Qualcomm's Dream Device, looking somewhat familiar.

This year Less Rain is the only German agency to win a coveted Webby Award, aka "The Internet Oscar". Nominated from almost 10.000 entries, our Red Bull Soapbox Racer won the People's Voice Award in the Game or Application category. Thanks again to everyone who voted!

Andreas Lutz wins the only other Webby going to Germany, in the Student category for his portfolio "Because clicking is so 90s!". Congratulations!

Following the nominations at the Webbys, FITC and The One Show, the Red Bull Soapbox Racer is now also nominated at the Clios 2010 in the category Beverages / Non-Alcoholic. We are pitted against the Coca Cola Happiness Machine by Definition 6, a nice example of a viral video done right:

Following the recent nominations we are now competing for a Webby as well, in the coveted category Interactive Advertising / Game or Application. And again, we need you! Please vote for the Red Bull Soapbox Racer at the People's Voice Award for a chance to win a Good Deed of the Day-Medal.

Update: Soapbox Racer wins the People's Voice Award. Thank you, people!

Our friend Hawken just released his first iPhone app, Facemakr, and apparently I'm in it. So if you ever wanted to create a portrait based on my likeness, now you can!

Julius Wiedemann and Rob Ford from the FWA teamed up for TASCHEN Verlag to present you with "sixty success stories from clients' briefings to final projects" - and two of them are ours. Both our Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab and Vandalsquad feature as examples for a successful investment online.

You can flip through the entire book here, or read more at the TASCHEN website. The Internet Case Study Book is out in April 2010.

The Red Bull Soapbox Racer just got voted Website of the Month at The FWA, and is also Website of the Day at Adobe.

Red Bull Soapbox - kids of all ages in self-made cars, racing down a steep hill. An extremely popular event, held throughout the year across the globe. The cars are powered by gravity only, no engines allowed but all dreams and colors.

And now it’s online! All of it, the cars, the race, the place to meet and challenge your friends. We call it Red Bull Soapbox Racer and racing you will.

Race first, think later

One single click on “Race now” and you find yourself on top of a steep road, pointing downhill. While the countdown is running, please be reminded that the game is based on a realistic physics simulation and you should not not not smash into one of those nice obstacles. Do collect cans for an extra speed boost and don’t forget the spanners. With ultra speed comes maybe damage.

If you didn’t win instantly the first time, maybe it was the wrong track. We have tracks for everybody, Wildwest, Night Ride, Turkish Riviera, Waterland, Alpenglück - many more will be added. Or was there a problem with the car?

Another car, another race

Red Bull Soapbox Racer lets you build your own car in 3D. Just draw the outline with your mouse. It’s really that simple and everything you draw will have an effect later in the game. The rounder the wheels the better, reconsider materials, use more stickers, paint, use colors, use more colors than your opponents, use every tool you have at least once. And winning races will get you even more of those. (THERE IS A NAILGUN!)

Give it some love, cars will be rated by who-knows-what so make sure there is no doubt. You may also browse through all existing cars for some inspiration.

The Challenge

After tinkering and test driving for a while there comes a point in time where you are quite sure to have the best car ever built on this planet. Challenge your friends! Invite them by E-Mail or simply click on the name of your long-time-rival in the so-called friends list.

A challenge works like this: Start the challenge and you have three attempts to race your best time. After that your opponent will be notified and offered three rounds to beat your time.

And after that, there is the highscore list for everyone to see.

Steeper, faster, harder

It’s even better to challenge somebody on your own surprise track. Give it a try, it’s simpler than building cars. Draw with your mouse where the street should go, done. Then, if you like, adjust the downward slope with some gusto and remember the guideline: The steeper the faster. Place obstacles and power-ups as you see fit, some recommend at least one can of Red Bull.

Red Bull Soapbox Racer is the latest addition to our creative online communities. Make your race times heard, we sure will try to beat you. See you on the circuit!

Related Posts:

Red Bull Flugtag Flightlab
Developing Red Bull Flugtag Flightlab

Our now sadly defunct-because-we’re-sold-out online shop, The Less Rain Super Center, is featured in iCatching, a new book by Singaporean publisher Page One.

Filter Forge is a Photoshop plug-in that lets you create your own filters using a Max MSP-like interface. Very handy to create seamless, photo realistic textures like this one:

The Mac version got released just now, with a 30% discount. User-created filters can be downloaded for free.

In the last few days I’ve been experiencing weird rendering problems in some websites while using the latest stable version of Firefox (3.0.1) in MAC.

Searching google I found more people having similar issuses like blinking pages when using SWFAddress for Flash in FF3 MAC.

• SWFAddress Help Forum
• Firefox 3 + Adblock = disaster (asfusion blog)
• FF3 breaks SWFAddress (sometimes) on OS X
• Firefox 3 and SWFAddress

In all the cases the solution given for the problem is to add a small delay between the visual transition and the JavaScript interaction of SWFAddress.

After reading all this posts I thought the problem was specific for SWFAddress but my surpsise was when I found similar problems in one of our projects which is not using SWFAddress at all and it is almost 4 years old (AS2). In this specific project we were using ExternalInterface extensivelly.

I have done a small test with just a gradient background and three round corner buttons using ExternalInterface call method to call three different javscript functions and the results are scary:

1) First button (left) calls an alert in javascript using a timeout:

JAVASCRIPT: setTimeout(”alert(’test 1 with timeout’)”, 1000);
FLASH: ExternalInterface.call(”test1″);

2) Second button (middle) calls an alert in javascript:

JAVASCRIPT: alert(”test2 no timeout”);
FLASH: ExternalInterface.call(”test2″);

3) Third button (right) calls scrollTo in javascript:

JAVASCRIPT: scrollTo(0,100);
FLASH: ExternalInterface.call(”test3″);

Second and third button in FF3 MAC makes the flash movie to behave in a weird way when the javascript action is executed.

http://www.lessrain.com/projects/luis/as3/bugs/ff3mac/deploy/

Looking at this results and considering that SWFAddress uses ExternalInterface I can say for now that part of the problem is caused by using the ExternalInterface call method in FF3 MAC (looking at the problem from a flash developer point of view, I don’t know what is happening behind the “Cocoa Firefox” scenes), but maybe the problem goes deeper than this, I don’t know yet, this is only my first attempt to find out the causes of Flash blinking and behaving bad in FF3 MAC.

As a practical add-on for our loyal Flight Lab users we created a mini hangar widget that users can embed on their blog, social platform profile etc.

We happily used Clearspring as the platform for our widget, just click “Get this and Share” and take it away. If you enter the e-mail address you registered with at Flight Lab, the widget display your own planes to show off your flight machine building skills.

Related Posts:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Developing Flight Lab