Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum

On Thursday, October 23, the Grout Museum District of Waterloo, IA, held a Dress Rehearsal for the upcoming Grand Opening of the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum.

Throughout 2007, Applied Art worked closely with the museum's designer and fabricator, Split Rock Studios of St. Paul, MN, to plan the video theaters, computer interactives and other unique presentations within the museum. Production began in January of 2008, culminating with this unveiling of:

• 35 historic videos and veteran interviews
• 78 audio-supported homefront and warfront stories
• 7 Interactive "Dog Tag" stations
• 2 Iowa Veteran Search Stations
• An ever-scrolling memorial tribute to all Iowa Veterans
• A laser-based presentation chronicling World War II

The museum Grand Opening is scheduled for Saturday, November 15 and begins with a parade at 10 am. The public is invited to attend the Grand Opening for a $1 admission price.

~Jeanie

Adobe Bends Boundaries With Flash CS4

It seems like only yesterday I was installing the Creative Suite 3 package from Adobe. It was a simpler time, where I could sit back in my chair and ease-in to a new animation project. I knew the technical limitations and all the capabilities of Flash CS3. Honestly, not a lot changed from Flash 8 to CS3 other than the cosmetics, it was your typical upgrade. But today, I discovered why we pay Adobe $600 for those upgrades.

The new CS4 is worth every penny, or at least it would appear so. I haven't yet jumped into it, but I took a look at a video on Lee Brimelow's website, and I was floored. I had dabbled in the world of 3D in the past, using tools like Maya or Lightwave for 3D modeling and rendering. These programs were well developed and required an in-depth knowledge of the craft. I used to animate in Flash and get frustrated with shape-tweens, setting up motion guides and a few other shortfalls. But it appears that Adobe has finally overcome these hurdles, and then some.

The concept of inverse kinematics, a staple in the 3D animation world, is something that we're all aware of (whether or not we know the technical term). The new "bone" tool inside of Flash CS4 allows for incredible control and flexibility (pardon the pun) in your vector animations. You can create a set of symbols or a simple polygon shape, apply a bone structure to it and begin to bend, fold and contort your vector art in any way imaginable. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while.

Along with the impressive new kinematic controls, Flash CS4 has also added some new ways of controlling entire animations as well as customizing your animations in 2D and 3D space. That's right, 3D space... That's a whole 'nother post in itself. The web is about to get a lot cooler - all due to that $600 price tag we love to hate. Adobe has obviously worked hard since acquiring Macromedia, and Flash CS4 is by far the best upgrade in a long time.

~Grant

Physics Doesn't Exist; It's all Gnomes

"Physics Doesn't Exist; It's all Gnomes" is an actual group on Facebook...with a whopping 42,996 members. And if you want a good chuckle, skim through the names of thousands of other Facebook groups.

Beyond a chuckle, what are these groups good for? Target marketing. You would skip over the Gnome nerds...unless...you were the guy selling the "I heart geeks" T-shirts.

Web usability guru Jakob Neilsen recently put out a report that web banner ads are not seen on the web. That said, I started to wonder about how targeted social media banner ads would perform.

How targeted can your ads be on Facebook? Very. This morning I created a Facebook ad for a local website http://www.dsmgolflessons.com/. After going through the process, Facebook reported the ad would potentially reach 3,280 people who have identified likes of "golf" or "golfing" and who live in Ankeny, Altoona, Des Moines, West Des Moines, Ames and Urbandale.

I also placed an ad for a major motion picture's site http://www.finalseason.com/. After going through the process again, Facebook said this ad could reach 775,280 people in the United States who listed some sort of baseball love in their profile.

For the next few weeks, I will keep a close eye on the number of hits the ads receive and the respective Google Analytics reports for the web traffic (also a critical part of our usual web design and development process for our clients).

I will keep ya posted on what I find out about the ads' effectiveness...

~Stephanie

What If You Ran an Ad, and Nobody Saw It?

Recent research confirms something that we've suspected for a long time. Banner ads don't work. In an article from the New York Times Jacob Nielsen, the web usability guru, said, “For the longest time, the web has been in collective denial of this phenomenon."

Nielsen points out that, surprisingly, paid search ads are effective. “We thought we’d find [paid search] box blindness the way we did banner blindness, but that’s not the case. Users are interested in search ads and actually look at them.”

Other studies have indicated that ads inserted in video are effective. Possibly because we are accustomed to advertising in video. More likely is the fact that we have to actually select a video and are anticipating the content to follow.

Video ads produced, edited and then posted to the web, huh? Now that's something we're good at!


~George

The Biz of Tweeting

So there's emailing, texting, blogging and what I've come to call "uber messaging" or, Twitter. According to our friends at Lava Row, Twitter is a rather localized sensation who's main users are Gen Y, the Millennials, and everyone else who can't quote Top Gun.

An account on Twitter allows you to "tweet" or...tell...your twitter followers what you are doing, feeling or thinking about at any given moment in 140 characters or less. Your followers can receive instant tweeted info online and/or via short message service (SMS) - text messaging - on a mobile device that doesn't need to have web access.

In March 2008, reports were putting Twitter messages at 3 million a day. That's when big companies started to go, "hmmm". Starbucks, JetBlue, ComCast, Dell and a host of other large and small all jumped into the fray.

They use Twitter to offer promotions, dialogue with customers, post company news, and remedy customer service issues. By using slick applications like TweetScan or TweetBeep - it's easy to keep a pulse on what's being said about them.

And if you're interested in learning more about how you can put other social media like Facebook or MySpace to work for your business - let's TweetUp!

~Stephanie

Flash of Genius

The movie, Flash of Genius, is about Robert Kearns who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and his battle with the Detroit automakers who he accused of stealing his invention. Who knew?

That brings to mind some other items that we use every day - and you might not know who invented them:

The computer mouse - Douglas Englebart 1964

Email - Ray Tomlinson 1971 (also came up with the idea of using the "@" in your email address)

Ethernet - Robert Metcalfe 1973

The computer chip (integrated circuit) - Jack Kilby and Iowa native Robert Noyce 1958

First computer game - Space War by Steve Russell 1962

Spreadsheet - Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston 1978

World Wide Web - Tim Berners-Lee 1989

Computer - John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University 1941

~George

I'm Running for President!

We came across this very cool application for Flash the other day and wanted to share it with our friends. George has already fooled quite a few people.

iNews3

This video clip utilizes Flash with embedded video content to allow users to add their name to various elements within the video. The site asks for your name and then creates a permanent link which will load the video and include your name throughout the video. Flash creates text fields that display your name onto bumper stickers, tattoos and other hilarious presidential ad spaces.

~Grant

Microsoft Seinfeld Ads – Love them or hate them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIjNJZpRtj8


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw


I wanted to hate them but I couldn’t help liking them. By now you’ve seen the new Microsoft TV/Web commercials. I can’t remember many videos that polarized people like these. You either love them or absolutely hate them. It’s worse than the Kennedys.
There has been a lot of buzz online about these – more in the geek world than perhaps elsewhere.

One thing that has surprised me is how often the haters say “they don’t say anything” or “where’s the message” or “what’s this got to do with Vista”. We are so conditioned to what we think commercials are supposed to be that then they are different it bothers some of us. I remember when I found out the secret to watching foreign films. I was always frustrated because I couldn’t find the story line. American films always have a plot – we are conditioned to look for the plot. A foreign film may be about a town or the study of a character and not have the traditional Hollywood construction.

I believe these were designed to break through the noise and were aimed at the geek influencers. There were several inside references that geeks would appreciate (Bill Gates membership card has his mug shot from when he was arrested for speeding in 1977). After these ad’s ran there was a huge spike in the Microsoft buzz – it even exceeded Apple’s. Microsoft rarely has any buzz – they are about as interesting as a Ford Taurus. They put Microsoft on people’s minds. If they would have run the (very predictable) “I’m a PC” ad – no one would have noticed.

Microsoft knows they can’t go head to head with Apple. They can’t possibly make the claim to be hip. It will never be cool to own a Zune. Wisely they avoided that and did a bit of an end run. I’m a PC - it’s ok not to be hip.

I don’t think that it’s Apple that Microsoft should be worried about... it’s Google.

~George

What does 1080p mean to me?

720p/60 or 1080i/60 or 1080p/30 or 1080p/60?

This is the Da Vinci Code of High Definition Television.

If you can decipher these numbers you’ll know almost everything you’ll need to know about High Definition video.

There are just three things you need to know to decipher the High Definition code. Resolution, Scan Type and the Frame Rate.

HD comes in 2 resolutions 1080 and 720. The number stands for the vertical resolution of the picture. A 1080 image has 1.5 times the vertical resolution of a 720 image. (It also has 1.5 times the horizontal resolution giving the 1080 image twice the number of pixels as the 720).

The Scan Type is the method the picture was captured. There are two choices here – Progressive and Interlace. In Progressive the picture is drawn on the screen one line at a time starting from the top. When the picture is complete, it's erased and the next picture is drawn on. This happens so fast that it appears to our eye to be one continuous moving image. Interlace scanning first draws every odd numbered line on the screen – one at a time from the top, erases them and then draws every even line on the screen. I know this seems crazy but it's a holdover from the early days of television where it was a way to reduce flicker and improve detail. It's used today because of its compatibility with tube TV sets.

Frame Rate is the number of pictures per second that the video delivers. You typically see only three common frame rates – 24, 30 and 60. (There are three more – 23.976, 29.97 and 59.94 that are used to be compatible with the tube televisions but you rarely see them mentioned). The only weird thing to remember here is when you're referring to an interlace scanned image (where half the picture is drawn at a time) the frame rate number refers to the number of half pictures per second (60 half pictures works out to 30 whole pictures per second – why they just don’t use 30 probably has to do with some engineering mumbo-jumbo).

That’s everything you need to know to decode that mysterious HD code. So when you see 1080p/30 you will know that the picture resolution is 1080 lines, progressive scan type and at 30 frames per second or 1080i/60 is a 1080 resolution image and 60 half pictures per second.

Wow.

~George