I forgot how cool The Price Is Right is.

When I was a kid,  11am was the greatest time of day because of The Price Is Right. Well during the summer at least. For fall thru spring, 11am sucked because I was in school not watching Price is Right, and I knew my mom and youngest sister probably were watching it. An early lesson in life not being fair. And over the past couple decades, I haven’t been fair to The Price is Right. Its an awesome show that I haven’t appreciated since childhood. I heard recently they changed the set to have a more 1950′s look, so tonight I went looking for pics and discovered the greatness of PriceIsRight.com .

And just for design-nerds like myself, some brilliant person on their web staff decided to include a nice-sized picture of the logo for many of their games. If you click on one of the games (like my favorite), you’ll first land on the video tab, but click the Photo tab and there’s the logo in glorious 2-dimensions. The 2D-ness shouldn’t be overlooked, because in the show these same logos are part of set-pieces so they are molded in plastic, extruded, etc. So its very cool they decided to post these fun  (sometimes even bad) logos like this.

Oh and back to the set redesign, this blog has some video on that. Continue reading there if your  I Don’t Give a Crap Meter isn’t already topped off.

GameSalad tosses up games for you!

I haven’t tried GameSalad.com‘s game making software yet (Mac-only btw), but if it does what it says it does, I’ll be checking it out for sure. And from what it briefly says on the site, and implies from this fast paced video below, you just need some graphics and a little know-how of the program to create Mac games and even iPhone games. Which if true would be like moving from my desk to a hammock to develop games.

One really short, one not-so-short animation by Eran Hill

Vimeo sure knows what I like. They sent me this first animation in the mail today. Its only a few seconds long, but stylistically very promising for what’s to come.  It was done in After Effects and Flash, by Eran Hill…

So I’m presuming this much longer animation was done using the same software…

That piece was Eran’s 3rd year student film which is obviously VERY impressive for a junior piece. (also I guess I should warn any youngsters, it has a tad bit of boobage)

New CartoonSmart Tutorials! Papervision3D and After Effects

Point your peepers at this month’s tutorials! Discounted as usual for $15 for both.  Plus this month’s download comes with a coupon code for 30% off anything on the site (except the Bulk Package w/Free Hard Drive, sorry).

The first lesson is on Papervision3D again. Our instructor Manu D’Macedo, did a tutorial on this topic last month too, so this is kind of a followup, although he goes over the initial setup again, so you wouldn’t be too lost skipping ahead to this one. It’s focused on creating a very cool 3D menu, which is hard to describe how cool it is here, so please check it out on the official sales page.

And Jeremy Hicks has returned with his last After Effects tutorial for a little while. He taught this iPhone course , so if I can pull him away from his day job, it will probably be for more of those. His AE course teaches how to do some advanced masking techniques, which create an effect similar to the opening titles in Stranger Than Fiction.

Now for the FUTURE….

What next? I’m still working on slick (but easy) Menu tutorial for Flash. “Still” meaning, still haven’t really started. So hit me up with some comments on things you’d like to see. Tutorials-aside,  I’m also toying with the idea of some kind of cartoon template for easy-character creation, but I dunno. I feel like that gets into the clip-art realm, UNLESS I could find some really fabulous illustrators to contribute to it. Thoughts?

Eeeouch! This animation is painfully fun!

Here’s a great, short animation by Vurup (< the animators/illustrators collaborative website).

At the group’s website you can find links to the creator’s websites and blogs with great posts like this one or this one with some of the source artwork…

Bored to Death’s not at all boring intro animation

Check out the intro animation from HBO’s Bored to Death (which is off to a good start imho). It looks especially wordy in high quality.

CartoonSmart-Approved List of iPhone Training Books (yeah books)

I have to admit, I gave up on my iPhone training the first time around. Just like Luke on Dagobah with his Jedi training. Except instead of running off early to fight Vadar , I just ran off in general…  That was about a year or so ago, back before Apple was allowing authors to sell books on the iPhone, so I was scrounging around for scraps of back-alley training. Not fun.  But recently I got a second wind, mostly because of my instructor Jeremy’s very easy-to-follow iPhone video tutorial, so over the past couple months I’ve been sleeping with training books. Seriously, most of mine have drool on them from being used as pillows. BUT thats a good thing. They aren’t sleep-inducing at all, its just that I’m liking my books so much that I take them everywhere. And I realized today how uncool is it that I haven’t told any of you all to get some of these. The top two I’d say are ESSENTIAL …

Learn Objective C on the Mac This book doesn’t say much about the iPhone, since its mostly about the basic concepts of OOP and Objective C, which is really the best place to start anyway.  Its easy as heck to understand the code just by reading it, so I didn’t really feel the need to fire up XCode to test every example.

Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK With this guy, you’ll be doing things right off the bat in XCode, and testing your projects with the iPhone simulator (or your phone if you get registered as an app developer). I’m about halfway through the projects and can definitely say this book is excellent. Very easy to understand most things, but midway through I found that first book I listed and decided to step back some and really solidify understanding basic Obj C.

iPhone Cool Projects Haven’t dug into this one much yet, but from flipping through it, it looks excellent. A lot of projects that I definitely want to try.

iPhone Games Projects I’ve flipped through and looked at the pictures. The title alone sold me. In fact, twice. I bought two by accident, so if anyone has a compelling reason why you deserve a free copy of this book, comment below.

And this same publisher Apress has a ton more of these books in the works. None of these are available yet, but you can see what they have ahead… iPhone User Interface Design Projects , iPhone Advanced Projects , More iPhone 3 Development: Tackling iPhone SDK 3 , Pro Objective-C for Mac and iPhone

Finally I picked up this Objective C Pocket Reference book by O’Reilly, which I was kinda ticked to see was published in 2003 when it arrived (yeah I didn’t notice the publish date in the title!!)  BUT I’ve actually used this quite a bit. Pocket references aren’t for training though. They are exactly what they say they, “pocket reference”

OKAY, thats all for now. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a more interesting post with pictures of rain. Thats what we do here in Atlanta now, is watch rain.

UPDATED: No rain today. I just posted on the forum the beginnings of what will hopefully be a long discussion for everyone interested in iPhone development.

Toon Boom one day sale coming up!

If you head over to ToonBoom’s site on Monday, Sept 21 and you’ll get 30% off Animate or Animate Pro. Thats a hunk o’ savings!  And how have I not posted this before? TB’s showreel…

True or False, any website with a monorail is cool.

I’d say True. Below is a Flash site proving me right at least once. Anyone know if this whole micro-city / micro-environment look has an official “interface design” name yet. This is definitely not the first one I’ve posted here. Maybe we need to come up with a name.

A really weird, really well animated Michael Jackson tribute

This was a surreal animation to get emailed at 5:30am when I already wasn’t thinking straight…

Had enough of the MJ tributes?  Well here’s a couple choice nugs jpgs to entice you to pack this animation into your head pipe.