’t take a ruined world, like the world of The Road to bring this goodness out in all of us.

If you have read the book please leave us a comment and let us know what your thoughts on this novel are!… just try not to give too much away for those who haven’t read it yet!

The story covered a wide range of topics within the umbrella of tech-support for your computer, from combing online forums, including some tips on etiquette, as well as the emerging tech support services sector. I found this all pretty interesting, but to be honest almost all their advice was old hat. As a long time PC user I had gotten very used to troubleshooting issues with my PC and operating system. What I couldn’t help but notice was that in the Click feature, they focused exclusively on PC’s! In fact there is even one part of the story where a man who has had to hire someone from Geek Squad just to move some music over from iTunes on his PC to his new Mac. The man also mentions that he was so tired of fighting with his PC that it is what caused him to go out and buy a Mac… curious don’t you think?

The fact of the matter is that this man has just recently discovered what most creative professionals like ourselves have known for years. That Mac’s or Linux based machines are far superior to Windows based PC’s. Since the release of the iPod, the Mac has been gaining more and more traction in the computing marketplace, as Apple’s market share has slowly, but steadily increased over the past 5 years. This is in large part due to the simplicity of the Mac philosophy, making complex tasks easy through effective use of design and engineering principals. What’s really scary is that the latest release of Windows, Vista as it’s known, was supposed to be the best windows ever, and yet it has caused so much frustration with long time PC users that now more than ever users are returning to Windows XP or moving away from PC’s all together.

The sad truth is that I was once one of the huddled masses clinging to my PC, living day to day, simply hoping that nothing would go wrong. Since moving to a Mac platform, I have never been happier, and my productivity has never been higher. When I initially started using the Mac good ol’ Tiger was still the OS of choice, and as I got more and more used to the new platform I was amazed at how much easier, faster and more productive my life had become. With the introduction of Leopard even more features and ways to increase my productivity have come along. One of the big features that I love is the increased connectivity of Mail and iCal, this makes organizing my busy schedule a snap, and Spaces helps keep my desktop and my workflow simple and effcient. Overall I can’t imagine ever going back to a PC. Sure the PC’s may have the price point down, but to be honest if you add up all the time you spend troubleshooting, de-fragging and de-bugging your PC, the Mac pays for itself within no time at all!…

I’m not here just to rag on PC’s, I admit that I was once a loyal user, but what I have recognized is that the Mac works best for me. I also recognize that PC’s definitely have their advantages as well, I’m just left wondering what those advantages are? Any help here!?

Do you have any thoughts? Leave us a comment and spark some conversation about which platform you prefer!

Again I stuck with a common feature of passing the component an XML file to read, though in this case I switched it up just a little bit. This time I used a simple PHP script which reads mp3 files from a folder and parses an XML playlist using the files ID3 tags. The Flash file generates the playlist based on this file, making this player a very re-usable component as it can be skinned in a matter of minutes and the only setup required is telling the player where to look for its playlist. This player incorporates some very cool features such as the live spectrum analyzer, sound buffering and scrubbing, volume slider and dynamic playlist.

Also on the list of more advanced components to develop was a horizontal ‘tsunami’ menu. I had developed a tag display system using this technique for the UBC SALA site and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to port the script over to AS3. To my knowledge no one has yet built a tsunami menu using AS3, so this was a fun and challenging build. There are still some bugs to work out in this file, mainly relating to the highlighting of tags, but it is a solid rough example of the tsunami effect in AS3.

Both of these projects have really helped me build my knowledge of the ins and outs of working in AS3, and I have to say that I am still a little on the fence about the whole thing. Overall I really am starting to prefer AS3 to AS2, but there are none the less some things in AS3 which really, really…. really bug me. Firstly, what is up with all the nonsense errors AS3 tends to throw!? I have had to make good friends with Google search to discover the roots of some of these cryptic error messages flash likes to throw now. Fortunately, Curtis Morley has been nice enough to develop an entire site devoted to dispelling the mythical AS3 error codes. This site has become my new best friend as I really just can’t understand why, with all the major improvements in Flash CS3 that they couldn’t work out some better error descriptions, or at least give you the line number… something… anything… would help.

Despite a few hair pulling sessions I am getting more and more comfortable working in AS3 and developing more complicated AS3 components and applications. But there are still some things about AS3 that have left me scratching my head, such as why the onReleaseOutside method dissappeared? This is a really painful function to do without, especially when using draggable objects. I mean seriously, how hard would it have been to add in a MOUSE_UP_OUTSIDE method you could listen for?? In any case I found a suitable work around for this by adding a mouse up listener to the stage, but this still seems like an awkward way to handle a relatively simple event.

Another strange change I have come across is the changes Adobe has made to the startDrag function. In AS2 you were able to pass the function a set of co-ordinates to confine the dragging of an object… which has now been deprecated. I knew that there MUST still be a way to handle this, and it took me a couple hours of digging in the Flash help files to find the solution. In AS3 you must declare a Rectangle variable, and then pass the rectangle into the startDrag function. The rectangle will then confine the dragging of the object. I find that this is actually quite a nice fix, but my problem is with the way that Flash’s own documentation buried this feature in the help files. I guess my real issue with AS3 comes down to documentation: Adobe, why have you done such a piss poor job of documenting all these changes to your proprietary scripting language??? Why must I comb the web for answers to relatively simple problems?? Why must I have to search the web just to find out what your cryptic error messages really mean?

All in all, I have realized that my issue with the new version of Actionscript lies not with the language itself but with Adobe’s documentation of the language. To be honest, I think that Adobe could really have done a better job of documenting all of the changes to the language. This would really have gone a long way to making the new version of the language much more accessible for lower level coders and those of us who were familiar with the nuances of AS2. Had Adobe made more of an effort to make the transition a little smoother I think that we would be seeing many more people getting into the AS3 development environment. I hate to do this, but this new version of Actionscript seems to be suffering from the ‘Vista’ phenomena. Adding complexity to simple tasks, and adding simplicity to complex tasks. This is a trade off which I feel Adobe could have managed much better.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment.

I began my journey with a fabulous Lynda.com tutorial called ‘ActionScript 3.0 – Beyond the Basics’. I have done quite a bit of research into AS3 and how it differs from the previous version of the language, and I also studied up on my object oriented programming. By the time I began this tutorial I had a pretty solid understanding of how the language should look and operate. The tutorial took my skills to the next level though, helping me develop clips and components which I had already developed in AS2 in the new language and also in a largely class based OOP way. Menu systems, interfaces and particle generators were all on the menu of this excellent tutorial.

The Lynda.com tutorial took me about 2 solid weekends of coding to work through and fully understand, and I can honestly say that it was an excellent starting point for me to begin to develop a new library of AS3 classes and components. This is where generating my own AS3 code library began, developing simple components. I decided to begin by creating the building blocks of any website in a class based system, so that from now on creating an entire interface will be as simple as a few lines of code. I started with a basic menu system, quickly moving on to developing more complex navigation systems such as dropdown and accordion menus, then moved on to other interface elements such as photo galleries and custom scroll panes.

When developing all these components I knew that I would want all of them to be extremely expandable and re-usable, so making them class based was a must. For most components I realized that XML would be the universal language that they would use to generate the content, so all components are self-generated by simply passing the component a piece of XML to read. For example, the menu system below is created with only 4 lines of code:

import lift.interactive.DropDownMenu;
var dropMenu:DropDownMenu = new DropDownMenu();
dropMenu.loadXML(“dropdownmenu.xml”);
addChild(dropMenu);

By creating a simple class based menu system I was able to easily build on it to develop more complicated menu systems like the one above. This is one aspect of AS3 that I am really starting to enjoy, the ability to re-use code and create rich applications with very little code. Of course there is quite a bit of code that runs behind the scenes, but the idea is that you very rarely have to alter it, making AS3 a very powerful language.

More to come as I delve deeper into the world of AS3!!

The Elements of Neighborhood project is a fairly complicated one, with many different facets of the site and large quantities of numerical and graphic data to display. In other words, an interactive designers dream come true! We have steadily been building momentum with this project, and it currently feels as if we are just about ready to dive headlong into developing this web-app. A big thank you to the N-Labs team for all their efforts and collaboration along the way!

More to come soon on this exciting new project!

The site was designed and developed by local stars Biro Creative who did an excellent job creating this virtual world for us to explore. Check out the site and see what you can do to improve your local energy consumption.

This film was a very disturbing trip down the rabbit hole and into the minds of the madmen at the helm of the most powerful nation on Earth. To learn how these few men ignored the advice of the intelligence community, and other experts in the field of national re-construction is absolutely appalling. I am left wondering how Americans at large can simply ignore such a horrific truth. What I realized after watching this film is that we are all to blame, especially the American public; those of us that have done what we can to protest and prevent this malicious war of ignorance and greed have been left broken hearted by the masses who are to ignorant, confused or just plain un-caring to stand up and fight for truth and justice.

Growing up as a child of parents who lived in the 1960′s I was regaled with tales of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, which incited riots and protests across the U.S. This film really made me wonder where that same passion and conviction which swept up a generation was today? How is it that the generation which fought so vehemently for peace back then has failed so miserably to pass on those same values and passion to their children?

Perhaps we are just content now, with our Mercedes and Hummers, content to drive them in ignorance of how they are fueled by the blood of innocent Iraqis. Perhaps we are content to be inundated with useless media, masking the truth behind what Paris Hilton did on the weekend. Perhaps we are content to allow a liar and a cheat to desecrate the oval office with his ignorance and malaise? Perhaps we are just content to sit back and watch the world destroy itself while we all watch on CNN? For the sake of all of us, I hope not!

If you would like to make a positive change in dire situations like this… then sign up at an organization like this.

I hate to say it, but this is the way the internet should be. Sites which provide rich content in a simple yet engaging way, that is how I want my browsing experience to be. I don’t know about you… but for me, the days of the standard 3 column cluttered page should be forgotten and we should start looking for new ways to interact with the next generation of web-based content. The Flash CS3 and Flex environments are making this dream of mine more and more of a reality.

It is people like Andre Stubbe who are bringing these visions to life, bridging the gap between, graphic design, illustration, computational design and artificial intelligence. Look for more cutting edge works from this beautiful mind.