This is probably one of the bigger projects I had the opportunity to work on here at Zinc Roe, and I must say, it was an awesome experience. Not only did I learn more about code performance and optimization, I also learned that the word “Taiko” means “drum” in japanese!!!

Since a lot of the things that were done behind the scenes for this game were new to me, I decided to do a write up going through some coding challenges we had for creating the game.

Over at my blog post, you’ll read about how we dealt with the big bitmaps, managing multiple swf files, and different ways to display video with flash.

So let’s go! NEXT STOP => Carlo’s Blog!

This is a little story about a storybuilder and a project that came and went and came back again. Way back when the universe was young and zinc Roe was operating out of a bachelor apartment we created this thing called flashcan. It was a simple tool that let users drag and drop artwork onto a background and add text. This was pretty nifty stuff for the year 2000. We approached some clients and ended up licensing it to Teletoon and Family Channel.

Flashcan caught the attention of a team working at the CBC and soon I was in Vancouver working with the cbcr3 team to rebuild it as the CBC storybuilder. Shortly after the launch of the most-beautiful cbc4kids.ca site the project was cancelled and it disappeared into the ether. But not long after we started working with the Toronto Public Library. Once again we went back and improved things and launched it as part of the new KidsSpace website. The library also uses the system for their Summer Reading Club sites. This summer it will showcase the work of Werner Zimmerman.

In each of its various incarnations the storybuilder idea has resonated with kids and each project was just as rewarding as the last. For us, it also brought us in contact with some especially gifted folks – the artists who created the assets, the designers who helped shape the interface, the teachers and educators who integrated it into their classrooms and the kids who continue to produce crazy and amazing work with these tools.

Arctic Shuffle Sneak Peak from Jason Krogh on Vimeo.

A little over a year ago we received an email from a company working on ‘an open source consumer electronics device’. About a month later we got a package in the mail containing something that looked like a bean bag with an LCD screen attached to one side and a little label reading ‘prototype’. It was a Chumby. It ran Flash Lite and it was cute.

Not long after it arrived we had a version of our flashcan ecards system up and running on the Chumby. By wiring our flashcan system into Chumby.com visitors can create ecards and then ‘push’ them down to a friend’s Chumby. The Chumby is now showing up in more and more places (check out David Pogue recent piece called Please, do squeeze the Chumby).

We also knew that we wanted to create both the book assembly and viewing tool in Flash as opposed to Director. The tool is written in AS1 and uses Screentime Media’s MProjector software to create a standalone tool for creating the bundles of assets and text that are loaded into the viewer which works equally well locally or online.

What we see now as a version 1.0 tool has been used successfully by the Toronto Public Library in a public touch-screen kiosk format at the Metro Reference Library and had it’s widest release just recently as the core of a jointly produced project called Ontario Time Machine.

At this year’s SXSWi and the Museums and the Web conferences, the “VirtualBook” or “Page Turner” (it needs a real name) was greeted with interest by quite a few people from libraries and museums and it got us thinking about the possibility of a version 2.0 which would build upon the functionality and strengths of the existing version.

We know some of our basic goals in working towards a new version:

• Author in AS3 (bitmap handling and more structured code just a couple of the reasons)
• Streamline the book assembly process and application (cross-platform desktop application and/or hosted process)
• Make the viewing interface relatively “skinnable”
• Expand the display/export options (Flash viewer, HTML view, text only, PDF, etc.)
• Open the process and the product up to benefit from outside knowledge, criticism, and development

The first step in this is this post. We know there are a number of projects with similar goals out there in varying stages of production and we certainly have our personal opinions of where those tools succeed and fail but we would love some direct public feedback on what we have done with version 1.0 and on an on-going basis as we work towards a new version.

As an aside, here are a few companies and organizations with related goals or technology: Open Library, Google Book Search, Zoomify, and Issuu, Any others?

P.S. Please excuse the extremely punny title of this post. I shall endeavour to keep humour reigned-in during all future internet ramblings. Some may say it has been suitable reigned in that they noticed no humour present herein. To them, point taken.