Remember your mom’s hippie friend with no doors between the rooms in her house — just those bead curtains that rattled when you walked through them? (Or maybe that was our house; I get confused.) Did you ever catch your “uncle” Stu just kind of stroking the beads with tears in his eyes, muttering something about the lights and the music and how beautiful it all was? Did you wonder what he had just ingested?

Well someone’s “uncles,” Jin-Yo Mok and Ahmi Wolf, grew up and learned Flash. The Light Bead Curtain is a delicate veil of glass beads, in which every bead is alive, responding to your touch with light and sound. Even if we were high on nothing but life, we could play with something like that for, oh, years.

(We assume it’s built using Flash because previous, equally-enthralling experiments by Jin-Yo — such as the Music Box Projects — definitely were. But if we’re wrong about this one, tell us.)

If you’re inspired to start building your own physical/digital art, check out MakingThings — they’ve done the hard work of interfacing Flash with the physical world, so you can start playing right away.

We’ve had fascinating last-minute gadgetry show up in several recent Flashforward sessions (wires! everywhere!) thanks largely to MakingThings’ presence in our exhibitor area, easily accessed by several hundred Flash geeks in a hotel with too much Red Bull on hand…

(found on Gizmodo)

We just told you yesterday how excited we are about having Stefan Sagmeister speak at our conference, but hadn’t yet seen this news at the time. Flashforward cofounder Stewart McBride is on his mailing list and received this email yesterday [links added]:

Subject: Vom stefan

Hello everybody,

We flew out to the Grammies to Los Angeles on Saturday morning, checked many
of the brand new sites in the afternoon and picked up our Grammy nominee
tickets in the evening. The guy at the ticket window asked us what we are
nominated for,

I said: “Packaging”.

…

He just laughed!

Next day at the pre-telecast ceremony we were late, made it there just in
time to sit and listen to our category coming up, “..and the Grammy goes
to:

…Stefan Sagmeister for the Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime“

Matthias and I go up, I have no speech, so I just tell the story of the
laughing pick-up-window guy. The audience thinks this is funny too, lots of
merriment all around.

And: We won a Grammy.

All evening long people shouted: Look, its the packaging guys, great
packaging, packaging guys.

Our excuse for linking to the new trailer for the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is that it’s presented using Flash Video! (But we’d have come up with another excuse to mention it if necessary.)

It’s currently on Amazon’s home page, but if it moves or if you have trouble seeing it there, here’s a direct link.

You might also want to visit the main movie site (also in Flash, natch) and see the first trailer.

Or have the original book read to you by Douglas Adams. (audible.com — can’t figure out how to deep-link there.)

Or play the Infocom text adventure game. (Geek.)

Flashforward has always been as much about design and inspiration as it is about code, and so we’re very proud to be having Stefan Sagmeister present the opening session of Flashforward2005 San Francisco:

“Made You Look Again” — One of the world’s truly brilliant graphic designers opens Flashforward with some “old work” including his infamous Lou Reed posters, crude type cut into human skin, headless chickens and some Rolling Stones for good measure. The Austrian former hard rock singer then moves on to “new work” including his Talking Heads CD covers, Ben & Jerry’s social responsibility graphics and Guggenheim catalogs. Along the way he reveals epiphanies (”Buying the same amps and guitars as Pink Floyd doesn’t make you Pink Floyd”), goals (”To touch hearts with good design”) and his deepest questions (”Can I be happy as a designer and can I do work that increases the happiness of others?”). Not to be missed.

More about Sagmeister:

• Check out his elegant, goofy, Flash-powered company & portfolio site…
• The London Design Museum has an in-depth profile…
• An excellent interview at the AIGA Design Forum…
• An online reprint of an interesting 2002 conference presentation…

Macromedia is blogging about their participation in 3GSM this week in Cannes… looks like the list of Flash-capable devices is on the verge of getting a lot longer.

Which is cool and all, but we’re still hoping for news of a Flash player on the PSP, DS, Tungsten or Treo.

Let’s play “Six Degrees of Flash Fantasizing”

• Sony already knows how: they had a version of Flash Player running on the (Palm OS 5-powered) Clié NX series. They have since quit selling Cliés in the US, but the high-end Sony-Ericsson phones do run Flash Lite. The PS2 also has some Flash skills. (I remember seeing this demonstrated at a Flashforward keynote.) Given Sony’s jack-of-all-trades optimism for the PSP, why not Flash?
• Other current Palm OS 5 devices like the Tungsten T3 / T5 and Treo 650 have better hardware specs than the NX, so they should be able to render Flash as well or better.
• Nintendo is rumored to be planning to incorporate Palm tools on the DS, so if there were already a Palm version of the Flash player, maybe it could come along for the ride.

Again, just wishful thinking here, but it could lead to some fantastic homebrew games & content development for those platforms, and the gaming devices in particular have strong-enough vector performance that Flash should be able to run at a tolerable speed. (Then again, dual G5s oughta perform relatively well too.)

To rephrase this post more selfishly: “Please put Flash on a device I [plan to] own, so I can build my own toys for said device without having to, you know, learn anything. Thank you.”