Finally…. theFWA has RSS

You have to get it through the FWA Theater that just launched but just the same…. RSS. There is a press release on Think Swedish (FI’s media blog), detailing the service and the partners that FWA used to launch the service: Akamai for the heavy lifting and Fantasy Interactive for the media platform.

That media platform is pretty bad ass by the way. Its all too common for agencies to try to productize their services business. Its also all too common for them to underestimate the difficulty, time and resources required to do so. Which makes the accomplishment all that much more impressive. In the FWA Theater implementation FiV looks pretty clean and works really well. It would be cool if the individual categories had their own RSS feeds though. You can tell that there is a significant amount of time, resources and effort that have been spent in creating FiV. Creative agencies live and die by deals and current work, so spending the time to create a legit platform is a much bigger undertaking than it sounds.

Papervision3D Rubik’s Cube!

To use this swf, just click on the arrows to turn the faces of the cube, and drag the mouse to turn the whole cube:

A friend of mine and I were joking one day that the least accessible interface around would require you to solve a Rubik’s cube before you could click a button or interact with it. Later that day I read an article on Papervision3D and the idea came to me to create a Rubik’s cube in Papervision3D. I thought it would be a great way to learn more about Papervision3D and something fun to work on. I had arrows for the top and bottom face of the cube, but it was just too much on the screen and was difficult to see much in the 3/4 overhead view with those arrows in too.

I ended up learning more about coordinate systems and arrays than I did about Papervision, but it was still a blast. At any rate, I plan to keep adding to it over time. I’d like to have the initial configuration load from XML and I also plan on writing a class to check to see if the cube has been solved after each move. All of that will have to wait though, since I just got my invite into Google’s Appengine and I’m really psyched to learn some more about it!