Ball Droppings:

Fun sound toy done with Processing.js

Adobe's Mobile Plans:

I've been following Aral Balkan's discussion on Adobe's strategy and I mostly agree with him (parts 2, & 3 are also good)

Browser Pong:

Stewdio's browser pong is pretty fun via

PRESS+:

Beautiful but is it 3D or hand rendered? Actually it's hand altered printouts of a 3D animation


Julia Mandle dot Com

We launched a website an experimental performance/visual artist Julia Mandle last week. We collaborated on the identity design with the great Chad Kloepfer. This site was built on the Django framework with added lines doodles in Javascript (IE support via Silverlight & ExplorerCanvas).


Chalk 3d:

Perspective drawings on the street in chalk. via

Museum of Science & Industry:

These new installations by Potion look fun


New website for MTWTF

The new website for the graphic design studio MTWTF went live yesterday. We collaborated with MTWTF on the Scape website and were happy to work with them again. It's stuffed with great graphic design work, so checkout mtwtf.org and let us know what you think.


Paper Monster:

Big site update with a new community section. Looks like a fun.

Electronic Popables:

Prototype of an interactive popup book by Jie Qi and there are more videos

WonderWall:

I love the effect and content on this portfolio via

Atlas:

This visual editor for webapps looks to have a streamlined efficient workflow. It's what Dreamweaver should be.


Ji Lee at AIGA Small Talks

I had a chance to get out and see Ji Lee's talk for AIGANY last night. Lee is the Creative Director at Google's Creative Lab. He ran through a number of his personal and professional projects, and showed some pictures of his cats. I hope AIGA will keep hosting web/new media talks like this. Here are a few of the inspiring bits that stuck with me.

I was and am still blown away by this series of video interviews asking people in Times Square "what is a browser". Apparently 8% of people know what a browser is. Which of course makes marketing a browser kind of challenging. Lee showed these videos promos for the Chrome browser.

Goolery: A gallery of projects made with Google's tools or mashups of Google products.
WTC Logo Preservation: Preserving the WTC's design memory via the Flickr community
Bubble Project: Viral community project almost a prototype for later viral work for the New Museum
Favorite Places: Promoting Google maps by having celebrities map their favorite places in their favorite cites.


ToxicLibs Showreel:

Demo reel for ToxicLibs by Karsten Schmidt. Impressive computational visuals and objects


Book Review: The Magic Machine

All right, this is not exactly news, but I was going through our bookshelf the other day when I remembered how much I like this book. It's a reprint of Alexander Dewdney's 1980's era columns for Scientific American called Computer Recreations. It's a great introduction to programming, one that I've referred to often over the years I've been doing interactive design. Dewdney really shows how programming can be a creative exercise and well just plain fun.

Although some of the examples could be considered "dated" the mathematics are still interesting and charming writing never goes out of style. All the source code is written in BASIC so it's extremely approachable for even dabblers in computer recreation.

The Magic Machine isn't available new (the last printing was 1990) but you can still find it on Amazon