For a company like ours whose specialty is Flash and interactive production it’s disappointing to say the least that we won’t fully be able to take advantage of what Apple and some people deem to be the new “it” device or “game changer”.

Will it sell? Will we in the coming months or year figure out how to make this “useless” device useful? Probably. Until then it still remains just a large, cool gadget at best to show off to friends. Had it been more computer like with multi-tasking and an actual browser that lets you “surf the web” instead of just a giant iTouch it would reach the masses much more quickly and not just the mac fanboys (to whom Apple can do no wrong).

As much as I love my Apple stuff and am part fanboy, they’re starting to get more and more irritating. Their insistence on making things proprietary is annoying. The Apple TV could have been great but its a complete dud because of it. Would the game changing iPod which changed a whole music industry have sold so well if they said you had to convert all your music to an iPod specific format instead of the MP3? (anyone remember sony’s mini-disc?)

Personally, I’m still waiting for an iPhone that has a flash on it like my crappy phone did 3 years ago.

Produced for TAXI NYC & General Mills, this site features “Dan Sven” (Mr. Easy Listening himself!) singing 2 of his favourite tunes… “Hey Cookin’ Lady” & “We Need to Talk”.

The music videos were directed and edited Dave Pawsey (director of a few Sam Roberts videos). This site is a great example of what can be accomplished by Jam3 & Spy Films. The outcome is a highly creative and really polished interactive experience throughout.

www.dinnermadeeasylistening.com

This one is a long time coming folks. A massive undertaking we started at the beginning of ’08 for The Secret Location. The site was another Bell New Media Fund project for a television series on the Vision channel. www.iprophesy.net

What is it? Here’s our technical, geek speak blurb about it.  I Prophesy is an avatar-based Flash multi-user experience. The site encourages users to explore the future of the human race through video, mini-games (multiplayer and solo) and most importantly via chat and forum posting. The Flash app works in conjunction with a customized forum installation featuring a unified registration and login system synching Flash and bbPress. Avatars see recent posts in any one of the massive thirteen parallax worlds via an rss feed fed right into the skies of I Prophesy. The site even tweets to a Twitter account set up specifically for publishing postings on the forum. The site was developed for Flash 10 (as the player went into beta) allowing the development team to explore PixelBender among other things, for improved bitmap data performance used in the custom physics/world engine(s).

SmartFox multi-user server proved to be worthy, and allowed us to code a Java extension for some of our heavy lifting and network optimization strategies. The avatars themselves were created in 3D, rendered, converted into PNG sequences and then in order to control bandwidth usage and CPU resources a Java application was writen to process individual avatar frames into 2800px wide image strips of frame sequences separated into color data and PNG alpha channel for better compression, it would then create files ready for batching to produce swfs. Overall, the project was a year in the making and employs serious memory management, frame rate, and optimization techniques that allow this massive site to perform within the Flash player. The final result is an experience like no other with  an undisclosed number of codes and easter eggs!

Adrian out.

www.iprophesy.net

Check it out on GM’s website. LINK