Chakra Media blog

Just launched a re-design of manjujois.com for a long-time client of mine. Manju Jois, Ashtanga Yoga guru of Mysore, South India, is the oldest son of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, recognized worldwide as the foremost authority on Ashtanga Yoga. The site features a photo application that taps into the Flickr API via Kelvin Luck's great actionscript wrapper called Flashr (thanks Kelvin!) and is also back-button and deep-link enabled via SWFAddress. We have plans on integrating the Google Calender API for the schedule so they can easily update it themselves.

Apollo was released on labs a yesterday so I downloaded and installed the Apollo Runtime as well as the Flex extensions and the and the SDK. This seems like a really cool technology, being able to use my existing web skills (Flash, Flex, HTML) to build rich Internet applications that are first-class citizens on the desktop. I can't wait to give it a try. There was a cool demo by that maniac Lee Brimelow on his Flex blog using PaperVision3D in a full transparency Apollo app. Check it. I've been following PV3D for the past few months and there's some really talented people from all over the world who are involved in pushing it forward, with new people signing up everyday. It's exciting to see the open-source movement pushing Flash in such a cool direction. Hopefully I'll get some free time soon to post a few demos of my own...

I had the pleasure of meeting a talented writer by the name of Nathan Myers at my regular morning hangout/office.  Nathan writes for some major surfing publications and is currently working on a piece for the LA Times on Eric Jordan and 2Advanced.  He asked me if I'd heard of EJ and 2A (what web designer hasn't?) and asked if I'd like to read a rough draft to check for errors and give some feedback.  Nathan didn't know much about Flash before starting this article and wanted to make sure his terminology was accurate (which was for the most part).  Anyway, since the article isn't out yet I won't comment on it's contents (I will say it's good though!). If it comes out on the web, I'll link to it.  The point of this post is after reading about Eric Jordan and 2A I was reminded about his other job as a DJ and how he puts out free (as in beer) monthly sets of music for people to download on his site Neverrain.  I'm not a huge techno fan, but I find this music is great to work to.  I've been super-busy these past few weeks and this helps me get down in the trenches and just start hammering on the never ending pile of tasks.  His latest set is called Shade & Aura and he's released Volume 1 which is the darker of the two mixes. Check it out.

Just launched a new site for client David Robinson Design Inc (DRD), who is one of today's foremost design firms with an emphasis concentrating on restaurant design. Robinson himself is positioned among the industry’s most innovative and accomplished designers in Southern California. The site is all Flash and is back button/deep-link enabled using SWFAddress. The portfolio is XML-driven allowing for easy updates to the images and descriptions.

http://davidrobinsondesigninc.com/

Forget the Bones Brigade - the crew from Logan, Utah (a skateboarding mecca) shows you how it's done. I think I'm the only person with a digital copy of this video from 1990, so I figured it was my duty to make sure everyone in the world can enjoy this masterpiece in all it's encoded-from-a-degraded-VHS-tape glory.

Just posted a new site for my friend/neighbor Bridget Moss.  I took this on as sort of a 'charity' project as her old site was taken down and she wasn't given a copy of it by her previous web host.  This is a good example of putting that design template to work... I was able to create this simple site that is back button - deep link enabled and search engine optimized with minimal time and effort.

there's nothing like a new site design for the new year.... feels good, don't it? 

happy new year to all...

Speed on my macbook? Love it. Redesigned palettes? Nice.  New icon? Brilliant.  The whole new icon set is great in my opinion.  Bold, simple, intelligent, and usable.  The color wheel representation is great too... very fitting for Adobe and it's publishing background.  (It's also interesting to note that Flex is at the epicenter of it all.)   A lot of people seem to be complaining about them, but I don't see how they are any worse than a feather or a butterfly.  If I had never seen an icon for photoshop or illustrator and was asked to choose which icon represented which app, I'd have to say this new set would do a much better job of getting the point across.  Ai? Adobe Illustrator.  Ps? PhotoShop. Ae? After Effects.  ... this i can figure out.... but, a flower and a feather?  wtf?   Macromedia's icons made sense and influence is obvious here.  It's about usability.  Studio 8's icons stand out much more than CS2's on my dock.  I think they did a great job.

OK, so i recently built my first Flex app and was surprised at how simple it was to create a blog reader. (example was direct from the tutorials)... what I really find interesting (and look forward to learning) is the ability to blend both Flex and Flash content for truly amazing, immersive, high performance experiences. Flex offers a richer experience than a traditional page-based model, but it can still be somewhat ugly.... especially since it's geared towards developers who are less 'design' oriented. I think Flash designers/developers have a great opportunity to become the bridge between design and technology and continue to push the web in a forward direction. Flex offers great tools to interact with data and I think the fun part is learning how to 'flex' your Flash muscles to express the capabilities of this new development model... It's an exciting time to be a Flash/Flex developer and I hope more Flash designers will make the leap and explore Flex.

I wanted to share an example of a 'brochure-ware' template I've developed and used many times over the past year or so. I've updated it to work with SWFAddress instead of the custom back button solution I had done a while back. This example does not use the main timeline but instead uses movieclips on a single frame. It's essentially a light-weight skeleton or 'framework' (i use that term loosely) to load in content into various screens or sections. I was going to explain how everything works a little more thoroughly, but instead I'm going to do that in a future post that will explain how do to deep linking with dynamic products (or images) using the same template. (Bonus: includes SWFMacMousewheel support)

View the example

Download the source

*** UPDATED: check out the new AS2/AS3 versions here