G-RAFF creative director Steve Jones will be demonstrating Apple’s MainStage application at the London International Music show on Saturday 13th June at 2pm. The show is at London’s Excel Exhibition Centre

Steve has done a few seminars for Apple, being a bit of an evangelist for their Logic Studio software, but showing MainStage is a new departure. He used it live when touring with French band AIR a couple of years ago, claiming it was a “dream come true” for live performance using a laptop.

Just launched a minimalist 3D Flash showcase site for a lifestyle store in London – Bermondsey 167.

The idea was to use “tags” behind the scenes so that various “rooms” could be generated easily and quickly without any limitations. Tags can be visible frontside or hidden – for example, everything tagged *init appears on the homepage but that tag is never actually visible to users. This allows a more organic browsing experience that you would have if you went into the shop – one second you are looking at the beautiful shirts of Michael McGrath’s label M2CG, but you turn round and you’re looking at his equally stunning mirror tables and units. Similarly a bright top on the site tagged with “colour” can be clicked to generate a ‘room’ with just colourful items from bookends to photos to a cotton slipover.

Its a quirky shop, with quirky owners and a quirky little dog running around… but that is all part of the character, and it was a lot of fun.

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Been banging my head off a wall all day wondering why SWFAddress 2.1 wasn’t firing on initialising. The answer is pretty simple – you HAVE to make sure you include “id” in the optional attributes or it just won’t work. Here’s what I had (wasn’t working):

swfobject.embedSWF("darey_v2.swf", "flashContent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.0", "assets/swf/expressInstall.swf", null, params,null);

and it didn’t work… but I changed it to this:

swfobject.embedSWF("darey_v2.swf", "flashContent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.0", "assets/swf/expressInstall.swf", {}, params, {id: "dareysite"});

… and its all sweet – note the extra {id:"id_goes_here"} bit as the last argument to the static embedSWF function.

I love TweenLite, Jack Doyle’s lightweight tweening engine. Its a bit of a cheat, but we’ve all got to have our little tricks and time-saving moves when deadlines are looming and your fingertips are melting.

I’ve just been coding up a short script to crossfade video stills as you flick through using a navigator. I won’t go into the full code, but let’s suppose you have an array of display classes that hold images, and you are just looping through them. If you have a function called say 'showImage' with one parameter 'state' which is set to true or false – depending on whether you want to show or hide the image – then with TweenLite, you can do this:

public function showImage(state:Boolean) : void
{
  TweenLite.to(this, state?0.5:1, {alpha:Number(state), visible:state});
}

And that’s it. What that means is that if you call 'showImage(true)' on one of your objects, it will have its 'visible' property set to true, and fade to full visibility in 0.5 seconds. If you call 'showImage(false)' on one of your objects, it will fade to alpha zero in 1 second (causing a nice overlap), then have its 'visible' property set to false on completion. Nice one, Jack.

If you haven’t that many objects, and don’t want to have to load up your server with a stack of calls to reload images, this is a cool little routine. If you want source code, just comment… I’ll see what I can do.

Edit: following a comment by @Justin Flash I’ve found there is an even quicker way…

public function showImage(state:Boolean) : void
{
  TweenLite.to(this, state?0.5:1, {autoAlpha:Number(state)});
}

This assumes the “autoAlpha plugin” is activated in your TweenLite constructor.

We are delighted to be working with Suburbia Media again, this time for the launch of their stunning new magazine for Condé Nast – LOVE. When we saw the artwork, it was such a joy. Yet again, it was a case of trying to create something that transparently presented the excellent work of Stuart Spalding and Lee Swillingham without getting in the way. The guys like Flash, so we just created a slightly more involved slideshow with a liquid layout and fullscreen option.