In a quest to inspire young children to explore their creativity and imagination, Made in Me stumbled upon Less Rain and hired us as the production partners for the Land of Me - a suite of six creative software activities for children aged 2 and up to play with grown-ups.

Made in Me provided amazing words, illustration, animation and sound, Less Rain provided design, interactivity and technical direction to bundle everything together in a very sophisticated Adobe Air app!

Unfortunately its not for free, but you can download a functioning demo version here as well as watch some very informative videos here.

Visit Made in Me Website

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 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!

Soapbox predecessor Flight Lab won at both events in 2008: bronze at The One Show, and winner of the 3D category and a Best in Show award at FITC.

Update: You can now vote for the Red Bull Soapbox Racer at the FITC Peoples Choice Award.

Update 2: We won! Red Bull Soapbox Racer came first in the category 3D Flash. Many thanks to all of you at FITC!

• http://www.redbullsoapboxracer.com/
• http://www.alfaromeogiulietta.co.uk/
• http://www.passage-experience.com/
• http://www.redbullflightlab.com/

Requirements

• 3+ years experience in Flash development and solid Actionscript 3 skills
• A feel for good interaction design and usability
• Experience in working with frameworks such as PureMVC or Flex
• Experience with Flash integration technologies (XML, Remoting, Webservices)
• Experience in related technologies and APIs is an advantage (i.e. Papervision 3D, Facebook API…)
• English speakers are welcome!

Please send your CV and portfolio to Thomas Meyer.
We can only accept applications via e-mail.

For further information about Less Rain visit:
http://www.lessrain.com
http://blog.lessrain.com
 

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.

After Googling a bit we found a couple of interesting solutions provided by Xavi Beumala in his blog:

Debugging production ready AIR applications

In Firefox 3.6 for Windows if you embed a Flash Movie with the wmode parameter in the object tag set as default (wmode=”window”) the mouse wheel event is not propagated correctly, instead it is captured automatically by the Flash movie making the scroll wheel not working properly.

Common Example (youtube video):

If you hover the mouse cursor over the embedded video, the mouse wheel doesn’t scroll any more, instead if you leave the embedded video area the mouse wheel scrolls correctly.

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

The Solution:

The only solution I have found so far is setting the wmode parameter in the object tag to “opaque” or “transparent” so the mouse wheel event is propagated correctly, but this solution is far away from ideal.

It’s a well made and challenging memory game, perfect for your casual gaming needs. Check it out at One more Games or on the AppStore

It seems to be a side effect of fixed usability problem which makes old bugs to appear.

Solution 1:

In about:config:

Set browser.display.focusringonanything to true and set browser.display.focusring_width to 0

Solution 2:

Paste this in your css/stylesheet:

a:focus, object:focus { outline: none; -moz-outline-style: none; }

Thanks Thomas for the info.

See more at support.mozilla.com forum (FireFox 3.6 draws a one-pixel border…)

After almost a year in development, we finally went live with www.costanavarino.com, and immediately got ‘Site of the day’ in www.thefwa.com.

We have been working on the branding of this prime holiday destination since 2 years now, arguably the biggest branding exercise Less Rain had ever gone through. To this end we have enlisted the help of our friends at Praline

The website aims to collect information from all areas of knowledge related to Costa Navarino - history, flora, fauna, traditions, food - and prepare the visitor for the wealth of experience Costa Navarino has to offer.

The site has been built in a totally dynamic way, with full screen content and a variety of AS3 animations connecting all pages and interface elements in a seamless fashion. It features a computational soundtrack, using a small number of samples to construct 25 different sound scapes, saving a great deal of download time.

The Red Bull Soapbox Racer has been showered with awards this week. After winning gold twice at the Davey Awards, we’ve also won gold at the London International Awards in the Online Games category - ahead of Dentsu, Tribal DDB and Sapient. Soapbox Racer is currently also nominated at the British Interactive Media Awards.

You will be developing interactive environments in Actionscript 3.0, ranging from consumer & corporate websites to Rich Internet Applications. Here are some examples of the level of coding we expect:

• www.redbullsoapboxracer.com
• www.redbull.com/flightlab
• www.neoderma.com

Your role involves working with our front-end designers, back-end developers and Flash Developer team. Every project we do has a great concept / idea behind it and pushes the boundaries of what is possible, so you will never get bored doing the same website over and over again.

As a person you are quick, accurate and stress tolerant, a problem solver with good communication skills. You are self-motivated; flash development is a passion, not just a job. You like to try out new things and are willing to pass your knowledge to others.

You have a wide knowledge of Flash development and in-depth experience in web development.

Skills

• Solid Actionscript 3 Development (OOP)
• Experience with architecture/design patterns (MVC)
• Experience with Data integration (XML, SOAP, Remoting, etc)
• Experience with Papervision3D and/or other 3D Flash open library
• Strong Math and Physics capabilities
• Game development experience appreciated
• High level understanding of Flash, Flex, AIR and other core Flash Platform
• Basic third-party 3D software knowledge appreciated (such as 3ds, maya, cinema4D, unity3D, Shiva)
• Understanding of Back-end and Database technologies, but not necessarily having the ability to implement.
• Community awareness with new technologies, frameworks, resources and open source libraries
• Programmatic motion appreciated
• Eye for detail, performance and optimization
• Experience with video and audio
• Low-Level development appreciated (bytes level)
• Eclipse/FDT, Flex Builder and SVN appreciated
• Basic graphic design and motion graphics skills
• Basic Photoshop and Illustrator skills
• Basic understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Initial salaries are comparable to the market level and there will be a chance to negotiate as you develop.

Send your resume, references and portfolio to vassilios-at-lessrain.com.

Please include salary expectations.

Check the flexughh announcement for details. Thanks to Fabian and the flexughh for hosting us!