When I was at Gizmo I worked with an incredibly talented lad by the name of Kyle Hurley. He’s close to finishing up his new portfolio site, which I thought I’d share with the two or three people who stumble onto my site - aproductofhabit.com.

His work speaks for itself. We collaborated on a lot of great projects at Gizmo. Not only is the guy a top-notch designer, he also has a wonderful and offbeat sense of humor. For a sampling, take a look at teamhurley.tumblr.com, which is a blog that he and his brother maintain. A tale of two brothers. Good stuff.

Just love this image by Mark Weaver. Love love love. Had to share.

If you’re a fan of animation (and adventure), I highly recommend Cartoon Network’s new show The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack! The show was created by Mark “Thurop” Van Orman (read a good interview here) and in my opinion, it’s the best thing to come along since that whacky little sponge we all know and love.

Flapjack (voiced hilariously by Van Orman) is a young boy who lives in, and apparently is raised by, a whale named Bubbie. Their good friend Captain K’nuckles (voiced by the great Brian Doyle-Murray) has cast a spell over the young boy with his tales of adventure on the high-seas. Flapjack and K’nuckles hope to eventually find the mythological “Candied Island,” but spend most of their time in Stormalong Harbor getting into trouble.

Van Orman himself sums up the tone of the show pretty succinctly: “If a cartoon can make me uncomfortable, then I’ll be tuning in again. If it can make me uncomfortable while I’m laughing my ass off then I’ll never miss it.”

It’s the visual style of the show that really caught my attention. The characters live in this aged, grimy, highly-textured world that feels like old pictures from the 1800s that have been painted.

Owing a lot to Ren and Stimpy, the show uses very contrasting styles for effect, often cutting quickly to a frame that is much more detailed than the rest of the show or mixing in some live action. In fact, the show open is done in a completely different style than the show itself - it’s made to look like claymation.

Although it was my four year old who turned me on to this show, I wouldn’t recommend it for a child his age. There are some really dark aspects about it. Issues of severe poverty, plague, alcoholism and just down-right freaky hallucinations are probably a bit too much for young kids. But the kids today, what can you do?

P.S. The fan site is better than most, definitely worth checking out.

The first thing to check is that the permissions for the destination directory are correct - the website has to be able to write to the folder. But that’s simple. If you’re still having problems, and you’re site is hosted by an ISP and you don’t have access to PHP settings - before you do anything else, ask them to check and see if the upload_tmp_dir is configured correctly for your server. Turns out mine wasn’t, and I wish I had known this was something to check before I tried the other ten thousand work-arounds.

If the temp directory isn’t configured right, the server has nowhere to upload the file to before it copies it to its final destination. And so technically, the error message makes sense. It’s not helpful or informative, but…

Anyway, hope it helps. Remember - check the upload_tmp_dir!

Any time their spider needs to view a SWF file, it will load up this version of the Flash Player and at any given point in the application it will give the text and links that are available then. What Google and Yahoo are doing then is driving that application with a virtual user and they can navigate the application whether it’s an application, website or what have you and keep going down different paths of the file until they feel that they have viewed all the content…

Not sure what the time frame is, but hopefully it will be a step toward making Flash and Flex content more search engine optimized, and eliminate one of the strongest arguments against using Flash on the web. Correction: And then the Flash-bashers will have less fuel for their dwindling fires… Unfortunately, I incorrectly linked to Veerle’s article when I meant to link to the comments section. It was this exchange that came to mind as I wrote this post. And I inadvertently labeled her a “Flash-basher,” which was just a failed attempt at e-sarcasm. Rookie mistake.

If you haven’t discovered Veerle Pieters’ blog yet, you should definitely check it out. It’s one of the first blogs I started following regularly and inspired me to create this site.

The amazing Mr. Norrby is at it again! Horizon is a “3D camera-aware background gradient and image mapping tool for Adobe After Effects…” and looks like it will be as indispensable as other Trapcode plugins like 3D Stroke and Particular. As always, Norbby has created one of his signature “I needed something like this so I just whipped it up the other day” quicktime tutorials, which will show you what it does, and why you should build a shrine to this man in your studio.

Ever wonder how that giant poster design is going to look once it’s giant? LiveSurface has pre-masked, layered templates you can download to test out designs on real surfaces like bottles, envelopes and pretty much anything else you can think of. The templates also use Vanishing Point to provide 3D surfaces. Pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the amazing technology this guy has created, which currently takes the form of software called Photosynth, is owned by Microsoft and only Windows users get to try out the demo. Let’s hope they don’t f this up.

Basically the software takes a lot of photos of a particular subject, like a ton of pictures of Notre-Dame Cathedral on Flickr, and turns them into a 3D representation of the cathedral. The other technology this guy created, Seadragon, allows you to zoom, pan, rotate and interact with the Photosynth object in some unbelievable ways. You’ve got to see it to believe it.