Well, 2007 was a crazy year for me and many of my friends and family. Lots of life-changing events: injuries, employment changes, random luck and misfortune.
Let’s see if 2008 might be just a little smidgen more mundane.
Everyone, party safe — there’s a lot of crazy idiots out there tonight.
There have been a lot of exciting developments in Flash within the last couple years, especially with ActionScript3 (Flash CS3, Flex Builder), and because of these changes to the Flash “platform” the community has flourished. Open source projects are taking off and Flash finally has the functionality to facilitate real development (as opposed to all the fake development that has been done up til this point).
OSFlash is a good starting point for all the open source goodness.
If anyone is daunted by the prospects of learning Flash from ground zero, you should try to attend one of Colin Moock’s Adobe-sponsored ActionScript3 lectures or just get his book, Essential ActionScript 3.0.
There has always been exciting stuff happening on the Flash platform but there are all new possibilities,
such as real 3D, and a robust modern object-oriented environment. For some more examples what people are doing now, visit TheFWA.
These links are a week old by now but they are cool art.
Benedict Radcliffe makes amazing wireframe sculptures. He created a pedal-powered Lamborghini for the UK Art Car Parade and was commissioned by Toyota to make a Corolla.
Link to Lamborghini, Link to Toyota Corolla
These art pieces are piles of random trash whose arrangement casts a picture in shadow.
Today Amazon announced their online music download store that features DRM-free (unprotected) MP3 files for sale. The Amazon MP3 Download Store joins Apple’s iTunes Music Store, eMusic, Beatport, and others in providing ‘unprotected’ digital music that anyone can play in whatever device they choose.
I predict that they will quickly come up to the number 2 spot behind the iTunes Music Store in online music sales, and that this is the turning point in the music industry in general for ditching DRM.
Of course, digital music sales still has a long way to go to catch up to illegal music downloads, but this is a start.
Content wants to be free!
UPDATE: Here’s a good bit of commentary comparing the iTunes store and Amazon’s new store:
“‘If you have a choice of paying $0.89 on Amazon for a higher-quality track with no DRM, or $0.99 for a lower-quality track with portability restrictions, where will you turn?’”
I passed on the last few of these, but when I saw that MC Hammer and Sir Mix-A-Lot are going to be there, performing live… I was like “It’s Hammer Time!”
Here is the awesome oldskool line up:
Naughty by Nature
Sir Mix A Lot
The Sugarhill Gang
Dawn Robinson of En Vogue
and a Finish line concert by MC Hammer.
It’s happening at the LA Memorial Coliseum Saturday, September 15 at 9am.
I have a special invite a friend link - so if anyone is interested in going for running or just watching, hit me up.
