We’re very proud to have been a part of the launch of www.bluemarble.com. The site was designed by Caroline Chen of ChenGrafix. We’ve been working with Arturo Tabuenca of Blue Marble to optimize the site and finalize the Flash and PHP/MySQL production for the site. The site is deceptively complex, with plenty of dynamic Flash content and smart forms, polls, market data, etc.

We feel fortunate not only to have worked on this project, but to have learned about Blue Marble and the world of Socially Responsible Investing - which we knew nothing about before (at least I didn’t). SRI has shown incredible growth in the massive investment industry and it is good for all the right reasons. Good for the earth. Good for humanity. Good, sound investments in companies with an eye toward the long-term. Why wouldn’t you choose to put your money into companies that are thinking 10, 20, 50 years into the future and planning now to keep our rainforests around, and making conscious choices not to support sweatshops, etc.

It just makes sense.

So read up about Blue Marble - the story of its creation, the world of SRI, and sign up for the wonderful Out of the Blue newsletter.

This idea is for real. And its time has come.
Cheers.

How-To: Run Flash games on your Xbox 360 - Engadget

At the end of 2005 a hacking group known as PI released a copy of the demo disk found inside of the Xbox 360 kiosks. PI has been cranking out a lot of these game ISO files even though there isn’t a way to play them yet. The thing that makes the kiosk disc special is that Microsoft didn’t enable many of the security features found on regular game discs. Granted, the actual executable files are still cryptographically signed, but you can manipulate many of the other unsigned files on the disc. The disc doesn’t have a strict media flag either, so you can burn it to a CD/DVD and it will play in any Xbox 360. The Xbox-Scene community has been investigating booting your own Flash files using the disc which is what we’ll be showing you today. The final result will be a disc that is playable on any Xbox 360.

Now that’s pretty awesome stuff, and talk about a process to get it working. Although we all know you can’t put a price on watching your friends faces when you show them the “flash intro” you built for your 360

Looks like flash 8 is getting picked up by major online add distribution channels. I am sure this will do wonders for the plugin penetration. It will be interesting to see how advertisers will put limitations on cpu load and the new issues that f8 introduces.

Some links:

Point Roll
JD

Another quite amazing Flash site:

http://www.ashesandsnow.org/

We’re off to Flash Forward 2005!

–Were Back: How about some pictures
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noinput/sets/231715/

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Shared Libraries from the time I first started trying to use them when developing www.tonyrobbins.com. I think the concept is great - with the ability to share simple graphic assets, even code snippets or classes across multiple swf files using a central library file. The main problem I have yet to find a great answer for is the loading process. There is no way to truly monitor the progress of loading shared libraries without a workaround.

This is particularly difficult when working with a shared library that contains entirely dynamic assets that you intend to add to your app at runtime using attachMovie or something like that. The movie you are bringing a shared library into must actually have an asset from that library on the stage somewhere to trigger the loading of it. Here’s the workaround that works for me.

1. Create a blank movie clip in your shared library and call it “assetLoader” or something like that.
2. Export it along with all the other library assets you are using.
3. On frame 1 of your destination movie, you can load your shared library in on _level2 and monitor its load progress that way.
4. On frame 2, you can unload _level2 and place a copy of your blank shared asset “assetLoader” on the stage… this will force the movie to load the library swf in correctly. But since you’ve already loaded the file into cache in step3 above, this process doesn’t need to be monitored and should be instantaneous.
5. On frame 3, initialize your app and you are off and running.

If anyone out there has a better solution than this, I’d love to hear it.

Another resource for everyones favorite fonts.
http://www.ductype.com/

Pretty interesting and very life-like
http://www.starterupsteve.com/swf/wireframe.html

Power Bright

Has anyone else noticed how flash content seems to play a little smoother on IE than firefox. I just switched over and it is one thing i noticed. It does not seem to be a frame rate issue, more a redraw limitation.