Safari Popup Blocker And Flash AS3

On a recent project we came across an issue where user initiated popups get blocked in Safari when being called by an AS3 Flash app. The issue doesn’t happen in AS2 and I’d not come across it before, but when I did and I researched it I found it was a well documented issue with no solution. Most popup blockers are able to distinguish between a user initiated popup and an automatic one, and this is the case with all browsers with AS2 or all browsers except Safari with AS3. But what do you do if a popup is an…

Yellow Bird Camera – Video Unbound

Today I came across a tweet linking to a demo of what the Yellow Bird camera has to offer. I was blown away but I had work to get on with so I put it to the back of my mind and moved on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then later at lunch I was explaining it to some colleagues, it was the first free moment I’d had to reflect on the technology after a busy morning, and I started to get overloaded with ideas of how this technology can be implemented. And more than that I never…

More Augmented Reality

Our team recently had the agency’s first stab at the Augmented Reality craze that’s going down lately. We launched this a few weeks back. We didn’t have much of a budget at all so it’s no great masterpiece and we’re relying on our target audience (8-18 years) not having been previously exposed to the technology, so hopefully they’ll find it fresh and fun. Basically the packaging and magazine ads have the image needed for the experience, we’re not promoting it in any way, it’s just a viral… seeded campaign. Here’s a neat example of how it works:

For the most

Video Slideshows With Animoto

Researching for a client recently I came across a neat little service called Animoto. The problem we had was needing a photo gallery that lives on a single page. Not a huge problem in itself and any of these… would work, or numerous others I’ve worked with or built over the years. But the issue here is the CMS we have to work with doesn’t have the ability to upload media, this has to be done separately via FTP, so it’s a messy process and not ideal to leave in the hands of the account team. So I figured

Flash Windowless Mode (wmode)

Just over a year ago when we were done ideating the “nextgen” Ford vehicles site and moved into prototyping and early production I put this document together. Disabling wmode had long been the practice of my company and being on the team charged with developing the next generation site we felt that enabling it was a compulsory step to stay competitive with our websites moving forward. It stemmed from a discussion with our multimedia team, I can’t remember now the exact words they used but according to them the whole idea of wmode was a bad hack by the Flash…