Flash CS3 , pleasure to meet you

Finally I got a go ahead to use Flash CS3 as a day-to-day worktool. And what a pleasure it has been so far. It seems that more then merging Flash into Adobe Suite family, Adobe really listened to the developers and included some great features in the IDE. It's mostly the little things not to detract from the established workflow routine, but it somehow feels enhanced and smooth.
The way that the different control panels can be folded into a sidebar that not only makes the task of saving realestate, but it gives a visually appealing medium-size icon side tray with easy one click reference to that panel. The tool bar itself is interesting. you can click the top of the toolbar to squeeze the tools thinner along the screen, one column instead of two. Then when you're doing something else the tool bar hides, and a click on it's head bar brings it back. Small things like this make it good. Similar thing happens if you have your library open from the sidebar for example, then you click on an empty frame, and the library folds up. This I found to be a bit annoying becuse I wanted to open the library, target a frame by clicking it then dragging the library item onto the stage. Couldn't do it without opening the library again because it just closed. The other criticism that I have is that the contents of a library can take a while to load.
Other than that, it seems really fast. Adobe have done a great job merging Flash into it's product range.
I've only been working with FlashCS3 using AS2 at the moment, which seems like a waste, but I'm looking forward to diving into AS3 already having the tool in front of me.

My work is getting blogged with positive feedback

Doing a quick search on "iDirectory westfield" in Google, brings up a few blogs that people actually went to trouble to to write about my software. This is the wayfinding kiosk in the San Franciso Westfield shopping center. This one seems to be positive on the software interface part, which makes me happy. The couple of points that were pointed out were about putting more of these kiosks around the place so that people didn't have to wait to use them. There is a good discussion going on here about the viability of this type of interface in shopping centers. Always good to discuss these things. This one went to the trouble of putting the interface usage on digg and youtube.
Great feeling.

SWF -> XAML one for the Flashers in the tech wars

This looks promising. Electric rain have released a SWF to XAML converter! This means that things like Silverlight and other XAML authoring tools could be redundant. Developers could leverage their knowledge of flash to create SWF files and then convert them to XAML, the crappy MS bound vector format for Vista.
Go Flash! One for the home team!

graphic designer's hat 'on'

Seeing I'm into computers, people's expectations about the range of things I've been asked to make using a computer has been enormous. When those people are friends or family you always do stuff on the cheap and do a 'deal' one way or another. Because of this blurring of lines between what I would consider work and relationships, can result in good things or indeed bleedin nightmares.
This one is pretty good overall. No one has lost an eye and the scratches are only superficial. This little favour involved me putting on my graphic designer's hat and making print brochures. The subject is a hand engraving business that my mum runs as a hobby on and off. Anyway, I thought this might help her out to expose her skills. Now This has been going on for years. From 3D crystal vases and wine glasses, through to desktop publishing for photocopied flyers, though a few websites that are long lost to the etherweb. Now the latest reincarnation is a postcard-sized color one side black and white on the back. So I same up with this. This is only the front of the postcard, the back has promotional spiel.
Making this was more of a trial than I thought, logo design, layout, colors, working with limited image quality. Overall though I pulled this one out of my hat.
The other things that I have made for my mum over some years is here if any one's interested.

After finishing this one, I found out why I can't be a graphic designer right now. Don't get me wrong, I love the creative aspect of the whole process. Going with what the image 'feels like' is one of the most liberating feelings. These days though if I tuck into something to do with graphic design, I'd draw up the layout in about 2 minutes and then sit there for weeks tweaking it. By that time the magic is lost and the whole process just becomes frustrating.
Now I know this is because of lack of knowing my tools. I'm not the whiz of photoshop but I can things done. But that's a world away from sitting down with your WACOM and whizzing through your project, waiting for your PC to keep up. I love that feeling with using Flash and coding in general. Actually moving forward by being able to keep up with your mind's creative speed. Bumping into frustrating walls of not knowing your tools is too infuriating for me right now. One of the reasons I'm putting off buying a MAC.

web and 3D like gum and peanuts ?

The world of using 3 dimensions on the web has reincarnated many times. From the humble and corny animated GIF icons through VRML then in Flash Swift3D and now papervision3D, 3D on the web has never really made it. Why is that? Large part has got to do with the bandwidth required to create the balance between effective 3D animation and enough graphic detail to make it past the teeth-gritting experience of next frame anticipation. The bandwidth thing is getting better though, so what's holding 3D from becoming a comfortable web browsing experience?
I believe the juncture lies in not what the user expects from the Internet, but what the user expects from 3D. The Internet provides information in much the same way that paper provides it. A more-or-less flat surface filled with information. The bonus of the Internet delivered information is the ability to navigate through it in innovative ways. Sure, cool, dwell within human psychology to derive attention grabbing navigation, play with layout and color theory, architect RIA applications till your heart's content. But in the end you just wanna get stuff done or read something useful. Somehow I think that 3D heads away from this purpose into providing an empty experience of floating in a pseudo 3D world.
So it seems 3D interfaces lean towards providing an experience rather than functionality. What does that mean in terms of the web? Well for one it throws the challenge of creating an information-rich and usable interface. It also means that 3D web experience is leaning towards experience-rich implementations like online gaming and other proprietary environments, such as secondlife. So even with advances in the flash player and things like papervision3D, I don't believe that we will see a commonly used effective 3D web interface anytime soon.