The FlashCanon

The Escapist magazine interviews Dan Ferguson of Blockdot.

Here’s the link to the interview.
And here’s the lead-in:

Office managers can thank Dan Ferguson for helping reduce their workers’ productivity. He pioneered the concept of the “advergame”: easy-to-play, casual videogames that pitch a product, service or company’s brand. Often played within a web browser and running in Flash, these innocuous looking games can suck up a lot of hours during one’s workday - and that’s how they are intentionally devised.

Ferguson began making such time-wasters when he, along with his business partner Mike Bielinski, created Elf Bowling as a promotional tool for their design company. Released in November 1999, it capitalized on the holiday season and served over 7 million downloads. Buoyed by this success, Ferguson and Bielinski sold their company and formed a new one in 2001, which would marry their ad design experience and newfound game design skills: Blockdot.

Since then, Blockdot has made over 800 games hawking its clients’ wares and names. Blockdot cranks out one to two games per week. This modest-sized company (they employ just over 50 employees at their Dallas office) could likely be considered the most prolific game developer in history.

I spotted this post over at Beedigital and just had to click on the link to check out Adobe flash on. After spending just a few minutes on it, I wanted to help spread the word so here I am writing this post. I’m going to dig deeper, but it looks like the short explanation of it (my own explanation anyway) is that it’s a video portal where you can choose different categories of videos to watch. With categories like horror, animation, lifestyle, hd, action, comedy and several others, there’s plenty of video there to keep you entertained for a good while. Check it out when you have a few minutes.

Thanks for the post Mário.

After much thought and careful consideration, I’ve recently turned in my resignation with Click Here and will be joining the team at Blockdot starting on November 26th. While I’m very much looking forward to meeting (and of course working with) all of the extremely talented developers at Blockdot, I will also miss my friends at Click Here who have been the best group of people I’ve had the pleasure of working with to date. The last 4 years have been very valuable to me in terms of both personal and professional growth and if anyone reading this post is presented with the opportunity to work at Click Here, I would definitely recommend it. With that said, it’s time for me to look ahead to my future and open a new chapter in my career… a chapter that looks to hold plenty of fun challenges, learning opportunities and of course… games.

Just read this post over at Actionscript Hero and since I’m in advertising, I wanted to be sure to pass it on as well:

“Google has announced and given some examples of their new Flash based ads. They seem to vary from average size to full screen-width Flash advertisements, with some interactive abilities. ‘Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google(TM) content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale.’”

Here’s a Link to Gailin’s post on Slashdot
And since this involves Flash and advertising, here’s a shameless self promo link to my book on Flash Advertising

Mike Potter at RIA pedia has posted an entry on his blog about an ActionScript multitouch table which will be shown at Adobe MAX in Chicago at the end of this month. As Mike points out:

The key differences between this and what Microsoft is building are that the AS 3 library will be open source

That’s right, he said open source (you gotta love the Flash/Flex/ActionScript community). He also mentions that you can get involved and learn more at nuigroup.com. Check out the post when you get a minute and be sure to check out some of the videos on nuigroup.com as well.

With tomorrow’s DFWAUG meeting being the first since the release of my book, I’ll be presenting it to the group and we’ll be raffling off a copy as well. During the presentation I’ll be giving a general overview of the book, showing some of the work and code featured in the book and talking a bit about the actual experience of being published for the first time. Also presenting tomorrow will be fellow DFWAUG member and Manager of the local Dallas InDesign and Acrobat groups, A.J. Wood. A.J. is the founder of Media-Cats and will be introducing us to the latest version of Adobe InDesign. If you’re in the area, come on out to Nerdbooks in Richardson at 11am tomorrow (Sept 15th). See you there!

Well…. OK. I was planning on releasing it to the public sooner or later and with the deadline for the AIR derby being tomorrow night (Sept 5th), I don’t think it’s going to hurt to go ahead and tip my hand by putting it out there now.

So without further ado, here is my entry into the Adobe AIR Developer Derby:

Application Name: vizX

Application Description: vizX is a visual XML editor which displays nodes in a tree structure on the left while details of the selected node are displayed on the right. The details include the name and text value of the node, its attributes and the ability to add child nodes and new attributes.

Application Download:

• 1. If you don’t have the AIR runtime installed, you’ll need to download and install it in order to use vizX. You can get the installer for your particular system (OSX or Windows) from this link.
• 2. Download and install vizX from as either a .zip file or an .air file.
• 3. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to check it out.

You can also use the “Install Now” button below (Thanks Doug).

The new player penetration numbers are out and they look like this:

I feel like I still need to tweak it here and there, but what do you think about it?

AWESOME!! (I know it’s a mistake, but I just had to share) Here’s the link if you have $122.72 for a book.