Steve lays it all out, while I install CS5

Steve Jobs has such great timing. While a few hundred thousand developers are getting pumped to check out Adobe’s latest and greatest software (I’m mid-install), Steve posts this very well-explained article titled “Thoughts on Flash” And like a good lawyer he makes his case pretty well. The closing argument is one I agree with too… “Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future…”

I think us Adobe fanboys can gnaw at some of the other point he makes, but should at least get behind that final statement. HTML5 really excites me, not as a replacement to Flash, but because HTML4 sucks.  And like anything new and cool to us web-heads,  it would be a damn shame if Adobe wasn’t involved, or even better, spearheading how HTML5 content is created. Since I’ll inevitably be teaching HTML5 one day, I would like to be using Adobe products like Dreamweaver or Flash in the process.

Nuff said on that. Who missed the Jon Stewart , Apple video.

Still installingCS5!

New CartoonSmart Lessons!

Hey gang! I’m still prepping some sales pages for new templates before I blast out the newsletter, but if anyone wants to get a hold of the latest Combo Discount tutorials, they are now available (as some of you already noticed, thanks!).

Minimalist Super Hero Posters

Anthony from ScreenRant.com created these very cool, very simple posters. There’s 30 in all here, but I’ll repost some of my favs below to entice you over. I only wish he’d left off the superhero’s name, or made it a rollover event, because even though I tried not to, I kept reading the character name first, then engaging myself in the art. And to gauge my geek-meter,  I would have recognized all but 5 of them (they get a little obscure towards the end).

Also I found this linked through Digg which means this artist’s 3 or 4 nights of extra work are paying off big time in traffic for the site. A good example of pumping up your site on a coffee-pot budget.

DetectMobileBrowsers script gets an update for iPad

Hey I mentioned this site DetectMobileBrowsers.mobi a couple weeks ago when I was looking to divert mobile visitors to CartoonSmart to a different homepage than our Flash version, and I just got an email from the coder extraordinaire thats making that happen saying his script now includes iPads in the detection.

If you want to read the original post, its right here. And again, its a totally free script, but if you’re a commercial site, pony up the cash to pay for it.

Heaven and Hell Animations

Kripes these two animations are cool! I’ll embed the Vimeos below, but I really recommend jumping over to their site to watch and turning the HD on, and viewing fullscreen. Then turn down the lights…

Heaven:

Hell:

These were directed by Max Hattler, with lots of other co-conspirators which are listed on the video pages on Vimeo.

HTML5 recommended by 2022.

Thats the good news from this Barron’s article. Actually it was a commenter that pasted this in from HTML5′s wiki…

Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later.

Animate Pro 2 is here! Get your 3D Glasses ready

I just got a hold of Animate Pro 2 yesterday so I don’t have any tutorials yet, but I’ll have some fun stuff ahead. The last version of Animate Pro had true 3D so to add some icing on that cake they’ve included 3D Stereoscopic cameras. Here’s their official description…

Combined with true vision, Toon Boom Animate Pro is the only application that enables you to have left and right cameras set from different points of view to achieve 3D stereoscopic results, all within the same package. Flying through your scene adjusting speed in real-time makes you want to dive in your own animated world and enjoy the ride.

That sounds awesome. I guess I’ll have to figure out on my own if I need to use the red and blue glasses like the ones in the pic below that I swiped from their site, or if I can use those polarized ones from the theater. Wait, don’t laugh at me. I know those polarized glasses involve a lot more technology than just exporting out a Quicktime from Animate, but there will inevitably be some prosumer software before long that makes it so I can rip a Blu-ray or DVD with two video channels for the onslaught of 3D TV’s that are right around the corner.

Click here or below for the full list of new features or enhancements in AP2 (< can we make that acronym a regular “thing” ? )

Papervision 3D Flight Simulator

Hey all, I’m just going through some of the stuff from a new Papervision 3D tutorial. Its a followup to Manu’s last lesson on 3D Game Art. This one actually puts everything together and creates an awesome Flash flight simulator. You can check out the preview movie by clicking the image below. Very cool…

Click to check out an example movie of this in action

Animation using Google Maps

I got a chuckle out of this, so that makes it well worth sharing….

…And if any kids from Newgrounds are listening, I vote to retire ALL stick-fighting animation forever, and replace it (at least for a while) with fake car chase animation.

New Vimeo Animate Tutorials!

Hey Howdy Hey! I’ve just gotten done adding two new videos to CartoonSmart’s Animate channel on Vimeo. The cooler looking video (based on the preview image) is the one with the old western dude and this was done by Justin Cook who will be spearheading some character templates and tutorials with Animate. And the second video (this one) was recorded by yours truly, and features some of the new stuff in Animate 2.

What’s that you say? There’s an Animate 2 out!?!?! Yep, it launched while I was on vacation recently, and I didn’t get a chance to properly announce it here. Sorry Toon Boom.  But now you can watch me talk at length about it in the video. The highlights include a much-appreciated Text tool, better SWF previewing and exporting (with Filter FX), new Sound display (which I’ll tackle in a future video dedicated entirely to the topic of lip sync), Blending FX and finer color tuning. Also because its been a while since I taught an Animate lesson I had to remind myself of a few things I’d forgotten, so I threw in some general Animate instruction as well, in case you’re rusty too.