Bionic Systems were responsible for the project and art direction, we added our Flash treatment:

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.

Less Rain has been nominated for agency of the year at the 2008 .NET Awards, and our Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab has been nominated for website of the year! Vote now, at thenetawards.com.

Update: Voting is over, Flight Lab made it onto the short list for website of the year! Although that short list is very short, the competition is tough. We are up against Happiness Factory and Eco Zoo. So, fingers crossed!

Less Rain is responsible for creating the unique ‘A Message From Earth’ application, which is the first fully integrated rich media Bebo application created entirely in Flash. The application encourages users to compose messages in text, photo or drawing form. Users can vote on their favorite messages, with the top 500 making it into the galactic broadcast on October 9th. This digital time capsule is historically significant, being the first ever space transmission where the content has been democratically formed on the Internet.

“I understand that in the majority of cases these messages may be naïve, but I also hope that we will receive a creative and fresh look at the subject,” says Dr Zaitsev, one of the world’s leading experts in interstellar radio communication and A Message From Earth Team member.

What is your message from earth?

Let the Universe know by submitting your composition by September 30th. You might even receive a reply - in about 20 years!

Visit www.bebo.com/amessagefromearth

And… if you want to vote for me, check my latest submission in this widget:

Tuesday August 5th: Volume 3 of talk about the weather! Four inspiring, colourful and must-see presentations made a great evening!

Learn more about talk about the weather and subscribe to our newsletter. By subscribing, you will get an invitation once a month automatically.

See the photos of Vol.3 here.

You will be responsible for coming up with concepts for corporate & consumer websites, designing interaction with the information architecture in mind, as well as producing implementation-ready screens.

Every project we do demands a great concept / idea behind it and pushes the boundaries of what is possible, so you will never find yourself doing the same website over and over again.

You will be the main creative lead for the London office; working with developers, designers and project managers to ensure your creative vision stays intact. You will also be in touch with the Less Rain creative & technical directors in Berlin & Tokyo.

As a person you are always thinking of new ways to use design and interaction to solve problems. You are quick and stress tolerant, with attention to detail and good communication skills. You are comfortable talking about your ideas and can inspire others to follow your lead.

Skills

• Experience in designing rich media large scale websites
• Academic background in design, with excellent Information design & typography skills
• A feel for good usability
• A minimum of 5 years experience
• Excellent knowledge of Flash (as a designer, no coding experience necessary), Photoshop, Illustrator / Freehand
• Moving image & 3D software (After Effects, Maya, 3D Studio Max etc.) is a bonus, but not essential.

Initial salaries are comparable to the market level. Our first and foremost priority is to create quality work, and we do our best to apply this principle for everyone’s benefit.

Send your resume, references and portfolio to jobs@lessrain.com.

No agencies please.

Are you interested in travelling through digital culture, experiencing new pixel breezes and swimming in a pool of creative ideas?

If you’re:

• interested in working for a creative web design agency in the center of Berlin
• excited by animation
• a student in communication design or a related field
  (please no first year students)

don’t hesitate to contact us.

Technical skills:
You should be well versed in the Adobe CS programs: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and have a basic knowledge of Flash and After Effects.

Language skills:
As Less Rain is located in London, Berlin and Tokyo and all three offices work closely together, command of the english language is an essential requirement.

Preferably, we would like to find someone for six months. The internship starts in mid of August. Remuneration will be paid.

Please send your application including CV and samples of your work to Anna of Less Rain Berlin: anna@lessrain.com

To recap - Loading XML files in Flash over an SSL Connection in Internet Explorer fails if the “Pragma: no-cache” or “Cache-Control: no-cache” HTTP headers are set in the server’s response.
In AS2 the loading failed silently, in AS3 we at least get an IO Error #2032, which has been discussed several times (see below)

If you want to keep the browser from caching your dynamic content you’ll have to use other means.
Judging from my tests, the best headers to prevent caching without causing errors in IE are: “Cache-Control: no-store” and/or “Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMT”.

You can access the test suite here:

• Loading over an SSL connection
• Loading over a normal connection

Set the headers that you’d like the server-script to return and find out what happens when the same request is sent twice after each other.
Use the Live HTTP Headers Plugin for Firefox if you’d like to see what the server actually returns.

Other interesting insights

• The problem still exists in Internet Explorer 7! Don’t know about Vista…
• Here it’s suggested that “Cache-Control: must-revalidate” and “Cache-Control: max-age=0″ also work. While that’s true in the sense that they don’t cause an error IE, they don’t seem to prevent caching 100% - there is a timeout.
• “Pragma: no-cache” causes the error in IE, but doesn’t actually prevent it from caching at all when it’s set on a non-ssh connection.
• Firefox internally sets the expiry date of script files to the past - so unless you set the “Expires” header to the future it’ll never cache the content.
• Safari and Firefox change their caching behavior when the “Last Modified” header is set. If it’s in the past they seem to be happy to cache the file for you.

PHP sessions

Note that in PHP, as soon as you use sessions with session_start() the no-cache headers are added automatically. You’ll have to replace those headers or turn the default behavior off in php.ini. To replace the headers (found in the comments of the original post, see also the session-cache-limiter function and comments):

session_cache_limiter(’public’);
session_start();
header (”Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
// or if you still want to prevent caching
header (”Cache-Control: no-store”);
header (”Pragma: public”);

Related links:

• Adobe TechNote
• Related Microsoft bug
• More on Error #2032
• Microsoft article - How to prevent caching in Internet Explorer. Especially “The Pragma: No-Cache Header” section
• Even more trouble with gzip compression
• And the Microsoft bug report for that

Related Posts:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Developing Flight Lab

On Tuesday June 10th talk about the weather had its debut. While slurping either the London, Berlin or Tokyo cocktail the audience listened to TINA ROEDER, LARS EBERLE, DAVID KRINGS and PETER BUENNAGEL. Learn more about talk about the weather and subscribe to our newsletter.

Become a member of the facebook group talk about the weather and see the photos of the debut talk.

A subtle use of Flash and Papervision 3D creates an abstract, dreamy and atmospheric paper space to reflect the company’s vision of a harmonious relationship between nature, architecture, community and self.

The corporate identity we developed in collaboration with yippieyeah is based on botanic patterns (Phyllotaxy) as you would find in the growth patterns of sun flowers for example - it underlines the companies dedication to nature and community.

Regular readers will be pleased to find the site equipped with our usual technical treatment: fully dynamic, browser-button- and deeplink enabled (thanks to SWFAddress) and HTML-version for search engine optimization.

We were nominated in the categories “3D” and “Technical Excellence”. While we won the first one, the latter went to preloaded for “Launchball” - congratulations!

Apparently, we also won the “Best in Show” award. Which is amazing. Especially with the ridiculous acceptance speech video we handed in. Thanks everyone at FITC, and thanks to our moms…

Update: FITC posted the results…

BBC NEWS: Life in London captured digitally

DESIGN WEEK: O2 to launch Bluebook installation by Bruges.

Bring on the wood and sheet metal! Break out your saw! Cut the pieces to size, assemble them, paint them and… voila! You’ve built your own airplane. Now it’s time to get it off the ground… will it fly…?

As of today, Less Rain’s new 3-D model application with integrated flight simulator, the Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab, will be online, a 3-part game based on Red Bull’s Flugtag event.

Step One: The fuselage, wings and pitch elevator are cut out of Styrofoam, cardboard, wood or scrap metal. The pieces are then automatically assembled into a 3-D airplane. Material and shape will later play an important role in the machine’s flying properties.

Step Two: Customizing the parts. This can be done by uploading your own photos, designs and patterns or, alternatively, using brushes to paint the machine ‘by hand’. The results might be anything from a realistic looking airplane to an abstract flying artwork.

Step Three: The prospective pilot can test the quality of his custom-designed aircraft and its flying capabilities amidst stunning natural scenery in the 3-D flight simulator. The machine is launched from a floating launch pad using the arrow keys. First the wings beat softly then the plane takes off energetically into the big blue sky.

The goal now is to cover as much distance as possible. To achieve this, users may experiment with acrobatic maneuvers, collect cans of Red Bull to refuel and employ the thermal updrafts – but they must beware of the bumpy crosswinds!

Points are given after each flight for distance covered and piloting style. Loops, drifts, rolls, low-level flight and other maneuvers are rewarded. In addition, the other users rate the plane’s design. A total score is calculated which, if it’s good enough, may be included on a high score table.

Pilots can store their planes in a hangar where they can develop them further or try out new designs anytime. Another unique aspect of the game is that any user can take-off with any airplane and, what’s more, can change and improve it to their own tastes.

The back-end and user administration part of Flight Lab has been developed by Signal7, our partner of choice when it comes to enterprise level, tailor-made database solutions.

Related Links:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Pilot avatar motion capture demo and the original Paperdude post
Signal7

Update:
We’re Site of the Day at the FWA! Cheers, Rob!

Update II:
We made it Site of the Month at the FWA! That’s just fantastic, thanks everybody at the FWA!

Update III:
Thank you UltraShock, for the BombShock Award! And we are Adobe Site of the Day for March 4th!

Continue reading: Developing Flight Lab

Public Service Anouncement:
WordPress decided to delete the original post. This is a re-post, meaning the original comments got lost. We’re sorry about that.

At the beginning it’s always simple. “Everybody draw crazy airplanes and then fly them.” We wanted a fun experience, no boring modeling session, no nerdy flight simulation.

Just draw an outline, booom!, airplane wing

Flight Lab uses Papervision3D to show 3-D models and these models have to be created in a very specific way. Drawing an arbitrary free hand line is the opposite of that, you can draw everything, in any way. That’s why the Flight Lab builder has to do a lot of interpretations. Did you just draw a correction to an existing outline? Are there intersections? Can we simplify the outline while preserving its characteristic look so the Flash Player has less stuff to compute? Next, Flight Lab has to break up the shape into triangles because Papervision3D only understands models made out of triangles. At the end, we add thickness and create the final model by extruding the outline. We’re done! Now let’s head over to the game.

Fly like birds do and crash like airplanes

Flight Lab gives you the real thing: It’s a 6DOF (degrees of freedom) flight simulator modeled by a physics engine in 3D using rigid body dynamics. Real airplane wings can be described by specific lift and drag coefficients, depending on how quickly and from which angle the air flows over a wing section. That’s what Flight Lab does.

On the other hand you’re flying by flapping wings. The flying experience had to be as physical as possible using as few buttons as possible. So we put a bird into the simulator, added additional forces and offered the user the same control a bird has over its body – if it’s not a chicken. 4 keys, 2 optional keys and one space bar (hint!) oughta be enough for everyone.

Flying Pigs

The flight behaviour depends on the material you choose and the shape of the airplane. But to be honest, we ended up limiting this influence a little bit. As an aviation engineer you just have to design some things exactly the right way or the airplane won’t fly at all. Crazy airplanes can quickly become impossible to handle in a real flight simulator. However, we wanted people to create imaginative planes and fly them in our simulator even though they may never take off in the real world. So we decided on a compromise. Huge wings for example will do what you expect them to do but they can have any shape and any position. In the end though, a well engineered aircraft will still fly better and bring you more score points.

Hand-crafted, with a lot of love

The game itself has a lot of elements running at the same time and a lot of effort went into making this possible. Flight Lab is using Papervision3D 1.5 and builds on the efforts of a vivid open-source community. Nevertheless, there are limits when it comes to creating a game experience of this scale. Nearly every element you see in the game posed a significant problem of its own. Be it quality of graphics, a panorama, a water surface, airplane shadow, clouds, wind or general depth-sorting problems. And often something feasible turned out to be too slow in context. Game logic, stunt analysis, sound and physics simulation quickly add up.

Guest Star

PaperDude! Of course you know him and he’s back big time. He will be acting as your avatar so treat him with respect. His body follows motion capture data from Lord of the Rings and Saturday Night Fever. Real time, baby!

Plus everything else

Next to all this fancy game and 3D stuff, Flight Lab is also a website which offers saving, browsing and sharing airplanes. It’s a Rich Internet Application in the true sense of the word and a site that supports deep linking and browser history. If you want your friend to play the game directly using a specific airplane, just send him the link in the browser address bar.

Flight Lab is a prominent example of what you can do today with Flash Player 9. It was a fun ride and we learned a lot. Let’s see what the future holds, the flying pigs are here to stay.

Shortly after introducing the world’s thinnest notebook Apple is surprising us with another superlative, the world’s thinnest CD rack - the new iShelf touch. It’s ultra thin, and ultra unlike anything else.

Now you can really show off your CD collection, not just on your tiny iPod touch screen or your notebook, but mounted on the wall in your stylish living room.

(more…)

and this is the original with all the heavily branded kids