James Paterson has been busy lately. Besides filming an Actionscript 3 training DVD with Colin Moock and Hoss Gifford, he cooked up the software component of Harvest, his exhibition currently displaying at bitforms gallery in NYC.

The Rotten Fruit Tardis is an animated vehicle that transports viewers between a myriad of dimensions and nested worlds and displayed as a wall-projection. More than 5000 of Jason’s drawings are drifting in a space with each viewer explores the omni-directional interface.

With music by K-rAd and the help of other brilliant minds like Jeh Ham, Amit Pitaru, Jeremy Felker, Colin Moock, Branden Hall and James Braithwaite, it’s the digital synthesis of his impressive collection of works. Press on.

As promised, here’s the presentation from yesterday at RIApt AUG, on a 30 minutes talk about why you should care about Progressive Enhancement and how it can be applied to websites developed with the Flash platform.

The sample code (with SWFObject, SWFAddress and XSLT samples) is also available for download.

Update: As Marcos rightfully points out, the Slideshare link isn’t that “accessible”. So here’s a PDF or ODP for download.

Having a full day job and being a active blogger, makes it hard to find some free time to give presentations and worshops. But as I always wished for an active Adobe User Group in Portugal, it was hard to decline the invitation by Paulo Moreira, for the next meeting, February 27th.

I’m not really a full scale programmer, but having worked over 7 years with Flash, and being recently seduced by the advantages of web standards, the best i could remember for my session was the subject of Progressive Enhancement, or how to present  rich media experiences while delivering alternate content.

Here’s the meetup info:

RIAPT AUG

I’ll try not to be too technical, so if you’re interested in the subject, please drop by (signup required) . If not, i’ll post the the presentations slides here.

One of the greatest assets of rich media is the possibility of using input devices besides the mouse. Since Flash Player 6, the plugin has been supporting the Camera and Microphone classes, allowing users to have a new set of experiences.
Even if some computers aren’t bundled with webcams or some people just hate standing in front of one, microphones aren’t so intrusive, and it’s worth considering them as a great asset when creating interactive experiences for the browser.

So why don’t you put your mouth where the fun is:

Unleashing the roar with Lynx (aka Axe)

ZeFrank’s audio toys

Voice Draw

Meditation Flowers

Neave.com audio playground

Bouncing Balls

Dandelion

Teast Your Breath

Sound Sculpture by Pill & Pillow

Kettle the pot

Last year’s spooky work for Doritos by Goodby with Hotel 626

For some a nightmare, but for those who practice it with craftsmanship it’s one of the most exquisite forms of online creativity. Meet the preloaders. Not the annoying ones, but rather these ones: Pretty Loaded.

The archive was launched by BigSpaceship, as a tribute to a vanishing art form amid a constantly changing digital landscape..

If you haven’t still visited it after my retweet yesterday, feast your eyes with some of the most elaborate preloaders from Big Spaceship and friends.

Thibault Imbert is a System Engineer at Adobe France, with several years developing in the Flash platform with a personal playground at ByteArray.org, and side projects at WiiFlash or AlivePDF.

Last year, he wrote a book on Actionscript 3, and just when all was set to publish, the whole process went void(0). So what’s a writer to do? Well, of course, in the best spirit of Flash community: let’s opensource-it !

Thibault has now released the full Actionscript book, “Pratique d’ActionScript 3″, in PDF for download. FREE. Not as in beer, but it gets close.
Be a good sport and remind to hit that Paypal button. I donated a cheap 5€, the least i could do considering all the hard work Thibault had. And it’s a fine way to refresh my French skills.

Just two links i ⁽¹⁾ would like to share with you.

The first is a website done by Trevor Harman, and it features a cool concept: What would you do with that extra day every four years.

it’s Project leap year so go out there and say what you’d do with an extra 24 hours.

For the second link i’d advise you to get some 3D glasses and if you are a flash developer with a special taste for Papervision you have the source included.

It’s done by Ben Stucki a Flex Consultant you can read more in his blog and get the source for the project there too .

This is a guest post by Hugo Matinho, our new Flash Developer at Draftfcb Portugal. You can check his blog or follow him on Twitter.

Things have been quite busy lately here at the office (besides the moving and remodeling works). One of the things that lowered my usual rate of shared inspirations is Chevrolet Tattoo, a tactical website developed in the last month.

Last year i spent my reasonable share of time showcasing Papervision. Unfortunately, no suitable project or briefing came that was adequate to apply the framework. As you shouldn’t t use a new technology just because it’s there, the right amount of relevance to use Papervision came with a campaign for Matiz Tattoo.

The main objective was to showcase a catalog of vehicles, with 15 available patterns. With few resources available, the idea came: what if we used Papervision3D and allowed users to customize their own model online?

So, there you have it, my perfect excuse to use the Flash 3d framework on a online campaign (in Portuguese only):

Have fun and create your own Tattoo (Cria a tua Tatoo).

URL: http://www.chevrolettattoo.com/
Client: Chevrolet Portugal (GM)
Agency: Draftfcb Portugal
Interactive Team: Armando Alves, Bruno Duarte, Hugo Cervantes and Luis Castro.

Flugtag Flight Lab is a immersive Papervision experience, developed by LessRain for Red Bull.

You get to hack your plane in a virtual hangar, cutting, painting and applying you own patterns. In the end, you flap your wings to control your creation in a 3D environment.

Red Bull gives you wings!