whitenoise

For those who are looking forward to Flash on the Beach this year, I’d like to heartily recommend the session by Jon Howard. He took the Elevator Pitch by storm last year and this time around he’s going to take the world by storm (and quite probably blow it up): http://www.flashonthebeach.com/sessions/index.php?pageid=2218.

As I work with him, I’ve seen a few of the things he’s brewing for the session and some of them look cool as. So get along to it. After all, who has even heard of these Branden Hall and Mike Chambers characters that he’s up against?

I’m back from three weeks of holidays and the travel bug is still at a feverish high but the older I get the more the home sick bug counters and yangs to the travel bug ying.

Three weeks of taking it easy and I’m ill suited to the tasks that lay ahead over the next three days before I get back to work.

First off, I have to download some four hundred photos of weddings, lakes, food, cathedrals, statues, paintings, people I vaguely know, gondalas, canals, etc and work out where they were taken and why. At the same time, I’ll have to sort wheat from chaff and, because some will be passed on to the wedding party we were out there with, I will have to kick start good ol’ Photoshop and make a little better those pictures worth tampering with.

Nice to know then, that Windows 7 doesn’t even recognise my Canon EOS 350 camera. I know, it is at least 3 years old and thererfore should be resigned to the scrap heap of modern digital consumerism, but I’m perfectly happy with it and I’m a hoarder like that.

For those who suffer from the same lack of acknowledgement between said popular camera and said popular operating system (oh, that evil corporations would have better communication with one another), a handy tip, gleemed from Google:

Press Menu > select the last menu > set Communication to Print/PTP.

Then plug in the camera and the two items act as if they were childhood sweethearts reunited after many years.

This blog post from Unity caught my attention:

http://bit.ly/bUd9XF

I had already started looking at this Native Client technology announced by Google and trying to work out what it could be used for – what the advantages were – but the possibility of playing Unity games without a plugin and directly through a browser (admittedly just a Chromium build at the moment) seems pretty cool.

Now, if all the other browsers were to take up Native Client then we’d have  a truly 3d game-friendly web and with Unity 3 right around the corner things would get exciting!

If you haven’t already tried the Unity game engine, then there is no better time than the present. One of the big announcements that has come out of Unite 09 is a change to Unity Indie: it is now free and it is just called Unity. For more details see this article: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25840.

This makes it even easier for indie and hobbyist game developers to get into Unity and I think it is a good move by the Unity team. They are obviously getting enough progression from Indie to Pro to make this model viable. At the same time, I’m a bit disgruntled as I forked out for an Indie licence in the dark old days when these things cost money.

Unity 2.6 comes with some good features added: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.6. There aren’t many better IDEs around and all the features – particularly better performance, source control compatibility and the profiler – seem useful and should boost productivity. I think Adobe could take some pointers – especially for integrating the 3D features of flash player 10 into the IDE. How about, rather than gimmicky additions like the iPhone stuff concentrate on making the IDE a better experience to work with (faster, less buggy) and adding features that will be used day-in, day-out.

Unity 2.6 ftw.