Yet another reason Flash is a Good Thing: Ze Frank uses it to express himself. Come to Flashforward and see whether he’s even funnier in person: *

“A Warped Look at Flash” — In March of 2001, Ze Frank created a small Flash Website called “How to Dance Properly.” On a Thursday evening he sent it out to 17 friends as part of a birthday invitation. By the following Monday over a million people were visiting the site each day. Over the next four years, Ze Frank created a large, ad-free, personal online space called zefrank.com as a vehicle to interact with his spontaneous online audience. The site is a collection of games, toys, writings, short films and collaborative spaces that encourage creative participation from its users. He talks about his experience building the site and highlights some of the challenges and rewards of interacting with a large online audience.

More on Ze Frank:

• Spend a few hours at Ze’s Page. Seriously.
• In particular, since February isn’t over yet, look at his latest piece, Valentine’s Day.
• Oh, and don’t miss Frog — and while you’re going mwaa murr bleargh into the microphone, imagine how much more fun it would be watching Ze Frank do the same thing live on stage with a ten-foot frog hovering on the screen above him.

* Answer: yes he is.

Remember when we told you about a Java-based method of playing the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Infocom text-adventure game?

Well it turns out there IS a Flash-powered version hosted by the BBC, complete with clickable shortcuts for common moves, illustrations of the rooms and inventory items, etc. We might have to play this game a sixth time… (and we might get past that stupid door this time…)

Edited to add: Haha, boingboing got stuck at the same door.

We’re still researching the answer to this, but if you know, please tell us: has a Z-machine interpreter actually been ported to ActionScript, and is this the basis for this version of HHGG? And if so, can we please have it? There continues to be a thriving interactive fiction community, not just playing old Infocom classics but writing new ones. Having a Flash-based engine that can accommodate the same kind of location and item illustrations would be amazing. Open-source it, and we’ll help make it even better. Please oh please…

(via Kotaku.)

We’re posting this Flash-related plea for a friend…

I’m (also) a car geek, and one of my favorite pieces of Flash work ever is this educational mini-site about Volkswagen engine technology. I send people there all the time, both to learn about these engines and to see one of the things Flash is perfect for: interactive explanations.

But it hasn’t been updated since 2002!

It’s basically obsolete at this point — no 3.2L VR6, 2.0FSI-T, 2.5L-5, W8 or W12 — and I’ve emailed VW to suggest they have it updated, to no avail. I don’t think it’s even linked to from within the site any more.

Does anyone in the Flashforward community know who built this? Whoever it was: call VW and convince them to let you bring it up to date, and maintain it forever! They still use Flash all over their site, so they probably just forgot about this poor abandoned code. And their engine technology has not gotten any simpler to explain!

Can anyone help this “friend” of ours? We — I mean, he’d appreciate it very much.

One of the most satisfying aspects of Flash for many web designers is the ability to embed type so you can be sure your viewers will see the pages as you designed them. But if you were Matthew Carter, you wouldn’t need to worry about that, because your fonts would already be pre-installed on just about every device capable of running Flash.

Carter is another design visionary we are very excited to have speaking with us at Flashforward 2005 San Francisco.

“A Close-up View of Type” — Matthew Carter, one of the world’s most talented type designers, offers a series of case histories of the origins, processes, and results of his font creation. He examines typefaces designed “speculatively” (Mantinia, Miller), commissioned by clients (Walker, Fenway), and undertaken to solve technical problems (Verdana, Georgia). Ultimately, Carter answers the question he is most frequently asked: “Why new typefaces?”

More about Carter:

• A good interview at fonthaus.
• The Carter & Cone website — not much to it yet but yes, it looks great and yes, it does specify Verdana in its stylesheet.
• A selection of the fonts designed by Carter can be viewed at identifont.

We’ve all had the experience: a potential client is suspicious of this whole “Flash” thing and needs you to explain its advantages over other modern interactivity options. Now you can cut that debate short by simply directing their attention to Virtual Stan. “Can you make a pierced, spiky-haired hipster sing a custom, robot-heavy version of ‘Roxanne’ (in a stoic demeanor) while standing outside Hogwart’s School of Wizardry… in JavaScript?

“That’s right! Didn’t think so! Ha!”

And then you land that quarter-million-dollar real estate website gig on the spot.

(Via Zeldman.)