The brand new website of the “Heurigen” (typical Austrian wine tavern) of the Schmid family in Perchtoldsdorf presents information on wine and food offered. Thanks to a virtual tour can get an impression of the tavern itself and the well-thought-out route map doesn’t only allow you to see where the tavern is located but as well find nearby parking space and how to get there using public transport. Of course you can also find information on opening hours and even reserve a table using the online reservation form. Last but not least for all those wine- and winegrowing fans out there there is an extra section with loads of images and interesting information on the year of a winemaker.

Chic like the Diner itself comes the new website from chimbiss! By using lovingly designed graphical details and animations together with AST&NEBEL it was the goal to create an immersive experience for the visitor. The content therefore literally sits within the chimbiss: Opening the website you are welcomed by an elaborately designed snack wagon. On choosing a menu item it splits in half to uncover the content. Anyway an alternative navigation is available for those trying to get through to the relevant information as quick as possible. As a special feature the website changes its face outside the business hours and appears in a night version.

First I found asLocalConnect. It looked quite nice with a lot of features and good documentation. But when I had a look at the source code I was a bit disappointed. The source code wasn’t too well documented and the coding style putting everything in one class with multiple generic objects as data storage didn’t really feel right. Finally a lot of features like abstracting the security settings into levels and internally trying to fix name collisions with so called “channels” might be nice for some people, but for me it was unnecessary bloat.

Next I stumbled upon the LocalConnectionManager being a part of the DevelopmentArc Core. This also made me move on as I wanted a lightweight solution without any unnecessary dependencies.

Finally I found flashlcs. The main focus of this project obviously is “high speed” data transfer (coping with the 40kb limit of LocalConnection) and the possibility for two way communication (method return) which again wasn’t really what I was looking for.
So what else then? Right, do it yourself.

LocalConnectionSync

LocalConnectionSync is a lightweight way to connect various swfs and receive Events if the connection status changes. Here is just a short feature list:

• Define a set of clients to connect to
• Status Events (established, timed out, lost)
• Broadcast to all clients
• Send to one specific client
• Define a handler object that handles all those method calls

Download LocalConnectionSync Source & Examples

This is the first release so if you find any bugs or have any ideas for improvement feel free to leave a comment.

Examples

Connect and lose Connection

Those two swfs try to connect which should work out fine. If you click “remove bottom to test Events” below the “bottom” swf is removed which should soon make the “top” swf notice that it has lost connection to “bottom”.

Timeout

This swf tries to connect to a non existent swf which of course will end with a time out.

I just want to say thank you again for creating HYPE and giving it away for free. It was a pleasure to me to add to this great framework and I hope you’ll find my additions useful. And of course congratulations to Johan Lindholm, all the Honorable Mentions and everybody else who participated!

If you want to read my blog posts about what I did submit for the contest (source code and examples included) head over to this two posts:
Hype – play, experiment and win
Hype – ChainLayout and Logo Animation

Oh and stay tuned for pictures of the World Largest Gummy Bear Massacre!

ChainLayout

My generative work always circled around paths in some way. As mostly I used them in a very basic geometric way, this time I wanted to arrange more visually complex, illustrated stuff. So I tried another approach. Instead of first calculating the path and then arranging stuff on it I tried a more recursive way.
The way ChainLayout works is very simple. You have an asset which contains another asset named target. This target clip defines the starting point and angle for the next segment of the chain. By feeding a lot of assets into the ChainLayout you end up with a long path. To see the possibilities of this have a look at the examples in the download.

Logo

Source & Examples

• Source&Examples

Already before this contest was announced I had of course grabbed a copy and started to play with it. First I tried and compared it to my diploma project Coded Beauty which finally led me to writing my first extension for HYPE:

SpiralLayout

It is a SpiralLayout and does exactly what it says – like the GridLayout arranges stuff in a grid, this arranges your stuff in Spirals. You can choose whether it’s an archimedean or a logarithmic spiral and specify a couple of other parameters. To cut a long story short here you can see the final output.
After the contest ends I will also put the Source and some examples online. Have fun!

Source & Examples

• Source&Examples

If you want to learn more about my work have a look at my Portfolio, if you’re more interested in personal information about me and my skills have a look at the Information-section and if you want to have a look at the blog – here we go.

For those of you who came here via blog.kraftner.com please update your bookmarks as my old blog is now integrated into my portfolio.

If you experience any problems, especially if due to the new website feel free to write a comment or just send me an email.

As a film and motion graphics company the main requirement was of course to showcase the videos. Already when entering the website you are welcomed by a fullscreen video. This concept then continues throughout the whole site. The simple navigation always puts the attention on the video and presents the world of motion design through soft animations and fluent transitions.
If you want to take a closer look at a video the navigation disappears completely and makes it possible to enjoy the video without any distractions. Like that it was possible to create an experience that goes way beyond what classic websites can offer and feels more like a video portfolio than a website.