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The Brahma Bus application is an awesome new project developed by PARK Studio in Russia. You can rotate the bus around and paint on it using a variety of tools. It’s great fun and definitely one of the best uses of Papervision3D to date.

Google Maps has an awesome new feature called ‘Street View’ that allows you to zoom into select cities and view them in a very cool way. The view starts off with the cities buildings being presented in a 3D-style fashion and presents you with a little chracter which you can drag around.

By double-clicking the little guy, you are presented with a 3D panorama of the street he is currently positioned on.

The panorama was built with Flash, however, for those who are wondering, it doesn’t appear to be powered by Papervision3D. Great stuff though. I can’t wait to see what they will roll out next.

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Microsoft has now launched the official site for Surface.
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That's right. Microsoft has answered to the Apple's multi-touch madness with a new line of coffee-table style computers which feature a nice sized touch-screen for interacting with display objects. What is super cool about their technology is that it also interacts with wireless devices. For example, you will see in the video linked below that you can place a camera on the table and the photos will spill out of it onto the screen. With your cell phone or another device placed on the table, you can then drag some photos to that device and the photos will be sent to it.

Pretty remarkable. Check it out for yourself:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html

The first table, or 'product', will be dubbed Microsoft Surface and will only be sold commercially to Microsoft's partners starting in November. Plans for selling the products to the general public have not been released at this time. More information can be found here:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132352-c,futuretechnology/article.html

Since this technology is very, very cool, however it will not completely replace the tools we use today (at least, not for quite some time), I have decided to dub this style of computer usage as "casual computing".

The FWA have officially launched their Hall Of Fame site and announced the very first inductee, Fantasy Interactive.

Congratulations to the talented teams at both the New York and Stockholm offices; you certainly earned it. In addition to this exciting news, FI has launched a new blog, think swedish, which is powered by their new Propod media blog solution.

Ok...WWDC 2007 is now exactly two weeks away; Steve Jobs official Apple keynote being Monday, June 11th @ 10 am PST. So, what can we expect? Well, I actually have a pretty strong theory about that. Let's look at the facts.

Last year, Apple discontinued their iSight camera. They did this as they began rolling out new iMacs, Macbooks, and Macbook Pros with built-in iSight cameras above the displays. Everyone was thrilled by this fine addition and anxiously awaited the same updates to be made to the actual cinema displays. It never happened. It has been over a year now since we saw any changes to the display lineup; in fact, all we have seen is a price drop.

Also note that it has been rumored for quite some time now that Apple has new LED backlit displays for the 15" and 17" Macbook Pros, as well as a bump in display resolution for the 17" model to support native HD video editing. These changes were strongly expected at NAB, but never happened.

Where am I going with this? I'll tell you soon enough - but first, let's now examine the software side of things.

Perhaps one of the most shocking and upsetting announcements this year has been the delay of OS X Leopard until October. This is highly uncharacteristic of Apple; especially with how much they love to make fun of Microsoft for their product delays. So, what are they working on that is so important that it is worthy of such a delay? Apple's press release stated that they had key OS X developers allocated towards the iPhone development longer than expected, thus causing a delay in the completion of Leopard. I believe this to some extent, but I think there is more to this story. Why is Apple putting so much love into a phone? Keep reading.

People who have been working with OS X developer seeds have been noting that the interface is slowly beginning to see some changes. Rumors have been circulating for a long time that Apple was ready to update the beloved Aqua interface.

And now for the moment of truth. With the "top-secret" Leopard features that Steve Jobs promised us so long ago, interface changes that have been proven to be in the works, displays that are wayyy overdue for a refresh, and a phone that runs OS X and sports multi-touch technology...

That's right; I am suggesting that Leopard will have full-blown multi-touch support and the reason that the displays have been delayed is because they will be compatible with this new multi-touch technology that Apple has patented.

It all makes so much sense. The iPhone was announced because it had to get approval from the FCC. Apple went ahead and announced it so we would hear about it from them first. It worked out great for them though because it gave all of us something to talk about and be excited over while the technology was being integrated into the rest of their product line behind the scenes.

What we are about to see in two weeks is a demonstration of new Apple hardware and software that allows us to work in ways we never have before. I believe that multi-touch will initially be supported throughout Leopard, iLife, and the rumored "ProTools killer" that Apple has been working on for some time now. Eventually, the technology will make it's way to the rest of Apple's professional application lineup.

So this is all very exciting speculation, but what does it mean for you? Well, as an artist and/or programmer, such a technology is greatly going to change the way you work. Imagine being able to manipulate various aspects of an image in Photoshop using two hands, or even moving some nodes around in DVD Studio Pro with several different fingers.

If all of this speculation is correct, Apple will deliver one of their biggest blows to Microsoft yet. A brand new lineup of phones, iPods, displays, and software - all of which support multi-touch technology. It will be a much-welcomed step towards the future; one that will certainly leave Vista and it's long list of problems begging for mercy.

Cross your fingers; we will know for certain what the future holds in two weeks.

This news is several days old now, but I've been busy and forgot to post about it. Scott Hansen has some new prints for sale in the ISO50 store. Also keep an eye out for his new Tycho single which will be released in July.

Check out dnScoop. You can find out some really interesting statistics about domain names (including your own), such as how many pages contain links to that domain and how much the domain is estimated to be worth. Pretty awesome.

Originally derived from Papervision3D, Alexander Zadorozhny's Away3D engine for AS3 is bringing some very interesting innovations to the table such as occlusion culling, phong color lighting, painting tools, and mesh morphing.

Google has some new experimental search features available for testing that include timeline and map views, as well as keyboard shortcuts. I really like the timeline feature a lot...would have been nice to have back in my high school years while doing reports.

A popular trend that started with the addition of the BitmapData class in Flash 8 was the practice of caching movie clip content to a single bitmap file by drawing the data to a BitmapData object. This approach can be used for something as simple as caching a dynamically loaded image or for large performance increases by caching an entire MovieClip or SWF in it's current state.

There is, however, an undocumented issue with this practice. If you are using something like the MovieClipLoader class to load an image file from a domain other than the one your SWF file is hosted on, the image file will load in, but you cannot use the 'draw' method of the BitmapData class on the MovieClip that the image was loaded into or any of the MovieClip's parents. I tried tricking the Flash Player by nesting many levels deep, but with no success. Since you cannot duplicate a MovieClip that contains content loaded into it by a MovieClipLoader or the 'loadMovie' method, you're basically stuck.

The problem is that you can use the 'allowDomain' method and/or a cross-domain XML file on the server the media is located on to load SWF files, however this wasn't applicable for image files until Flash Player 9. Below I will summarize your options for working around this issue; it is much easier if your minimum Flash Player version is 9, however you aren't completely out of luck for version 8.

AS2 / Flash Player 8

You have two options for making this work with Flash Player 8.

Option #1: Server-Side Proxy Method

You can trick the Flash Player into thinking that the file is from the same domain as the SWF file loading it by using server-side scripting as a proxy around the image. This would look something like this in PHP:

Example usage:

imageproxy.php?file= http://media.datadomain.com/someimage.jpg

Pros:
-You don't need access to the server hosting the media.
Cons:
-The image will need to be loaded twice; once by the PHP file and once by the SWF file.

Option #2: Shim SWF Method

By placing a SWF file with the necessary logic to handle and cache images onto the media server itself, you can then load that SWF file into your main SWF and achieve access to the image files without restriction. I recommend this method over the server-side proxy method if you have access to the server the media is hosted on.

Pros:
-Better performance; the image will only be loaded once.
-Better security; the data is much more secure since it is not being proxied.
Cons:
-You need access to the server hosting the media.

AS2 / Flash Player 9

A much better solution to this issue is now present when using AS2 with Flash Player 9. A new property exists for the MovieClipLoader class, 'checkPolicyFile'. When set to 'true', Flash Player will first search the specified domain for a 'crossdomain.xml' file before beginning the load process. This is what a cross domain file looks like if you haven't created one before:

Your image is now free to use the 'draw' method of the BitmapData class. More information about this solution is available here on the Adobe site.

Conclusion

It's a shame that the issue was never resolved for AS2 under Flash Player 8, but it's nice to have some alternative options if you are stuck publishing for Flash Player 8.