An excellent talk from Gever Tulley entitled Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. Working with kids online we are faced with the challenges inherent in providing safe online experiences. Many of the measures (I’m thinking of COPPA specifically) provide what I consider to be false assurances. In theory they protect [...]
Friends Kyle (age unknown) and Maeve (age 5) host the weekly kids’s time radio show on community radio in Guelph. Last week I made a special guest appearance on the show to talk about the elusive pugbunny. Every show has great themes ranging from pancakes to animals. The show combines great music with stories and [...]
My quick walkthrough of the Zimmer Twins. Loads of articles, ideas and videos from Dust or Magic is available on the Dust or Magic Wiki.
Optimizing vector artwork in Flash is usually the last thing on an illustrator or animator’s mind when they’re drawing in Flash. Unfortunately, when all the artwork is done and it’s time to get it ready for the web, it can be pretty daunting to think about going through the FLA and doing Modify > Shape [...]
This Sunday Anne-Sophie and I will be heading to New Jersey to attend this year’s Dust or Magic Institute. Given the breadth of work we are involved with we often find ourselves at larger television, animation or technology conferences. This year we’ve made an effort to branch out and sample some smaller events with hopes of meeting [...]
One problem I always run into when developing a game in Flash is how to tell when a timeline animation is finished. The quick and dirty solution is to put some callback functions on a frame (or two or three) on the MovieClip’s timeline. This works well for simple cases, but gets messy quickly. And [...]
Drupal has been our choice of CMS since James Walker worked with us to build terminus1525.ca. Ashok Modi is our very own Drupal guru and recently undertook a major project in porting the Zimmer Twins site from Drupal 4.6 to Drupal 6.0. Ashok will be giving a bit of ‘behind-the-scenes’ tour of the process involved in [...]
Crappy Cat is not a good kitty — unless you consider hard-drinkin’ and hard-livin’ to be desirable qualities in a cat. Then Crappy Cat is a very, very good kitty. The new Crappy Cat game, (which we’ve been programming all summer) went live this past weekend. It’s a bit different than most of our work (definitely not [...]
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Showcomotion conference in Sheffield, England. The conference was a crash course in the children’s media scene in the UK and I met plenty of interesting folks. There were a few excellent speakers showcasing their recent work. Mark Walsh from Pixar gave an excellent behind-the-scenes look [...]
This summer, the Toronto Public Library KidsSpace website comes to life as a larger than life Dewey visits locations around Toronto. What’s a Dewey? Dewey is/are the KidsSpace mascots and they are helpful alien clones that love to read, play, and tell stories. Dewey was discovered in late 2005 by intrepid explorer, and builder of [...]