PaperVision3D howto demo in Breeze

Here is a great Adobe breeze presentation that demonstrates setting up a PaperVision3D in Flex, creating the models in 3DsMax, exporting to Collada, and coding the 3D animation via PaperVision apis in your ActionScript 3 project. It is presented by Pelle Christenson from the Danish Flash User Group. Pelle shows what settings/modifiers you need to use in your Max as well as the materials you can choose from. The actual example is a spaceship flying around a little planet with a house on top of it.

This is a good presentation for developers with little to no PaperVision experience to see the actual steps needed to get up and going with Flex and PaperVision. I have only done one little project in PaperVision so far so this was especially helpful for me.

Since PaperVision uses the Collada format (*.DAE) as input, you will need the Collada exporter for Max which can be found here feelingsoftware.com.

You can find Pelle’s Flex source for his Little Planet example here.

Yahoo’s Pipe-dream

Well, not really. Yahoo has a new service called Yahoo Pipes. It is an AJAX based RIA that let’s average Joe developers create data mashups by taking sources like Google searches, RSS feeds, and Flickr, and piping them into each other. You can use it as a feed aggregrator to create highly personalized feeds. You can ask for user inputs and there are a lot of good examples out there. I wanted to build a mashup that shows Basecamp projects by geographic location but something like that is not available yet since Basecamp requires the ability to make REST based web service calls with basic authentication. This is more RSS centered but I am sure more features are coming. There are some cool eBay and Craigslist mashups out there all ready.

What are alive internet apps?

Here at effectiveUI we are focused along with many other RIA firms in creating useful apps, our motto is: “We create and build interfaces people want to use”. A big part of utility is useful animation, not just any animation because animations are quickly distracting if they are not useful. Consider the bouncy icons on a Mac, they are useful but can become a distraction quickly if an icon bounces too much. It is interesting that the default behavior of Entourage is to bounce for every new mail but the Mac mail designers wisely do not bounce the icon every time a mail arrives. They knew that it quickly becomes irritating. In that case simply putting a red number by the email is more interesting to users. Which raises an interesting point that perhaps they also thought that in the case of email making users check instead of notifying them would raise their excitement and bring them more into the app because after all who doesn’t like to check their email for new messages. But I digress.

So what are alive apps? The focus right now in our industry is on “Rich” internet apps and this usually means at the very least an application experience that is better than standard old static html apps and is more desktop-like. But what kind of desktop apps are we trying to emulate? There is a danger that RIA developers will simply reinvent desktop apps and deliver them via Flex and Apollo. But surely this will be boring for users and will only increase utility in terms of access but not really in terms of the experience.

On OSX 10 it is easy to see that being alive is at least one design focus. The icons are bright and easy, the animations are always realistic like the flip of a widget which rotates in 3D space. Things start to have depth and feel very physical. Things are more alive. It is obvious that this will be the case even more in the Leapord release with Core Animation features. And the same goes with Windows Vista. Alive internet apps will use the Flash player 9 and 10 and useful libraries to try to create similarly alive apps that are useful through animation and 3D built with the Flash player.

There is a big focus in the AJAX library community on creating useful animation design patterns and I think the focus in the Flash based RIA community should be the same but to consider what in Flash allows us to come up with patterns that are not possible in Javascript but are just as useful. As an example, I would propose flipping something over in 3D to reveal the back of it and other 3D animations. Again the new ground to break here is finding useful 3D animations because a lot of work has already being done by others to push the use of 3D in the Flash player as a whole.

I propose that alive internet apps are apps that bring the best of Flash animation work to useful real world applications. The role is a unique combination of animation artist and interaction designer and there is much to explore.

I finish with a few resources.

First of all here is the PaperVision3D library that is an exciting 3D library being built for Flash.

This is still in private beta but you can download a free copy from SVN at: http://svn1.cvsdude.c…

There is also a mailing list you can join at: http://osflash.org/ma…

If you want 3D effects on real Flex components see the work of Adobe consultant Alex Uhlmann. He took the distortion mapper from the Sandy3D api and created these cool Flex effects:
http://www.alex-uhlma…