BIT-101 Blog

Do you make Flash content? Do you have Flash content on the web? If so, you owe it to yourself and your clients to check this content against the upcoming version 10.1 beta player. There’s lots of new goodies in this player, but as you – a developer yourself – know, when you add and change stuff, you risk breaking existing stuff. The Flash player has this problem 1000 times over – it has to run all the existing Flash content created by millions of developers all over the world, and with minimum failure. A lot of testing is done internally obviously, but only you will know if your content runs without any hitches.

So if you haven’t already done so, install 10.1 and take your existing or soon to be released content on a spin with it. Hopefully it works fine. You might need to fix a few things on your end, or in the worst case, you might need Adobe to fix something, in which case you should submit a bug report now, before it’s too late.

Ted Patrick has more details on what to do and how to do it here.

This also goes for any AIR applications you may have out there. Your users will soon be updating that as well, and you should make sure your apps run well on it.

Been a bit quiet around here, eh?

As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I’ve been kind of taking a break lately. Haven’t really been doing much of anything to write about to be honest. Waiting for inspiration to hit me.

Well, it’s starting to hit. A few weeks ago, I talked to Shawn Pucknell about speaking at FiTC Toronto. So I needed to come up with a subject to talk about. Up to now, I’ve almost always done a brand new talk for every conference I’ve spoken at. Really, the only exceptions are when the organizers explicitly ask me to do a specific talk. But it seems that most speakers are doing the same talk at multiple events these days. Many do the same talk for a year, or a good part of thereof, at every conference they speak at.

I used to be opposed to this idea. I felt like it was lazy. For sure, coming up with a brand new talk and all the slides and examples that go with that, for every conference, sure is a lot more work. But I was talking to a few speakers late last year (specifically Grant and Mario while in Tokyo in November) and started to get a new viewpoint on the subject. These guys are anything but lazy about their presentations. Even though they are doing the same basic talk each time, they are constantly revising and tweaking it based on audience reaction and feedback, pacing, personal experience, new data, etc. Doing the same presentation more than once allows you to get better and better at that presentation. One part didn’t go so well? Drop it or change it? Went too long in one section? Figure out how to shorten it. Randomly run across some new graphic or example that is perfect for the subject? Squeeze it in there for next time.

On the other hand, when you do a new talk each time, you get one shot to make it good, and the next time, you’re onto something new and get one shot at that.

There’s also audience logistics that come into play. Again, I used to think that doing the same talk multiple times would be boring for the audience. But not everyone goes to every conference. If I do a talk in Brighton next year and that’s the only place I do it, there are a lot of people who might be very interested in it, but don’t happen to be at that conference, and will never hear it. And as for those people who seem to be at every conference, well, once they’ve seen your talk, they are free for the rest of the year to check out other speakers during your time slots. I know there have been plenty of times for me when there were two or more presentations going on in the same slot that I really wanted to see. I would be unhappy thinking that when I choose to miss one that I was really interested in, that’s the last shot I’ll ever get to see that particular talk.

So with that said, allow me to introduce my talk for 2010, “Programming Art”.

As you may know, in July 2008 I started a site called Art From Code. Algorithmic and generative art has, since I first started programming, been one of my biggest passions. In the old BIT-101 lab, I called them “experiments” but they were really quick and dirty interactive art pieces. Art From Code was an attempt to continue some of that same spirit, but with more focus on static images and less on the code behind them. I know that not providing the code for the pieces, and not making them interactive was a huge negative in many people’s eyes, but for me it was somehow very liberating and opened up my creative flood gates for a good six months. Then I got hooked on iPhone programming, and … well that’s another story.

So, while I was trying to figure out what to do next in my extracurricular programming life, one of the options was diving back into art. Another was to do more with games. I find game programming very fascinating. It has many of the same creative aspects as programming art, but in the end, I tend to get much more bogged down into the details of architecture and story line and level creation, and before long even the most exciting game idea becomes a chore to finish. With art it’s always fresh. Short iteration times and when you just publish the result, no bug reports!

Anyway, I decided I wanted to do more generative art again, but didn’t want to limit myself to just ActionScript and Flash. There were a lot of different tools and frameworks that I knew about and had dabbled with, that I thought would be fun to eventually try out more in depth. Stuff like Processing and Open Frameworks, but also lesser known stuff like Context Free Art, Structure Synth, Nodebox, and Toolbox, among others. I figured, what better time to dig into them but now, when I had nothing else particular going on anyway? And if I based my 2010 talk on them, that would keep me focused on them for quite a while. Enough to get to know each one really, really well by the end of the year. And so, that’s what my Programming Art talk will be about. Here’s the blurb:

As soon as computers had visual displays or printouts, people were using them to create art. In this presentation we’ll take a short look at the history of computer generated art, and a hands-on walk through of several of the available programs and languages used for that purpose today, including Flash, Processing, Structure Synth, NodeBox, Context Free, Open Frameworks, and maybe others.

I’ll be debuting the talk at FiTC Toronto in April, most likely doing it at Multi-Mania in Belgium in May, and then again at FlashBelt in Minneapolis in June. Those are the only conferences I’ve yet committed to speaking at in 2010. If I’m not totally bored with the talk, I don’t get rotten fruit thrown at me, and I get invited to speak anywhere else after that, I’ll probably do it a few more times.

Out of the talks I’ve given, one of my own personal favorites was my Art From Code talk at FiTC Amsterdam just about a year ago. I definitely plan to incorporate certain parts of that talk into Programming Art, before exploring the different tools.

I think it’s going to be a fun year!

There’s so much I could say about the iPad, particularly being a Flash guy. But I’ll stay out of that fray. Whatever will be, will be.

The thing that bugs me about people’s reactions to the iPad is when people say it’s a Kindle killer. First of all, I’m pretty sure that most of the people saying such things do not own a Kindle. It’s a totally different device. Here’s where the Kindle wins out:

Battery life: 10 days vs. 10 hours.

Eink: You can shrug this off if you don’t have a Kindle, but it does make a difference.

Form factor. This is the biggest one and there are several points I want to make about it. I have a Kindle 2. The iPad is just shy of being the size of two Kindle 2’s laid side to side. I can carry my Kindle anywhere in my laptop bag and barely notice it’s there. I can pull it out while standing on a crowded subway and very comfortably read it while holding it in a single hand – even with gloves on. The iPad is almost like carrying another small laptop. I wouldn’t try to use it standing up on the train or hold it one-handed. I don’t think you could realistically hold it and operate the touch screen with a single hand. The Kindle, in its case, is fairly indestructible. The iPad, while being almost twice the size has what seems to be an almost 100% glass surface, without the overall support that your laptop screen has from the rest of its body. I predict a lot of broken screens. I already carry my Mac Book Pro and iPhone to work every day. Would I carry an iPad too? I wouldn’t use it at work. As already mentioned, I wouldn’t use it on the train or bus unless I was able to snag a seat. I would probably generally leave it at home. Thus, as an eBook reader, it is fairly useless to me.

Connectivity: The Kindle has free 3G service. The iPad has WIFI and fairly expensive 3G paid service.

Content: Kindle taps into Amazon and has 400,000 books available and more coming all the time. iPad I believe has deals with six publishers at this time. Not sure how much of their content is available. If you can’t get the book you want on your device, it’s useless as a book reader.

So what does the iPad have that’s better than the Kindle in terms of it being an eBook reader.

Storage: 16-64 GB vs 2 GB. OK, but do you know how big eBooks are? A quick search of mine reveals that many are less than a single MB. Biggest are less than 5 MB. So my Kindle can hold somewhere between 400 and 2000 eBooks. I think I’m all set with 2 GB.

Display: Color vs. Black and White, and size. Have you opened a book lately? Text in books is 99.99% black and white. Most photos are black and white. Most charts are black and white. Granted, if you are reading a book where the color plates are a vital part of the experience of the book, the iPad wins. But in the vast, vast majority of books, you don’t really need a color display. Size is nice, but comes with its own drawbacks as mentioned above. For technical books with charts or diagrams, the larger display is definitely a plus.

In short, the iPad looks to be a pretty cool device, but a pretty crappy eBook reader. If I do get one, it will likely stay at home while I take my Kindle with me. But still, is the iPad “better” than the Kindle? That’s like asking if your iPhone is “better” than your wrist watch. Sure, it does a hell of a lot more, but it’s a senseless comparison. If you want to tell time, get a watch. If you want an eBook reader, get a Kindle. If you want a phone, media, pocket gaming device, get an iPhone. If you want a larger form factor media and gaming device, get an iPad.

Sadly, I think that despite all my arguments (which make perfect sense, are irrefutable, and are 100% correct ), the iPad could still be a Kindle killer. The iPad is a cool device and most likely many, many people will get them. If I had an iPad, I probably would not be able to justify going out and spending another $259 on another device, JUST to read books, which my iPad already let me do.

It will be interesting to see what Amazon’s next move will be. Just a week before the iPad was announced, Amazon revealed the Kindle application developer program. Now you’ll be able to make and sell apps that run on the Kindle, and sell them, just like iPhone and iPad apps. I’m not sure where that’s going to go. I can imagine there might be a few types of apps well suited to the Kindle. I can foresee a dedicated Instapaper or similar app that could be fantastic. But I can’t conceive that there will be thousands of actually useful Kindle apps. At any rate, it’s not a move that’s going to save the Kindle. What could save it is slashing its price in half. For a bit over $100, the Kindle would be a no brainer.

Just before I went out to FiTC Tokyo, I was contacted by Naoki Miyagawa, a translater working for OReilly Japan in Tokyo. He said that he was working on the translation of my book, AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation and had some questions for me. It was pretty cool to be able to say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’ll be in Tokyo next week. Why don’t we do lunch?” So in Tokyo, I successfully navigated the subway system solo and got out to OReilly’s offices, met with several people working on the book, got some cool Japanese OReilly schwag, and had an awesome lunch.

Today, I got the word that the book has now been published:

It should be in the stores, or you can order it from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/ActionScript-3-0アニメーション-―衝突判定・AI・3DからピクセルシェーダまでFlash上級テクニック-Keith-Peters/dp/4873114373/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264161951&sr=8-2

I don’t have a copy in hand yet, but have some on the way. This means a lot to me personally, living in a half Japanese home, having a Japanese extended family, and having Japanese culture a part of my everyday life.

I wanted to make a demonstration file for a talk I’m doing this week to show the difference between bitmap and vector performance. So I needed something that drew a whole lot of lines. Came up with this, which I probably won’t use for the presentation, but surprised me with a cool pattern emerging.
Read the rest of this entry »

So my iPhone game, Falling Balls, has been out for almost a year. In the first few weeks it was out, it rose to be the #1 free application on the iTunes App Store. Trust me, this surprised nobody more than it did ME. It stayed in the top spot for a day or two, maybe more, I forget exactly, then started slowly sinking down the chart. But it sank quite slowly. I think it stayed in the top 100 for something like a few months. And even after it was out of the top 100 free apps list, it was still hanging in there in the top 100 free games list. Of course, all good things come to an end, and eventually it went out of site.

Until now! Yesterday, somebody tweeted a link to this review:

http://blog.appboy.com/2010/01/falling-balls-for-iphone-is-everything-a-mobile-game-should-be/

Now you can’t ask for a better review than that. I read it, smiled, got a nice ego boost out of it and got back to work.

Cut to this evening. I get home, I’m relaxing in my chair, my iPhone is sitting there beside me. I get one of those bored moments where I think, maybe I’ll download a fun little iPhone game. I figure, let’s see what free games are available first, maybe I’ll luck out and get something fun for nothing. I open the “Top 25 Free Apps” page, and to my astonishment…

Yes, Falling Balls is the #2 free application! Amazing.

A short while ago I got an email from Hartmut Bohnacker, one of the authors of a book called “Generative Gestaltung”. In his words, “In this book we try to explain the basic principles how to generate images with code.” The code used is Processing. You can find out more about it at http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/

The reason they were contacting me is that the book included some works and code based on my Lissajous Webs at Art From Code. They had credited me with the idea, but wanted to inform me personally. I, of course, was fine with it – honored in fact – and asked if I could get a copy of the book.

The book arrived the other day, and it’s a beauty. Textbook sized, and almost 500 pages. A huge color plate section – over 150 pages, and the rest is code and lots of images. Unfortunately, it’s in German, which means I can’t read a word of it, but I can read the code anyway.

As you can see, the book is absolutely gorgeous. The kind of thing you could just pour through and get inspired on every page. Here are a few shots of the Lissajous Web stuff:

Anyway, if you are into processing, or just want an amazing generative art coffee table type book, check it out.

Actually, I just noticed on the site that an English version is in the works as well. I wonder if I can cajole my way into getting a free copy of that too…

A while back I mentioned on twitter, and the other day here on this blog about a pet project I was playing with, visualizing the running data gathered by my Garmin 305 GPS watch while on runs. Well, here's what I've got so far, for a 5 mile run I did a couple of weeks ago:

Basically what I do is get the data of the Garmin device using the Garmin Training Center program that comes with the watch (updated via the web). Then I choose a workout and export it as a TCX file. This is a plain xml file with overall information about the run, and a whole bunch of track points. A single track point looks like this:

As you can see, that's pretty easy to parse. You get latitude and longitude, plus altitude, so there's three dimensions. Here, I am showing my heart rate with the thickness of the line drawn. All you get for each track point is the distance traveled so far, but by subtracting that from the previous track point, and dividing by the time between the two, you can get the speed at any one point. This is shown by the color of the line. Red is fastest.

The map is from Open Street Maps. Using the max and min latitude and longitude, I can get a bounding box for my run, and request a map of that area as a png from that service. Load it up and rotate it around in 3D with the trail, and we're in business. Actually, for this demo, I've saved out the map as a file on my own server and am loading that in. Otherwise, I'd need to proxy the map service to be able to load images from it. It works fine dynamically on the local version. Actually, I need to do a lot more tweaking on aligning and scaling the map to the trail. This example isn't too bad, but there's a bit of hacking around going on and it's still not perfect. But not bad for a first try.

The whole project is less than 200 lines of timeline code in Flash CS4 (take that you elitist framework junkies!) but I'll eventually clean it up and turn it into some classes that will be worthy of being seen by eyes other than my own.

When the Barnes & Noble Nook was first announced, I was intrigued. If it was as good as it seemed to be, I was actually planning to get one. It seemed to be an incremental improvement to the Kindle.

A couple of things bothered me from the start though.

One was that the screen refresh speed (how long it takes to turn a page) seemed awfully slow in the one hands-on, non-Kate video I could find. eInk itself is not the speediest of displays as it is. The Kindle itself is kind of just on the edge of annoyance. You learn to press the page turn button in on the second to last line of the page, and hold it there til you are into the last line and release it part way in, giving you time to read the last half of the line and shift your eyes upwards just in time. Sounds silly, but you can get into a good rhythm that keeps it out of the annoying range. The Nook's refresh speed looked seriously slower. Enough to just make it that little grain of sand that irritates you every time you turn a page. You might not notice it if it was your first ebook reader, but if coming from a Kindle, I would imagine it would get on your nerves. Anyway, this was just an impression from a little video, but I wanted to see it in person, or read some hands-on reviews that mentioned how the screen update was. This brings me to the second concern...

Other than the official promo video ("I'm Kate, and this is my Nook..."), the video mentioned above was the only other one I could find of the Nook in action. Furthermore, there were absolutely NO reports of non-B&N people who had actually laid their hands on one. In fact, various reports of people who went to various events where the Nook was featured said that NOBODY outside of B&N was allowed to touch one. There was no hands-on. This was a red flag. All I could think is that they are hiding something. Something not good. Now of course, it's natural to want to hold off on early builds of any hardware or software until it's ready for the public eye. But as time went on and we got closer and closer to the release date, there was not a single report of anyone in the real world who had touched a working model. And I looked regularly. They were being sold as prerelease items, and sold out at that, with nobody but Kate & company telling us how awesome they were. This just screamed, "NOT READY" to me.

Finally, on December 9, B&N released some of their babies into the wild. Both David Pogue and Walt Mossberg panned it. Both reported it being slow, and both reported crashes and bugs. About what I expected, actually.

So beyond that, what about the advantages the Nook has over the Kindle. After all, there was something that made me want it originally. Well, here are the points I wrote about back in October, when I was still kind of excited about it:

• Additional storage through a micro SD slot. Still not sure why this is cool. You can fit 1500 books on the Kindle. Don't think I'll outgrow that any time soon.
• Removable battery. As I said, "battery life probably outlasts how long you own any one device before upgrading to the next big thing." Not a selling point.
• Wifi as well as 3G. Sounds cool, but reports say this feature is not implemented very well. No indication of hotspots, and no way to log in to a connection if you need to.
• Exclusive content only available on the free B&N wifi. (discounts, etc.) OK... not going to make me buy.
• You will be able to read entire books via in-store wifi without buying them. It turns out that you can do one hour of reading per book, per 24 hours. And I'm not at all sure that's that's their entire catalog.
• Personalized screensavers. This is nice, but not a killer feature. Not sure why the Kindle doesn't allow this. I finally installed the screensaver hack on my Kindle, and it's nice to have custom images there. But hasn't changed my life or anything.
• Native PDF support. Amazon beat them to the punch here by adding that to the Kindle 2 just before the Nook was released.
• Color touch screen display. What I originally said: "Gimmicky perhaps, but seriously, anything has to be better than the e-ink/joybutton navigation on the Kindle. Well, who knows. Maybe they screwed it up royally and made something worse, but you have to hope." From the reports I've read, it appears they may have actually screwed it up royally.
• The whole lending thing. This also pretty gimmicky. And it turns out that you can lend a book exactly one time, for a period of 14 days, during which time, you may not read the book yourself. meh. Oh, and books can only be shared if the publisher allows them to be shared.

Additionally, while they are still touting "over one million titles", the majority of these are old and largely unknown works in the public domain, from Google. The kind of stuff you can get on Gutenberg. So those are really available for the Kindle as well. Most reviews now say that the actual selection on the Kindle is much better than what you can get on the Nook.

So overall, the advantages are luke warm, and the deficiencies are significant.

As for my own hands on, I frequently visit a few different Barnes & Nobles and was finally able to get my hands on one a week or so ago. Right off the bat, I did find the navigation a bit confusing. Not the greatest UI. But I found a book and figured out how to open it. It took noticeably longer than my Kindle takes to open a book. Again, the Kindle is no speed freak, so this was pretty long. When it finally opened, I get an error message saying something about it being "unable to load a program". Totally not user friendly. What program? Why? What does this mean for me? Can I read my book now? Should I return my Nook for service? Reboot? No idea. Eventually I just dismissed the dialog and was able to read the book just fine. Page turns were slower. Probably just over that annoyance threshold.

I should note that I've had my Kindle for 9 months now, and have never once experienced a crash, freeze, any error of any kind, or in any way had it not do exactly what I expected to do. This is with significant, usually daily use. So the fact that I had an error the first time I laid hand on a Nook is bad news.

At another store, I was just walking by the Nook display where an employee was showing off a Nook and heard her, frustratedly say, "hmmm... not sure why it's doing that. All I can say is that this unit has been used a lot today." Another crash? Sounded like it.

Another, humorous incident when I was walking by a display, the salesperson describing the Nook to a couple was clearly struggling. "... well, the display... it's um... well, it's like reading a book. Yeah, soo... that's what it's like. It's ... it's like reading a book. So... um... yeah..." Another customer asked here the differences between a Kindle and Nook and she went on and on about the replaceable battery. Finally the customer acknowledged that one and asked what other differences. She finally admitted that was the only difference she knew of. Of course that doesn't really say anything about the device itself, just found it funny.

Anyway, I'm not trying to bash the Nook. I'm actually kind of disappointed. Like I said, I was ready to buy one if it lived up to its claims. It just doesn't yet. On a positive note, though, it seems like most of the issues with the Nook are quite obviously software-based, rather than hardware. This means that as updates get pushed out, bugs could go away and performance could improve. Already, I understand that a patch was pushed out that improved performance. A few more of those and the Nook could be a contender. However, at this point, I think even a perfect Nook wouldn't make me switch from my Kindle.

But at any rate, I'm glad the Nook is here. Amazon needed some real competition. I'm very much looking forward to what both companies come up with for their next versions.

For the past few years, I've posted a review of the previous year and a look to the coming year. So, I'll do it again.

2009 was a very interesting year. Like this year, last year I had a whole bunch of unused vacation time at the end of the year, so took a couple of weeks off over Christmas. I decided to dive into Objective-C and iPhone programming. Little did I know how much that would dominate the next year, both in terms of my personal projects and work projects at Infrared5. One of the very first things I did was a little game called "Falling Balls". A stupid little thing where you tilt the phone right and left to avoid ... well ... falling balls. It was just a silly thing I did in about 1.5 days, mostly to get a handle on the language and writing games in Objective-C. Unbelievably, the game rose to be the number one free application on the iTunes store. I put some ads in it and the cash started pouring in. I mean, more money than I could believe. Of course, it had its peak and eventually slid down the chart and made less money, but even now, it's doing amazingly well in terms of ad revenue.

Hitting it big like that was a blessing and a curse. All I had to do, I figured, was do a handful of apps like that a year, and I could retire rich, buy an island somewhere and ... ok, back to reality. Seems I wasn't the only one who got the idea of making it big in the app store. I released a bunch of other apps - some free with ads, some paid, some lite/full version, etc. All told, the total amount I've made via all my other apps is equivalent to about what I currently make in a single day on Falling Balls. So, I've pretty much given up on striking it big AGAIN with iPhone apps, but will continue to give the occasional tweak to Falling Balls to keep it active.

At Infrared5 as well, we hitched up to the iPhone bandwagon. It wasn't hard. All we had to do is say that we did iPhone stuff and after that pretty much everyone coming to us wanted us to do iPhone apps for them. I did one Flex job early in the year, but since then it's been pretty much flat out iPhone projects for clients.

A lot of people have actually been upset with me for "abandoning" Flash here. I'm not even going to defend myself on that one. I pretty much did abandon Flash for quite a while there. I can't say I'm diving back into it both feet at the moment, but I did get pretty burnt out on the iPhone stuff as well. Still working on iPhone stuff at work, but don't have any ongoing personal iPhone projects at the moment, or any solid plans for any. I love the platform and hardware and capabilities and even got to love the language. But I hate the business model and publishing stranglehold that Apple has on it. In Flash I can bang out a SWF, put it on my site, blog or tweet about it, and in minutes, the whole world can see it. With the iPhone, I have to submit it, wait some unspecified amount of weeks with no feedback or anyone to communicate with, to see if it is approved or not. If not, no real recourse. Just fix it and put it back into the queue. It's awful.

So what now? Back to Flash? Possibly. As you may have noticed, I had a whole game programming thing going on there a few months ago. Did a whole bunch of research on game architecture, applying it all to Flash games, spoke about game architecture at Flash on the Beach, and promised a game framework/toolkit "Asobu" that I was working on. Not sure what really happened with that.

In fact, for about the last month or so, I've hardly done any coding at all in my own spare time. Of course, I've been doing plenty at work, and that's going fine. But usually when I get home, I have some personal stuff I'm working on - a game, some generative art, some experiments, components, a book, or whatever. But lately, I don't know. I just get home, eat, relax, read some, hang out with the family, light up the wood stove and relax. I'm not particularly worried about it, and you shouldn't be either. I think my mind just needs some time to recharge. I've been going at this pretty hard core since 2001 anyway. Consider I'm on a mini-personal-sabbatical. You might have noticed the dearth of posts here in the last several weeks. In fact, this is the first post I've done this month. I'm not going to make any promises about how I'll now kick everything back into gear and get going on stuff again, but I have no doubt I'll get fired up again sometime soon. I've learned to trust my instincts. They've done well for me thus far, and right now they are telling me to chill out.

One thing that I've given a lot of attention to in the last few months is running. I started up the Couch to 5K program to get in shape at the end of last August, and now I'm running 5 days a week. I'm completely addicted. Reading lots of running magazines and books and sites. Naturally, I'm getting all geeky about it with GPS and heart rate monitoring and tracking applications, etc. In fact, it has taken over my other, "personal" blog at http://www.keithpeters.org. If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not I'm alive, you can always check there and see what's up.

But I haven't been totally code free. In fact, I have actually been doing some ActionScript projects, particularly over this little vacation I've been taking. Tying in with the running, I started parsing the raw output of my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS running watch - parsing the XML and graphing it out in interactive 3D. So much better than any of the apps that map the route on a google map and give you a 2D chart underneath it showing speed, elevation and heart rate. I plan to continue working on that over the next few weeks and have something to show. Also, I revived a cool project I'd started a long while back using the Flash 10 sound synth stuff. Been working on that actively the last couple of days. I actually started getting very excited about the possibilities of that, so that may be the next major thing you see coming out of this place.

What about overall 2010 plans? Can't really say just yet. At work, we are starting in on a very major, and very ... unique project that would possibly be done in Unity 3D. So I may be diving into some C# work for that. And beyond the Flash projects I just mentioned, I'm really interested in learning some other experimental technologies. I started playing with Structure Synth a while back, which is very interesting. A whole new take on programming. Hard to wrap your head around the syntax at first, but produces some stunning pics. I also want to dive more into some things like NodeBox, Context Free, ToolBox, Processing, and Open Frameworks.

Beyond that, like I said, just going with my intuition. And I intuit that 2010 will be a good year.