Game Mechanics in Social Media

I just watched this Google Tech Talk video, Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software. Anyone in the social media industry would probably benefit from watching this video, because it brings up some great points.

Pale Blue Dot (revisited)

EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from The Loft Productions on Vimeo.

The Loft Productions created a "re-imagining" of Carl Sagan's famous Pale Blue Dot, and it includes some amazing time lapse photography, as well as an original piano piece. Very moving, and the last time lapse (shifting from day to night) is simply stunning.

My Blu-ray Review of The Final Countdown (1980)

My Netflix queue is, shall we say, "diverse".

I recently received The Final Countdown on Blu-ray through my queue. I added this movie a while back while in a nostalgic mood, and had sort of forgotten about it until now. The basic premise of the 1980 movie is that a US carrier goes through some storm and travels through time back to the day before Pearl Harbor. The only two things I remember from my childhood about this movie was 1) Some really lame effect of travelling through time, and 2) A scene where friggin' F-14's take on Japanese Zero's!!!!

If there's two things I love, it's Sci-Fi and F-14's. Top Gun is one of my favorite movies (though, technically speaking, the movie's action scenes don't really hold up to modern standards). Clearly I had to watch this movie!

I had both good and bad reactions to this movie. The Final Countdown, according to RottenTomatoes is only half-good, and I definitely had the same feelings. The acting is pretty mediocre, and the ending is anti-climactic. It's funny watching a pre-Terminator movie discussing notions like "time paradox" and "changing the future."

On the other hand, what I wasn't expecting is just *how* well this movie captures life aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz, and it's all captured in fantastic detail on the Blu-ray transfer. Some of the shots of the F-14s flying and the "carrier" at work are awe-inspiring, and you really get a sense of the sheer effort involved in keeping an aircraft carrier fully operational. I do have to say, that the first scene when a Tomcat takes off, I was expecting Danger Zone to be playing in the background!

I'd say if you enjoy Sci-Fi and enjoy military themes, this is definitely a good rental. What makes it particularly entertaining are the 2 "extras" in the Blu-ray. One of them deals with the general production of the movie and some of the challenges, and it's one of the first DVD extra I've seen that actually "talks some smack" about the director and some of the people involved, so that was refreshing!

The second extra is worth a big mention, it deals with the Jolly Roger squadron pilots that were hired to film the aviation scenes (the 5 weeks they spent filming used up their "vacation leave"), and they had some really interesting anecdotes about the production:

• There's an infamous scene when an F-14 is dogfighting a Zero where the Tomcat pitches up, rolls to one side and dives toward the ocean, only to pull up with what appears to be mere feet from the surface. Apparently the plane did bottom out with about a 100ft above the deck, and it was so dangerous that they didn't show it to their commanding officers until the movie was in theaters
• After shooting one day, the pilots and director were in the hotel bar when Katherine Ross, the female lead showed up. The pilots asked the director to introduce them to her, but she refused to meet them for no reason. So, the next day, one of the pilots took a sign up that read "F*** You, Katherine Ross!" onboard a Tomcat, and while filming a refuelling scene they held it up so the camera got a shot of it. Two days later (it took that long to process the film), in their "dailies" meeting, the brought up the film to review, and, with Katherine Ross present at the table, the first shot of the film was the pilots holding up this sign :)

Watching the extra featurettes made this movie worth the rental, so I'd recommend you give it a look-see, and tell me what you think!

AIM App review by a user

So, I've been sort of MIA - I've been mainly working on AIM Express, which you can check out from here.

I was just looking around YouTube today and found this review of the app. It's a little blurry, but it was cool to see someone else take the time to review the app that Todd and I wrote. He's been doing a lot of the heavy-lifting lately. Hopefully I'll get some free time to help him out soon!

The App Store is open! Check out AIM for iPhone!

Woke up this morning to a text from Todd, saying our app was up in iTunes, a day early! I've been reading the reviews and comments, so far some bugs but generally positive! Go get AIM for your iPhone (your current iPhone will work too!), and tell me what you think:

Or click here

Tip: Load the new AIM Express in your Firefox sidebar

Firefox only: By default, AIM Express runs in a new browser window. I prefer to run AIM Express on my Firefox sidebar, and so I thought I'd share how to do that!

First go to this link:

http://o.aolcdn.com/aim/gromit/beta_3_aim_express/WidgetMain.html

Then add this as a bookmark, make sure to check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar"

And there we go!

An AIM Express low down

My how time flies! The last time I posted, it was pretty much right after the iPhone SDK announcement by Apple. Since then a lot has happened, and I haven't posted about any of it! I will try to post with more detail on each thing as the summer rolls on.

First off, after the announcement I went back to my day job, which is working on the new version of AIM Express. Which, by the way, is in public beta! Check it out here:
We were given the task of rewriting AIM Express from scratch. AOL hadn't been showing AIM Express any lovin' lately, so we wanted to restart the project for all the folks that still use AIM Express. Since it was a complete rewrite, a lot of features are still being brought in, and we'd love your feedback on what to do! Leave us your feedback once you try it out!

AIM Express 7 is written in Flash, which provided us a great platform to try and build something with a lot of dynamics, while still being cross-browser compatible (for the most part, we're workin on that (thanks IE!)).

So, how do you build an AIM client from scratch in ActionScript? We decided to use the WIM API, which is our new web-based interface for writing your very own AIM app.

Some developer notes on AE7:

It's using pure ActionScript 3.0 - none of the mess of AS2 - which proved to be an excellent development environment along with Adobe Flex Builder. We use Flex builder as our IDE, but it doesn't use any Flex code, just pure low-level flash rendering. On top of that we built our own lightweight UI framework to suit our needs for this project. This allowed us to complete access to the dev pipeline, making things like (simple) skinning and quick layout optimization.

Some of you know that AOL also runs ICQ, and ICQ has a web client as well called ICQ2Go! Well, our team at AOL was given the task of building 1 application that can run as both ICQ and AIM. This was a daunting task, as both apps run basically the same, but have some significant differences. All in all, I think we've been able to build an app that can make both AIM and ICQ users happy. Here's a screenshot of ICQ2Go:

We're still working hard to make this app be great - between Beta 1 and Beta 2, we added custom status messages, tooltips and IM sounds. We are working on some other great features, also keeping in mind that we have some ways to go in making AIM Express 7 a client you'd want to use even if you had a chat client installed on your desktop!

One last thing: The WIM api is free to use for anyone who wants to try writing an app that uses the AIM network (all the way from your own AIM wimzi app, to building a full-featured desktop replacement!). And, if you're using Flash, you'll be glad to know that we decided to open-source the library we wrote for AIM Express 7 that handles talking to WIM for you! I'll be talking more about that in the future, but check out the code at:

wimas3.googlecode.com