Josh Sager Media: Creative Technologies Blog

Last Friday Pittsburgh was named the most livable city for the 2nd time by Places Rated Almanac. We are the only city to have ever earned the title more than once. Quite an honor for our city.

Typically I would have shrugged my shoulders, made some sort of cynical comment about the recognition and then moved on with my life. But I can’t help but feel pride and excitement about the kudos from non-Pittsburgh media. Over that last 8 months I’ve been apart of a creative community heavily involved in the creative arts and technology scene responsible for podcamp, doughnuts and art, bootcamp, the 24 hour creative marathon, creative treehouse, internet web video, online novels, interactive podcasts, traditional art, etc, etc, etc…

I’m witnessing the rise and excitement of our community first hand. With every event I meet more people who then get involved and pass the energy building momentum for the next meeting, the next event, and things to come. A collective passion is forming into a contagious stimulated community that is empowered to share their skills and imagination with the rest of our region. As this continues to snowball others are taking notice. Pittsburgh was just recently featured in an Associated Press article that was picked up by CNN.com.

The national media is now taking notice of this creatively inspired activity. This is a “Very Big Deal”!

Keep the fire burning, get involved, and make some noise in your community. We did so can you.

With the WWDC right around the corner in June, mac rumors and speculations start to fly around the net trying to predict Apple’s next move. Personally I think Apple will release software like iLife 07 and iWork 07. However there is a little bit of buzz around the possible release of a mac tablet.

I can’t really confirm if it’s true but I’m definitely for the idea.

As with many things technology I got really curious and I started to seek out more information about the fabled Mac Tablet. And here is what I found.

Online Petitions
http://www.thetabletmac.com/
An online petition lobbying for Apple to create a Mac Tablet.

Patent Drawings
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/10/apples-patented-the-tablet-mac/
Drawings and patent numbers for the mac tablet.

Home Integration
http://www.macrumors.com/2006/11/26/apple-mac-tablet-with-docking-station-in-2007/ Reports that the mac tablet will be able to interface with lighting, audio, and other home devices.
Are the rumors true about the Mac Tablet? Will it be the next big release? I don’t know, but I do know this. It’s fun to talk about and if mac had a tablet it would definitely be my next computer.

I’m blogging live from Doughnuts and art and let me tell you yum yum yum! The doughnuts are the only things that are tasty. Here are a quick snapshots of me in front of my display.

Now that’s tasty art! This goes on all night so stop on by!

More pics of the show on Flickr!!

This morning was class 2 of 3 @ PTI and we got into some more heavy ActionScripting. Although I think we went a little too far and their heads were a little over full at the end of they day.

I went over MovieClips as Objects with properties, methods, and events. A pretty tough concept for new flashers, but I think they did really well. By the end of the day they had text boxes that were dynamically manipulating properties of movieClips. I feel pretty comfortable that they get the idea of reading basic code to a level of manipulation. It will take some time before they can rattle if off the top of their heads. That will come with experience.

There was one girl in the class who was super excited about what she was putting together. She kept tinkering and changing code just to see what would happen. It was very inspiring. Especially when I found out that she dives all the way from Ohio just to make the class. Stories like that are why I love to teach people who want to learn.

One more class left. If you’re a PTI Alumni and you haven’t made a class yet, you’ve got one more opportunity to do so. Next Saturday is the last of the Flash Brush up courses and Iwill be going over the construction of a Flash based web site. Start to finish. Hope to see you there.

Do you like Donuts? Do you Like art? What about both of them together at the same time? What if I told you there would be live music and lots of cool people?

Just as I thought. A completely irresistible idea! Hope to see you there.

My posts have been extremely technology heavy lately. In an effort to keep the balance of creative arts and technology I’ve posted this video of Steve Hamaker.

In case you’re not familiar with him he’s a the master of color behind Jeff Smith’s Bone, which is an excellent read by the way. I highly recommend it.

Currently Steve is doing all of the color for Jeff Smith’s Shazam! Monster Society of Evil series, and this video is showcasing his work on a Cintiq. After seeing it in action, I’m very jealous and want one.

Due to formatting issues I’ve removed the video but you can still play it here.

This is a must watch! Although it’s a little long these guys do a great job of explaining what will be open source and how everything is tied together.

Scream it from the mountain tops!!!! Flex is open source!Here is the press release to prove it!

This is a really huge step for the Flex community and Adobe in general. Once again I’m impressed at where this company is going. Although I was really disapointed when they acquired macromedia, Adobe’s recent activity has dramatically changed my tune.

With the developer blogs and labs.adobe.com, I feel like I’m more involved in a creative developer community. No longer am I randomly updated skepticism and notes on a news sites throughout the web. I’m getting my information directly from Adobe. If that isn’t enough I have faces with names and direct contact with the people making the tools that I use every day. The personal connection there is a great value to me.

Along those lines, Adobe has opened up the Flex SDK to the entire world in an effort to grow the community and extend the technology far beyond anyones expectations. As a developer the possibility that I can have a hand in that is huge!

Adobe is really in touch with their users and community right now. I for one am really excited to not only see what happens next, but to contribute to it.

Things that caught my eye about the Flex Open Source Announcement:

• The open source Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
• Available since June 2006
• MXML™ compiler and the ActionScript™ 3.0 libraries that make up the popular Flex framework

Here is Object-Oriented ActionScript in action. I modified the roomManager example from the book Object-Oriented ActionSript for Flash 8 so that the entire thing works under the MVC design pattern.

From a user perspective you wouldn’t really notice all that much, but from a coder perspective it’s really cool.

http://stardotstarcomics.com/labs/roomManager/index.htm

The Adobe Blogs reported that a standalone Flash Video Player.

Here is the press release.

Here are the things that popped out to me.

• Enables higher quality Flash format playback - Very interesting. HD in our future???
• The ability to download and view videos offline - Finally. I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen. I do wonder if this will impact the iTunes store at all.
• full screen playback - Thank you Flash 9
• one-click viewer ratings - I’m more interested in knowing where that info is going. And if it gets embedded in the movie, or just called from a web service.
• A powerful Favorites feature that automatically downloads new episodes of favorite TV shows or video podcasts - RSS!!!!! That is awesome!
• Including RSS and SMIL - See Above
• Including on-demand streaming, live streaming, progressive download, and protected download-and-play. - protected download and play… This is very intriguing. This opens the doors to a Flash + Flex online video store.
• Viewer-centric dynamic advertising and the ability to customize the look and feel of the player on the fly to match the brand or theme of the currently playing content. - Very interesting and very pandora.
• Compile permission-based analytics data - Very cool. Peace out Nielson
• Developed using Apollo - Does this mean that adobe will start releasing other smaller apps? I really like how they are putting their money where their mouth is but developing products using their technology.

The Adobe Media Player will be available on their website later this year. I’m very curious to see how it performs and to see if Adobe re-engineers the interface.