A very happy new year to everyone. 2007 is already shaping up to be a very busy year, not least on the speaking side of things; February sees me going to Seattle having been very kindly asked to speak at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, then in March it’s off to SxSW(my first time) in Austin where myself and Jim Coudal will do a little free form ideas kinda thing. April I’m in Toronto for FITC, one of my fave conferences and then May it’s a brand new conference from Lynda.com in Boston, Dx3 - which incidentally mN have just done the corporate identity for.
Speaking of mN, look out for a fab new site we’ve just finished for a new BBC tv show which will be airing soon, and keep your eyes peeled for our own new site; it’s taken longer than we (or should that be I) anticipated, partly due to me redesigning some parts of the interface. Judging by the emails I’ve been getting and the people I bumped into at Flash on the Beach, many are intrigued by what’s going on in the little teaser trailer we put on our current site. All will be revealed soon. Also look out for the next issue of Computer Arts Projects which has a lovely big feature on mN and while you’re at it check out future copies of .Net and Digit. Remember we’re always on the look for new talent to be part of the mN adventure. If you think you’ve got what it takes then get in touch.
Right now I’m spending quite a bit of time getting into NodeBox, the free Mac OsX Python based 2D graphics program. They’ve recently released a library called CoreImage - think dynamic real-time scriptable Photoshop type thing and you’ll get the idea of how powerful it is - and that’s just one of the very cool libraries for this fabulous piece of kit. I was talking to Rich Shupe about NodeBox at Flash on the Beach, as we were wondering if all this hardcore AS3 stuff that’s soon to hit in Flash 9 will put up a slight barrier to entry for designers getting into the beauty of code. We started to remember the days of simple things like Hypercard and the like. Anyway, one of things I was telling Rich about was how NodeBox has this crazy menu item called “New with code”. Instead of starting with a new blank document you can choose “New with code” and it creates some random code (that always works) that just does “something”. This can then act as a spring board for generating ideas or more importantly help you understand the Python language. I just love that.
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hey bren, it’ll be my first time at SXSW as well this year…doing a little “power session” on accessibility with Ian Lloyd on Sunday 11th. might bump into you in austin at some point…
patrick h. lauke / 04/01/2007