In preparation for the holiday season we teamed up with our old friend Dave Skaff and his awesome new company The Science Project on a fun little project for GE. We put on our elf hats and got to work for the big guy in the red suit. With the help of the brain power over at GE, we souped up Santa’s sleigh to fly him into this millennium… let’s be honest, it was time.

GE provided us with some pretty amazing technology to lend a hand in this overhaul. We can definitely get behind technology that promotes cleaner energy, improves access to high quality health care (you have to take care of the guy in charge of presents for the entire world after all), and it even promotes a safer world! To paraphrase: Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night!

From adding Icephobic coating to implementing GE’s Asset Intelligence Tracking system, we pimped Santa’s sleigh in this 360 degree 3D Flash demo for all to see. Go on, you can peek before Christmas, we won’t tell.

You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.

That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.

We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?

Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.

Five years. Holy moly.

Five years ago today, a bunch of youngsters at two companies called The Barbarian Group and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky launched a small minisite three days in advance of the late night running of some broadcast spots. They wanted to iron out any last minute wrinkles in the site by emailing it around to a few more friends, and get a little early buzz before the spots ran.

In the next 48 hours, before the spots even had a chance to air, the little viral site that could had already bombarded the poor XServe in Crispin’s internal data center with 25 million hits. Within days, a cultural phenomenon was spawned.

All for a creepy dude in a chicken suit with garters, who looked like he was running some sort of shady web cam operation.

AAnd here it is, five years later. Let’s take a moment to pay tribute to this noble chicken, and let’s look at the impact he had, and where his place might be in marketing today. Man, it’s a good thing I document everything in my life. The events are getting hazy, the facts are starting to be lost to the sands of time. Some pictures I can only find as lo-res GIFs. But we shall persevere!

So I’m working on a video player.
Big deal.

So I can change the color of the controls of the video player.
Big deal.

So I can change the colors with CSS.
Whoa.

Thats right. Click through to read more.

As a Flash developer, games are definitely one of my favorite things to build. Still, as fun as developing a game can be, the dread of getting the nitty gritty of a game set up can sometimes put a damper on that fun. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for great game development platforms that smooth out that process as much as possible.

Rather recently, I discovered Eric Smith’s rather amazing Citrus Engine and I was quite impressed. Built in ActionScript 3.0, it’s a fairly robust Flash sidescrolling platform game engine that allows quick and easy development. It even makes game physics a little less painful to implement, by integrating the Box2D physics engine into the game mechanics.

I’m definitely excited to dig deeper into this. Eric says it’s still in beta, but I still encourage everyone interested to check it out. I look forward to seeing him add more awesomeness to this in the coming months.

So the new Pitchfork has lunched with an iPod Touch takeover ad. The seamless incorporation of the top navigation bar into the ad is really delightful, it just makes it. It owes a debt to the recent Wario Land : Shake It ad on YouTube but the execution is just as slick. Hopefully this sort of freedom to incorporate page content will become much more widespread.

This past summer I was approached by the folks at Wiley Publishing to author Teach Yourself Visually Flash CS4 Professional. I accepted, unaware of the complexities involved in writing such a book, and having no relevant experience other than my knowledge of Flash. After many balmy picnic days spent indoors writing while the sun was shining, and nights soberly gazing over my laptop screen at an unopened bottle of Tuscan Syrah, I completed it.

It was totally worth the effort.

From wiley.com :

If you’re new to Flash and are looking for a good way to get started, I highly recommend it (of course). Or, if you work in another aspect of our business and want to gain a better understanding of what that guy on the 17th floor with the Elvis Costello glasses does for a living, it may be worth checking out too. Feedback is welcome. Many thanks to Jody, Sarah and the rest of the Wiley team.