Embrace the timeline....

Adobe Max Milan 2008

2008-11-30T06:48:44Z

I’m in Milan with the rest of the board of the Adobe User Group Netherlands to attend Adobe MAX 2008. I’m not presenting like last year, but we will be organizing a special AUG get-together on Sunday night, with a session from Doug Winnie and drinks and networking afterwards.

Looking forward to meeting you all the following days!

“Adobe Flash Virtual Human Player”

2008-07-02T00:34:04Z

“Just a thought..if Adobe wants Flash to be searchable..why release their ‘special Flash Virtual Human Player‘ only to GOOG and YHOO?” – Owen van Dijk on Twitter.

It would make much more sense to release it out in the open..so everyone can play.

Video’s on FDT, HobNox and Mario Klingemann’s best work now online!

2008-06-26T16:48:28Z

We’ve put video’s of the presentations from Nico Zimmerman, Carlo Blatz, Andre Michelle and Mario Klingemann on our website for the world to see! If you want to switch presentations, click the name and then “Bekijk deze sessie” button (dutch for ‘Watch this session’). Enjoy!

Pictures of the event by Bert Hagendoorn.

“WE LOVE TINIC URO!” – Interview with Mario Klingemann and Andre Michelle..

2008-06-23T09:49:04Z

Last Friday we organized another Adobe User Group meeting in Amsterdam and we showed some german love, having an all-german lineup with Nico Zimmerman and Carlo Blatz from Powerflasher, Mario Klingemann and Andre Michelle. It was a great meeting with lots of people and in the end we enjoyed sponsored drinks by MediaMonks, all good

I did a little interview with Mario Klingemann and Andre Michelle, where they show their love for Tinic Uro (around 03:45). Camerawork is done by Ralph Hauwert. Enjoy!

New BrightKite invites available, looking for OffBeat Guides invite

2008-06-02T18:46:25Z

I got a fresh new round of BrightKite invites available! Three are for first come, first served, so please leave a comment if you want one. If you have an OffBeat Guide invite available, i’d like to swap it for a BrightKite one!

You can follow me here on BrightKite.

Need a BrightKite invite?

2008-05-23T09:09:25Z

First 5 visitors who leave a comment get one… Update: All gone.

Remember Dreamless.org? A trip down memory lane…

2008-05-21T15:06:46Z

Do you remember Dreamless.org, the forum setup by Joshua Davis back in 2000? Although i was more of a lurker, i have good memories of it and met some really great people through it.

Eduard von Lindheim together with some other Dreamless members (i remember Vitaly Leokumovich from Ego7 and Sunny and another guy from Friends of Ed) organized the New Media Underground Festival, as a grassroots initiative and held their first meeting at the Lux and ICA during the same time as the UK Flashfoward conference in November 2000. Only through Dreamless i found out i lived 5 minutes away from Eduard (i used to live in Rotterdam back then), and i helped him out a bit organizing the festival. The other organizers were spread around the world (New York and London) and communication was usually through ICQ, email and Dreamless.

The event itself was priceless, hundreds of people showed up and had to crawl together in a small art gallery space, while even more people had to stand outside and couldn’t get it. There were sessions by Joshua Davis, James Patterson and lots of FlashForward speakers showed up as well. I forgot most of the lineup and don’t have any pictures or video’s of it so please leave a comment if you were there (and have a better memory) There were free shirts given away, books, lots of great conversations and lots of positive energy. During that week another NMUF event was given at the ICA. I remember seeing a lot of grassroots initiatives popup during those years and the NMUF festival was given all over the world, in New York, San Francisco and Cape Town.

I was reminded by Dreamless and the NMUF while reading the cover article about Threadless by Max Chafkin in Inc Magazine:

“When he wasn’t working or studying, Nickell was tinkering with Web design, a hobby he indulged in on Dreamless.org, an Internet forum for illustrators and programmers. He would spend hours at a time cruising the forum, talking with his online friends and engaging in a pastime called Photoshop tennis. In it, designers pass digital photographs back and forth and challenge one another to manipulate the images in the most outrageous way possible.

Nickell’s design for the New Media Underground festival — three lines of gray text that mimicked the layout of the Dreamless website — was an entry for a contest that the festival’s organizers were holding online. The design was simple and not quite pretty. But it was strikingly clever — a physical representation of their digital community. The Dreamless members agreed. Nickell won the contest.

In concrete terms, this accomplishment meant exactly nothing: He got no money or even a copy of his winning shirt. But the experience was exhilarating. Dreamless members spent a lot of time batting ideas back and forth, but their creations rarely made it out of the digital realm. Suddenly, Nickell had an idea: What if the best designs were printed on T-shirts and sold in the real world? He suggested as much to Jacob DeHart, one of a handful of friends he had met on Dreamless. DeHart, a student at Purdue University, loved the idea, and each pitched in $500 — enough to pay a lawyer to set up the business and print the first round of shirts.”

Although i’m familiar with Threadless I never realized Nickell won the competition. I think i still have a shirt somewhere, so if i find it i’ll send it over to Threadless

What are your stories about Dreamless?

The Google way of detecting Flash…

2008-05-16T02:18:02Z

“As much as Google loves and advocates the open web, there are still a few things that can be done with Flash. If you need to use Flash, you need to react gracefully if Flash is not installed.”

Read more at Google Doctype…

Flash crashes 9 out 10…

2008-03-30T17:50:58Z

…as soon as i drag a FLV directly to the stage from either my local disk or a network disk, on OSX 10.4…really, really annoying.

I Am Singularity.

2008-01-15T00:33:27Z

Amsterdam = Flash Capital of Europe 2008!

2007-12-12T18:20:21Z

While most of you are probably finishing up the last projects of 2007, we are already preparing for 2008. And it looks like my hometown Amsterdam is THE place to be in 2008 when it comes to Flash/Flex events. Let’s see what’s coming up:

Januari 17: Flex 3 and AIR Prerelease tour
Februari 24-26: Flash in the Can
Februari 27: Colin Moock’s “Actionscript 3.0 From the Ground Up Tour”
April/May: Adobe On AIR Tour
And this. yet to be confirmed…. :0)

Ofcourse, the Adobe User Group will continue to organize regular events throughout 2008 as well. I’m excited to show everyone around here in Amsterdam, and to show you that it has more to offer then smoking weed at the Grasshopper and wandering around the Red Light District.

If you have questions, travel or lodging related or just want to meet up while in Amsterdam, feel free to get in touch or leave a comment! See you all in 2008!

Debug versions of the “Moviestar” release and security chances announced.

2007-12-04T12:21:13Z

Couldn’t find these immediately through the announcement pages, but found them here (9.0.r115): http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Also, please check out the new Security chances in this document, must read: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer9_security_print.html

Watch the “Making Of” of Gettheglass.com by Jorge Calleja (W+K)

2007-11-22T14:43:32Z

A month ago we organized the 2nd Dutch Adobe User Group meeting and we we’re fortunate to have Jorge Calleja from Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam with us. He presented his past work and talked a little bit more about his work done on Gettheglass.com. We recorded his session which you can see here:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid131575345 (will open in a new window)

If you can understand dutch, you will notice two other presentations in the playlist, one is by Satama and one is by Waldo Smeets from Adobe. Our next meeting will be next week, 28th November and we have a great lineup. including Andy Hood and Johnny Slack from AKQA where they will be presenting the Halo 3 Believe campaign they did. Admission is free as always, but required and can be done at the Adobe User Group site. Hopefully see you all next week!

Finally live: Ambulanssi the Game

2007-11-19T13:15:44Z

Sorry for the lack of updates here, but after Adobe MAX Barcelona ( which was a blast, will post my slides here ) we worked around the Clock to deliver ‘Ambulanssi the Game‘, the follow-up of the award-winning website ‘Calucci the Game‘.

Ambulannsi The Game is the new, so called game commercial of the Dutch insurance company Centraal Beheer Achmea. In this game, based on the latest ‘Just Call Us’ tv ad, you play the part of the Finnish Ambulance driver. Your goal: get the Dutch patient to the nearest hospital, and survive all obstacles in the Finnish village. But be careful, if the bumper sensor starts beeping, it is Game Over: Just Call Us! The gamecommercial is a combination of a game and a tv ad, where you can try to avoid the classical fateful ending of these famous tv ads.

The behind-the-scenes post will follow later, for now, please have a look at Ambulanssi the Game ( it’s Dutch )

Jorge Calleja, Art-Director W+K Amsterdam (GettheGlass.com), presenting at the Dutch Adobe User Group

2007-10-08T20:27:32Z

I’m really proud to announce that Jorge Calleja, Art Director at W+K Amsterdam, is presenting at the Dutch Adobe User group this Wednessday October 10th. You may may be familiar with his work through the highly acclaimed project Get the Glass and the second generation HP “Hands” campaign together with Michael Gondry.

As you may know I initiated the first Macromedia User Group (MXUG) in the Netherlands back in 2004. Fast forward 3 years later and we’re now a group of 7, changed the name to the Adobe User Group and holding regular meetings at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, anyone can attend for free! We had a great session back in July, themed “3D” with Martijn de Visser, Ralph Hauwert and Niels de Keijzer doing sessions on Google Sketchup, Papervision and integration between those projects.

This Wednessday, October 10th we have full house, over 140 people signed up, and unfortunately we had to close registration. For those not able to attend, don’t worry, we will post the videos of the presentations (mostly in dutch though) on our site. The program is awesome, 7 sessions all related to “Interactive Video” in one way or another.

Program
14:00 Korte intro door Bert Hagendoorn (Adobe)
14:05 Visual kickoff (BeamLab, platform voor bewegend beeld)
14:25 Adobe Media Player en Flash Media Server 3 door Waldo Smeets (Adobe)
14:45 Webcasting met Flash Video in de praktijk door Mark de Jong (NetMasters)

15:05 BREAK

15:20 Interactive Video & Productie voor Flash – Showcases door Owen van Dijk (USSR Studio)
15:40 Toevoegen van interactiviteit aan video door Elvin Dechesne en Sander Riel (Satama FlashFabriek)
16:30 Portfolio Jorge Calleja (Wieden & Kennedy)

17:00 Borrel (MediaMonks)
18:00 Einde

Thanks to our sponsors for making this happen, and hopefully see you on Wednessday!

USSR Showcase session at MAX Barcelona

2007-10-07T21:27:33Z

In little over a week, Europe will have it’s first Adobe MAX conference, and i’m excited! I’ll be presenting some of the work we produced the past year at MAX Barcelona. Here’s the session description:

“As immersive sites keeps on raising the bar in terms of creativity, blending animation, 3D, video and audio into a rich interactive online experience, developers need to wear multiple hats during development, and often need to be onsite during the shoot, providing valuable feedback to the production team. In this session, Owen van Dijk from award winning studio USSR from Amsterdam, will take you through some its projects and share tricks and tips during the production, valuable lessons learned from these projects and share some of the mistakes so you won’t make them.”

If you’re interested in how we produced award-winning campaigns such as Calucci The Game for Centraal Beheer, the corporate site for Leffe and Kah Ra Shin for EA, come and say hi! And thanks Ted and Sabrina for inviting me.

MX Traveler is dead…long live MX Traveler! (And welcome back everyone…)

2007-09-30T22:17:45Z

After 4 years blogging at MX Traveler i decided it was time for change. Change of name, change of blogging software and mostly, change of subjects. Since the MX acronym was abandoned when Macromedia was bought by Adobe, i was looking for a new name.

Over the years my focus has shifted from microsites to Rich Internet Applications and nowadays i’m back to advertising again. Creating rich, immersive, highly interactive microsites…integrating video, audio, 3D and whatnot, all coming together with Flash, using a healthy mix of Actionscript and the timeline. Yes…the timeline, gone are the days of single-frame-SWF’s and i find myself using keyframes, tweens and the library within the actual IDE more and more. I still dabble around with Flex and ~~Apollo~~ AIR, but my professional focus is creating the best microsites out there.

So here’s to a new start, and welcome everyone back…

PS. If you’re looking for the archives of MX Traveler, please see the link on the right side.

Alternative to FMS now available as public beta

2007-01-11T06:45:09Z

The Wowza Media Server is a commercial alternative to Adobe’s Flash Media Server from a company of two ex-Adobe employees and is now available as a public beta.

Signup and download here: Wowza Media Systems :: Welcome.

Identify CS3 Icons here…

2006-12-21T13:24:48Z

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

wheel-o’-icons, originally uploaded by сdнarriѕoη.

I’m with Peter on this one, i think the new icons are a tad confusing. Help out identifying the new icons on Flickr. Lots of comments on John Nack’s blog as well.

AS3 port of the Dual-treshold buffering strategy

2006-12-20T14:15:59Z

I had a need for an AS3 version of the Dual-treshold buffering strategy by Fabio Sonnati so i rewrote it. Download and have fun

Link: Download BufferedNetStream Class.