November, 2009


25
Nov 09

Signal Vs. Noise

Just read a really fantastic post on a topic close to our hearts here at MZ.

Drawar’s article comes from a very personal place in the growth of the ‘list-as-an-article’ trend (or ‘link-whoring’ as it’s sometimes known). It’s not just the design community afflicted by this though; news, sport and even comedy is increasingly becoming lists of links to other sites and minimal original content in the never-ending quest for higher traffic.

Then on the other side, syndicated content is more and more pervasive now and between social bookmarking, blogging, microblogging, social networks and everything else… these days, everyone’s a publisher. The democratisation of web-publishing is at once the greatest strength, and the greatest weakness, of the internet. Now everyone can have a voice but unfortunately not everyone has something worthwhile to say.

Continue reading →


17
Nov 09

New releases from Adobe…

Flash Player 10.1 and Air 2.0 are out now.

Some interesting features in there… local microphone support, GPU acceleration and hardware decoding of H.264. I also like the sound of the new global error handler to deal with runtime errors. About time Adobe.

Most interesting though, is multi-touch support. Yes, you need a touch-screen device but it just goes to show Adobe are gunning for Apple. The Apple tablet’s not far off and it won’t be long until the other hardware manufacturers are catching up but my money says it’s the Flash-on-iPhone dream that they won’t let die and that’s really driven this.


9
Nov 09

Adventures in Lip-sync: Part 2

This post follows on from Adventures in Lip-sync: Part 1

So, at this stage, we’ve got a string of gibberish from Repeat After Me and not much else. To get this working there’s four key ingredients:

  • the audio soundtrack;
  • the phoneme info from Repeat After Me;
  • the graphic representations of the mouth shapes (visemes);
  • and a dictionary to translate one to the other.

All I need to do is hook them up.

Continue reading →


5
Nov 09

Chroma-Hash

This has divided opinion in the studio today – http://mattt.github.com/Chroma-Hash/

Personally, I think it’s a really interesting idea. At first glance,it won’t make much sense but have a look here for a more detailed description and a lively debate.

Screenshot of Chroma-Hash i action

Screenshot of Chroma-Hash in action

Continue reading →


2
Nov 09

Christmas fun

Big things brewing for the annual MZ Christmas card. Russ and I are full of ideas from Flash on the Beach so expect to see some multi-user gaming via Moock’s awesome Union platform and a test-run for our new Red5 streaming server.

Watch this space…


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