Studioblog (n): a blog by Studiobanks about design, marketing, internet, business, Charlotte and more. 

(Press Release) Studiobanks to elevate marketing of SAFER® Barrier

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New dynamic website will promote NASCAR and IRL SAFER® Barrier soft wall technology to other racing leagues in U.S. and international markets.

Charlotte-based digital agency, Studiobanks recently launched RacingMadeSafer.com, a robust website for Motorsports Safety Technology (MST), an alliance between NASCAR and the Indy Racing League (IRL), to promote the SAFER® Barrier soft wall technology to racing leagues and new construction projects around the world.

The technology, known as the Steel and Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER®) Barrier, is an energy absorbing soft wall system that has been installed on all NASCAR and IRL racetrack walls to help reduce crash severity and decrease driver injuries due to racing. The SAFER® Barrier consists of a high-strength, tubular steel skin that distributes impact load to energy-absorbing foam cartridges in order to reduce crash severity and provide additional protection for drivers.

The user experience of the Flash-based website captures the Barrier’s positive effects on racing safety, which will ultimately support MST’s efforts to market the technology’s license to other racing leagues throughout the U.S. and international markets.

We were impressed by Studiobanks’ abilities to really understand, showcase and promote the benefits of this amazing life saving technology that we call the SAFER® Barrier in such a cutting-edge manner,” said Shawn Rogers, NASCAR’s Managing Director of Business Operations for Competition and an MST Representative.

“We are committed to supporting ongoing research for new uses of the technology, and we mandate it on all of our tracks because safety for our drivers is our top priority. The new website will help educate other race tracks about the Barrier’s tremendous impact on driver safety, as well as other benefits such as increased track marketability for various forms of motorsports."

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Pretty Loaded

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If you haven’t already done so, check out Big Spaceship’s Pretty Loaded.

Pretty Loaded is an archive of preloaders, created and curated by Big Spaceship. So far it looks like Big Spaceship, Firstborn, Odopod and AgencyNet are the only agencies on the site, but it’s all top-notch work and warrants a look. You can definitely spend a lot of time appreciating the amount of detail that goes into all of the work showcased on the site.

If you’re a Flash developer and would like to learning how to create a preloader of your own, Jamie Kosoy (Big Spaceship’s Senior Developer) has a great article on Adobe’s site on creating a preloader with ActionScript 3.0.

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(Review) Learning ActionScript 3.0

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Initially, having already read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook, I wasn’t planning on reading another book focusing on introductory ActionScript 3, but then I started to hear more and more about Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. Lee Brimelow is quoted on the cover calling it “The best ActionScript book ever written.” How can you argue with that recommendation?

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FlaCC: Flash C Compiler

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Earlier this month Peter Elst posted on his blog about the FlaCC Project. In a nutshell, FlaCC is a way to compile C and C++ libraries to ActionScript bytecode, making code written in the C/C++ languages accessible to Flash. Interpreters for various scripting languages are actually written in C/C++ so this could allow you to port Ruby, PHP or Python into your AIR applications.

This video from Adobe MAX Chicago is enough to entice your imagination:

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(Review) Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns

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Being a predominately self-taught web developer, I’ve slowly migrated towards object oriented programming and, to my credit, made some applications that work but, at the same time, those apps definitely could have been made better and more efficiently.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson and found it quite helpful. Now knowing what the MVC, singleton, proxy, iterator, composite, decorator, command, memento and state patterns are I can better utilize them in my Flash projects and ultimately make better coded apps than I could before.

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Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4

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Today, Aaron Simpson at Cold Hard Flash posted a few videos demonstrating the new Bone Tool and Inverse Kinematics features of Flash CS4.

The Bone Tool basically allows you to group objects together as a flexible jointed object similar to how you’d rig a skeleton in a 3D application. Definitely a welcomed addition for anyone using Flash specifically for character animation.

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(Review) ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook

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In order to help my migration to Flash 9, I went ahead and read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook by Joey Lott, Darron Schall and Keith Peters.

Overall, I would say that it was helpful and recommend it, but even though my copy was a first edition, it did seem like the book contained way too may typos (both grammatical and in the ActionScript itself). Typos aside, the chapters on the Display List and XML were both extremely concise and informative. If you’re unfamiliar with either, I’d recommend giving them a look.

Like the other books in O’Reilly’s Cookbook series, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook works as a quick reference to commonly encountered problems. Focusing on the end results, their problem/solution approach to education works well when you’re already somewhat familiar with their subject.

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Google Indexes Flash

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Google has announced improvements to their Flash indexing!

Unfortunately, Googlebots do not execute all JavaScript they encounter, so, if your SWFs are loaded via JavaScript, you may want to switch to SWFObject 2’s static method in order to ensure visibility.

For now, only static textual content is crawled but, as a Flash Developer, it's exciting to have Flash applications becoming more legit in the eyes of search engines. For a more detailed Q&A, head over to Flash Charlotte.

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Starbucks Coffee At Home

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Yesterday, Robbie and I had a pretty good discussion about the Starbucks Coffee At Home site, so I thought I'd share it here.

At a quick glance of the site you know that the design and execution were both top-notch, so there are a lot of little details you can appreciate. However, what impressed us the most was that when a section was erased from the chalkboard/screen a ghost image remained. We wanted to achieve a similar effect with the Bouvier Kelly site we launched earlier this year, but due to the limitation of ActionScript 2 and the fact that most of the sections displayed dynamic content, we were unable to do so.

Talking it through, we decided the effect was created in either two ways.

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9-Slice Scaling in Flash

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One of the humbling things about working primarily in Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash is that I've been using these applications for years and I'm still stumbling across new features. My latest discovery is Flash 8's 9-slice scaling.

Down at the bottom of the advanced options of the Symbol Properties window is a checkbox labeled "Enable guides for 9-slice scaling." When enabled, a set of guides will be positioned in your symbol and when you scale an instant of this clip asymmetrically in your published SWF – it will maintain a crisp, clean appearance with undistorted corners and edges.

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