Creative Design + Development

So ya, I’ve ignored my blog for quite a while. And in the process I’ve been hacked and now my site comes up as “harmful to computers”. Now I’ve checked my code and the only thing I could see was an old script to the Orange Balloonacy campaign. Remember that cool campaign where people’s balloons would race across the internet or websites. Well that little snippet of javascript was the only thing I really found. So if anyone has some advice on malware protection, let me know. I’ve changed my passwords checked for scripts and iframes so I’m hoping that will solve the problem.

If you’ve seen Mike Chambers flashcommand implementation you’ll notice that it only works on the mac.  We have a lot of people at my office on Windows and I wanted to provide them something that could also work on a Windows computer.  Plus I wanted something a little cleaner, easier to learn and a bit more elegant than most of the solutions out there.  So I created FlashAntTasks.  Its a jar file that you reference in your class file that creates flash tasks that compile separate movies.  I’m posting it up on Google code so everyone can enjoy.  So enough with the fluff, here’s the details

WINDOWS USERS – you need to pass in flashcommand the flashapp attribute with the uri to your flash.exe like

You can download the code at http://code.google.com/p/flashanttasks/.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="FlashAntTasks" basedir="." default="Open in Browser">
 
    <description>
        simple example build file
    </description>
 
    <!-- os specific properties -->
    <property name="os" value="${os.name}"/>
    <echo message="Using ${os.name}.properties"/>
    <property file="${os.name}.properties"/>
 
	<!-- Include the Flash Ant Tasks Jar here, also make sure you 
                reference the FlashAntTasks.properties file which is 
                bundled in the jar file -->
    <taskdef resource="FlashAntTasks.properties" classpath="lib/FlashAntTasks.jar"/>
 
	<!-- Project Specific Properties -->
	<property name="html.filename" value="index_full.html" />
	<property name="local.path" value="${basedir}/wwwroot//${html.filename}" />
 
        <!-- make sure to reference the fla dir and your output dir -->
	<property name="fla.dir" value="${basedir}/flash" />
	<property name="swf.output.dir" value="${basedir}/wwwroot/assets/swfs" />
 
 
	<!-- TARGETS -->
	<target name="Compile Additional Swfs">
		<flashcommand >
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/site.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/site.swf" />
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/shared.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shared.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
	<target name="Compile Shell" depends="Compile Additional Swfs">
		<flashcommand >
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/shell.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shell.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
	<target name="Windows Example" depends="Compile Additional Swfs">
                      <!-- WINDOWS USERS: flashapp attribute is required -->
		<flashcommand flashapp="c:\\Program files\\Adobe\\Flash.exe">
			<movie test="true" source="${fla.dir}/shell.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shell.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
	<target name="Compile Shell" depends="Compile Additional Swfs">
		<flashcommand >
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/shell.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shell.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
 
	 <!-- Open in local browser -->
	<target name="Open in Browser" depends="Compile Shell">
		<exec executable="open">
			<arg line="-a ${browser} ${local.path}" />
		</exec>
	</target>
 
</project>

I hope you all are enjoying your holidays. As Seth Godin wrote on his blog today, “This has always been my favorite holiday. No gifts, no guilt, no doctrine.”  And I definitely agree.  Another thing he mentioned was pretty insightful about bloggers.  He mentioned that bloggers provide helpful info for free with no strings attached.  Bloggers have helped me in so many ways on a daily basis, and I know alot of bloggers read my blogs as well so I’d like to say thanks to all of you.  But it also made me realize that I just haven’t been posting much about what I’ve been doing lately in my life, cause who knows, it could help someone later in the same predicament.  So I’m gonna try a bit harder to get back into the whole blogging scene.  The only problem is that I can’t really talk about the projects I’m currently working on.  Which is kinda weird but I’ll figure a way around it somehow.  

Anyway my peoples.  Happy turkey day.

The Other You, one of the sites I worked on earlier this year, is on the Cannes Lions Titanium shortlist!!! We’ll know later today whether or not it wins.  But being on the shortlist is incredible to say the least!  The Other You was an absolutely incredible project.  We used every technology in our arsenal to create this site; Papervision, After Effects rendering servers, text messaging, multiple Flex and html sites, myspace, facebook the works.  And the most incredible aspect of it all was that it was done in 3-4 weeks.  Alot of long nights, seriously, alot….that carried over into the next day…and night…for real….alot.

But it was soooo worth it.

So Apple pulled a fast one on us at WWDC.  They had a small session on Cocoa for the Web in which they used a javascript MVC framework called SproutCore to create a thick client with bindings just like Cocoa.  I’ve been trying to get a look see as to what all the hoopla is but the SproutCore site is flooded.  Keep ya posted, in the meantime here’s a great article on it and here.