chromacircuit

we’re finally developing our first iphone app at visual mercenary group and that’s what led to the current favorite time suck. we’ve been talking about apps for a couple of years and have been part of the iphone developers group, but we just never really got around to it until now, when our friends at 4corners (see shca post) asked us to help them develop an app for one of their clients.

to make a long story short, i finally opened up xcode and started playing with the developers kit. apple really makes it easy, but still…not being an objective c developer has it’s drawbacks (and i don’t want to hear stories on 11 year olds programming iapps). so with my head exploding with code and model/view/controller logic i was bitching to my social network and vincent higgins pointed me to adobe.com, and the demos of CS5 which is slated for release next year. one of they key components of cs5 is that developers will be able to program in flash using actionscript3 and compile their work into an iphone app. well sign me up!

one of the lower chromacircuit levels

so while checking out the demo, i was led to the game chromacircuit by bowler hat games. bowler hat coded the game using flash cs5 and as3 from a pre-release of the software. so while that’s pretty cool in itself, the game is also great. and although us iphoners get to take it along with us, everyone else can still play on the web.

the object of the game is to rotate the elements in order to match the colors on all the sides. very simple yet very addicting. as the levels progress in difficulty, the elements also gain sides. it’s a really cool experiment in pattern recognition and gets addicting in trying to best the amount of moves required to finish. remembering which way to swipe on the iphone is a bit tricky and adds extra moves but it’s still great nonetheless. chromacircuit gets 4 out 5 stars for time suckiness. oh…and even cooler, you can download the source code and embed it on your own site for free!

the visual mercenary group is proud to announce the launch of the 2009 MPA Kelly Awards Gallery.  for those of you who voted on MPA’s America’s Favorite Ad at mag-ads.com, the people choice winner has also been announced. at the kelly site you can view all the winners, inspiration videos from the creative teams behind the work, judges’ insights, and case studies from the winning ads. the winning team took home $25,000. there’s some pretty good stuff to check out there.

this is the third year that we’ve helped MPA develop the kelly awards site and the first that we designed and built the polling site at mag-ads.com. additionally we created print and banner ads based on the look and feel of mag-ads. this was truly a multimedia assignment spanning LAMP application design and development, print, video, audio, and flash animation & programming. we love working on this kind of integrated media stuff.

so how did your picks fare with the industry judges at kellyawards.org?

Yahoo NewsGlobe

now this is the kinda stuff we love: the yahoo newsglobe. what a great mash up of technology. the folks over at yahoo have taken their rss newsfeeds, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, some free actionscript 3.0 libraries for adobe flash and papervision3d. web3.0 here we go… you can even check out the developer’s blog.

keep an eye out for what we have planned using this technology. radian is already brushing up on his trigonometry.