Beyond the Button

Flash camp

I attended mn.swf camp. This event was an all-day "Flash camp," held in Minneapolis (organized by the Minnesota Flash/Flex programmer's group and presented by Flashbelt.)

There were about a dozen presentations, mostly focused on using Flex and AIR – two software packages that are positively dreamy for museum interactive developers.

Presentations about slowing down

Two lectures about process struck me. These are rooted in standard software development. One presenter, who talked a lot about ‘tips and techniques’ for developers was Jason Grey. Another presenter talking about 'slowing down' (Danny Patterson, one of the authors of Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns.) Both talked about the benefits of slowing down, and how developers can push back against the development process to enable a better development process. The rest of this entry will discuss techniques presented by both presenters about how to 'slow down' the development process. A lot of the techniques may be standard for managers -- but are filtered by my perspective of a museum multimedia developer.

The tips

An interesting experiment in click-free user interfaces http://dontclick.it/

Too popular for their own good

I recently got to see a preview of the new hands-on interactive gallery at the Science Museum, London, called Launchpad. It looks like a fun and well designed space. The director of new media at the Science Museum London, Dave Patten, even has pictures up on Flickr of the space in construction (a cool move that I hope some more museums adopt).

To help promote the exhibit and to compliment the exploratory nature of the experience they built a really rad online flash game called Launchball. Sadly, this game quickly got picked up on digg and was swamped under the burst of traffic that digg can bring. It's been offline ever since. But hey, too much traffic is a good problem to have. I am sure they are working on a way to get it back up with more server juice behind it.

Wolf party at the zoo

WolfQuestI also just ran across this, in development, game from the Minnesota Zoo. They are building WolfQuest which seems like it will be a 3D first person game designed to give you a sense of what it feels like to be a wolf. I am curious to check this out when it launches. Will it be another educational "game" that feels a little too much like work, or will it be a unique multilayer environment that let's you play your way into knowledge. We shall see. There is lots of potential for this type of experience giving you a unique augmented sense of nature.