Big Spaceship | Labs Feed

A Plea for Developer Unity

Jamie Kosoy — Feb 03, 2010

This is an atypical Labs post, as it doesn't really concern specific code at all. It's more of a wake up call. It starts with the same thing you've been reading about everywhere -- the iPad. It ends somewhere much different and much more important for our industry. It's a conversation about what we're doing as experts in this field and how we move forward together. The announcement that the iPad won't support Flash kick started a lightning storm of opinions. The alleged issue at hand is that the iPad doesn't support Flash. This is a bad thing. It's a bad thing for the same reason that it also doesn't support Google Chrome, Firefox and (even) Internet Explorer. It's a bad thing because it doesn't support Unity and Java. It's a bad thing because it supports what Apple wants it to supports and that's all. Which isn't to say that we don't love making Apple applications... because we do. It's just that the iPhone app store was an incredible leap forward from the previous generation of mobile applications and so was rightfully recognized as revolutionary. The iPad isn't revolutionizing netbooks, it's devolving them back to a fully closed era. One environment, one language. A cumbersome, time consuming distribution process.While you can certainly be expressive using Objective-C and with the iPad, the decisions on how a user engages with something we make should be left to the experts.

Zend AMF Is Easy

Joshua Hirsch — Dec 18, 2009

When it was announced a while back that Zend was going to include AMF (Action Message Format) functionality supported by Adobe, I was excited to hear that there would be an "official" way to use AMF with PHP, as I had used AMFPHP, an unsupported implementation, with mixed success. I experimented with Zend AMF a little when it was released, and there were two things that annoyed me about this implementation as compared with AMFPHP, but I revisited it this week and discovered remedies for both issues.

A Dash of Rosemary on Your CSS

Matt Kenefick — Oct 28, 2009

Everyone has a complaint about CSS. Everyone has a complaint about browser compatibility. This is something Rosemary attempts to address. This is not a CSS framework. Rosemary is an open-source modular cascading filter-based modification system for CSS files; or commonly recognized as the acronym, OSMCFBMS4CSS. Your CSS files are run through a series of filters that modify it one after another. These filters can be toggled on/off, rearranged, or all of them disabled completely to give you raw output. It provides a scalable CSS wrapper that you can continue to use no matter what version of CSS is supported (or unsupported).

Thoughts on Silverlight Part II: Design and Animation

Tyson Damman — Oct 13, 2009

A quick introduction: My name is Tyson, I am an Art Director. I had the pleasure of working with my esteemed colleague, Jamie Kosoy, on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show project recently. My design team (Chris Petrillo and Caroline Caine) and I also dove headfirst into Silverlight and I'd like to share some of our observations and insights. Expression Blend Our initial thoughts on the Blend interface were fairly positive. It reminded us somewhat of After Effects and it wasn't a difficult program to pick up if you already are familiar with Flash or After Effects. We did begin to run into some technical issues with it, however. Jamie discovered that it is a pretty "leaky" program pertaining to memory, and this seemed to be causing issues with certain files crashing on machines other than the one they were created on. One of our biggest issues with building in Blend was...

Thoughts on Silverlight

Jamie Kosoy — Oct 06, 2009

I had the pleasure of diving headfirst into Silverlight in building the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment -- Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project's detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right? So now that the project is launched, I'm feeling reflective. And I have to say: Silverlight is a worthy competitor to Flash. It is a lot of fun to build in. I recommend it. I think there are times when it'll be faster to build certain things in Silverlight than Flash and vice versa, and it is a matter of learning where the strengths and weaknesses are for each. There were some things that frustrated me, but overall I found Visual Studio to be a great environment to learn to code in, C# was an extremely easy language to learn and most importantly of all the Silverlight player to be really flexible to the stress we put it under. Our team noted several times that we especially like Silverlight's animation capabilities -- we felt like we had far more "control" over what was happening on the screen than in Flash.

Quick Tip: Override toString();

Charlie Whitney — Sep 03, 2009

Sometimes when making custom classes a trace of an object just isn't enough information. For instance, if I had a custom person class, a trace would probably look something like [Object Person]. A quick and easy solution is to override the objects toString() method to provide a more detailed explanation. As with all good things though, use it in moderation. There is no need for each class to spill it's guts in a simple trace. Sometimes a movieclip should just be a movieclip.

Free Chicago Presentation

Joshua Hirsch — Aug 19, 2009

I will be giving a presentation this Friday, August 21st, at the Chicago Portfolio School. I will cover a lot of the same material as my recent appearance at the Denver Art Museum, including Big Spaceship's approach, culture, techniques, philosophy, and process. The event on Friday begins at 5:30 and is free! More info about the event can be found here.

Supershapes - Coder Challenge

Nick Hardeman — Aug 07, 2009

Charlie discovered the idea of the super formula. Since it sounded super, Charlie proposed a challenge, a coder challenge, a super coder challenge. The challenge was straightforward – create a super formula editor that creates a super shape. The other parameters being that the shape must spin in 3D (well at least look like it), the shape must be composed of at least 10,000 particles, the shape must be editable and it must be made in Flash. The winner determined by the fastest FPS, as judged by Mr Doobs stats class.

DelveUI Wrap Up

Jamie Kosoy — Aug 06, 2009

Just wanted to post a thank you note to those who came out to DelveUI and came to see my talk. I felt like there was some small spark of an understanding that designers and programmers in this industry don't have to relegate themselves to "Standards" or "Flash" camps... a subject I'll probably write on at some greater length at some point. Slides coming soon.

Denver Art Museum Gig

Joshua Hirsch — Aug 04, 2009

I will be speaking at the Denver Art Museum on Wednesday, August 5th as a part of the AIGA Colorado speaker series.

iPhone: CoreData Error

Stephen Koch — Jul 15, 2009

In an attempt to learn about CoreData to maintain persistent data on the iPhone I followed this tutorial. (I recommend following it and then opening up some of the provided examples from Apple that illustrate the use of CoreData.) Indeed it has a good deal of descriptions on how it all fits together and gave me great insight on how to implement a persistent Model. However, once I completed the tutorial to a point where I was able to build and run, the app was crashing and I was perplexed as to why. So I started with what the Debugger was telling me.

Cutting Edge Layout

Benjamin Bojko — Jul 13, 2009

Something has been going on in the Ship's kitchen during the past few weeks. After we got a new rack for our knives they had just been randomly dangling around in the beginning, enjoying their existence as cutting utensils. Nobody knows when it started exactly, but like crop circles in a corn field, the blades suddenly started getting a life of their own. On each trip for some caffeine there would be a new formation. What apparently started off as tidying up the workspace quickly evolved into a silent battle of knives. The great thing was that no body ever talked about the arrangements and the interaction was completely anonymous. It is still unclear who contributed, but about halfway through people started documenting everything on camera. My thanks go out to all the nameless knife shufflers. Hit the more link for the pictures.

Just Another Flash IDE - Flex/Flash Builder Workflow

Daniel Scheibel — Jul 07, 2009

The usual flash sites that we build contain tons of huge graphics, animations, dynamic motion, videos, timeline transitions as well as tons of code, utilizing huge open source libraries like papervision 3d, tweening engines and so on. We want everyone to be able to use their preferred design/dev environment to ensure a fast way to produce innovative high quality work. That includes using the Flash IDE and still being able to use Flex/Flash Builder as a developer.

iPhone 101: Understanding Distribution (Pt II of II)

Jamie Kosoy — Jun 05, 2009

In Part I of our distribution learnings we learned important lessons like the importance of mapping our certificate request to the same name in the iPhone Developer Portal, the differences between Agents and Admins and Developers (oh my!) and the answer to the all important question: "What should I set my bundle identifier to?" Now in Chapter II of understanding iPhone distribution we'll uncover provisioning for ad-hoc applications and prepping an application for final deployment on iTunes Connect.

iPhone 101: Understanding Distribution (Pt I of II)

Jamie Kosoy — Jun 03, 2009

When I first started dabbling with Objective-C and iPhone development I found the entire learning process cumbersome and frustrating. In fact, many days I still do. Often Apple’s documentation seems dated, complex or difficult to find. The hangover of the NDA from the early era of iPhone development still lingers – there is a dizzying amount of information to consume and understand before you can develop for this phone. I’d like to start sharing some of the learnings I’ve had along the way. Not every solution I’ve come up with is perfectly in tune with the patterns the Objective-C community or Apple recommends. I’m coming at iPhone dev from the angle of a self-taught programmer, someone who cut their teeth on JavaScript and ActionScript and now has stumbled onto something a little more complicated. Hopefully these articles will help me and the community at large to better document and understand this exciting new territory.

Flash on Tap slides

Jamie Kosoy — Jun 01, 2009

If you missed Flash on Tap, you missed out. I had a blast in Boston meeting and drinking with the community. Let me tell you, the infrared5 people know how to throw a party. My presentation covered Big Spaceship's process on a day-to-day level -- the 10 fundamentals that get us through what seem like crazy deadlines. I've posted the slides on SlideShare for your downloading pleasure. UPDATE: Or you can just watch 'em here!

Scrolling Materials in PaperVision

Charlie Whitney — May 28, 2009

For a project we were building recently in PaperVision3D I came across a problem when trying to clip MovieMaterials inside of a plane. Another big factor was that my stage was not set to scaleToStage, which seemed to fix the problems the little I played with it. However, for this site it wasn't an option. Following is some insight into the steps I took to solve this problem in hopes that it saves someone else some time. Admittedly, this problem should be no biggie for the papervision buff, but it took me a while to track down an answer.

Spectracular Music

Benjamin Bojko — May 22, 2009

What started off as taking my first steps in Papervision evolved into the creation of a visualization that maps audio spectrums to a 3D body. My goal was to display sound as a smoothly tangled structure as well as having it clearly react to highlights and different instruments in the song. The Candy Sound Visualizer is the result of those experiments.

FITC Toronto 2009 Link Dump

Daniel Scheibel — May 01, 2009

We went to the FITC conference in Toronto last week and had a blast. There was a good vibe all around and we had a lot of fun. To pass along all the good stuff we saw we generated a big FITC link dump featuring links to speakers, presentations and presented work we liked.

Color Unity: Adobe vs. HTML

Matt Kenefick — Apr 22, 2009

Working with colors can be a very difficult. It is hard to determine what is perceptual, what is consistent, and what is offset by outlying factors. Things can get pretty hairy when trying to synchronize colors between the web standards and Photoshop. There are a lot of options ( including: proof setups [view menu] and color profiles [edit menu] ) in Photoshop that you may forget about that will stand between you and that perfect color.