Earlier this winter, CloudKid friend and collaborator Brian Butler flew up from the sunny beaches of Miami to add some warmth to the CloudKid HQ. We asked Brian to paint a variety of odd, yet welcoming characters in the studio’s entryway, and, as always, he exceeded our expectations. It’s hard to pick which character is our favorite, so we’ll let you decide for yourself. Image courtesy of the artist.
If we had a nickel for every time a visitor to CloudKid’s HQ mentioned the amazing amount of toys we have… well, we’d have a lot of nickels. While we love seeing the excitement on people’s faces as they marvel at the sheer volume of gizmos and gadgets around our office, our toys are for much more than show. Despite being an office full of “adults,” we think it is vitally important to take time out to play each and every day. Whether it’s subtly swapping Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head’s parts or jamming together as an inner-office “Rock Band” during lunch, we prioritize play in our company culture.
While we’re all for playing to “unwind” and “stay young at heart,” we also realize the benefits of play go beyond fun cliches. We recently came across this article on the power of play, which alludes to a plethora of research that supports the importance of incorporating play into everyday lives — even for adults. In fact, according to the work of Dr. Stuart Brown, “playfulness amplifies our capacity to innovate and to adapt to changing circumstances.” We highly recommend checking out some of this research, and more importantly, to start incorporating play into your own workday. Warning: you may start to enjoy being at work more than being at home!
Exciting news at CloudKid – over the past month, we had one million unique visitors to the Fizzy’s Lunch Lab site! It’s the first time we’ve reached this milestone, and we’re pretty sure that the awesome new season of Lunch Lab had a lot to do with it! Thanks to everyone who’s been checking out Fizzy’s latest adventures, and stay tuned for more fresh material in the coming months. CloudKid forecast: next up, two million!
CloudKid HQ is abuzz with excitement over today’s official launch of Lunch Lab Season 3! As we mentioned back in December, this season was unique, as we focussed on making upgrades to the site to make the experience more personalized for kids. From the Custom Kitchen and Build a Bot creators to the magnets, leader boards, and login system, we hope these upgrades have been improving Lunch Labbers’ experiences with the content.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a new season without some new videos and games! Along with our production partners, Hero 4 Hire Creative, we’re so excited for today’s content launch. In addition to Season 3’s first webisode, “Hook Line and Stinker”, the new game “Sully’s Delivery Day” launched today on the site. We’re really pumped about this game, in which players will have to help Sully navigate the body to make vital deliveries. The whole CloudKid team worked extremely hard on this game, and we really hope you all enjoy it!
Please take a minute to check out (and play!) the new content. And don’t forget to check back over the next few weeks for more webisodes, and for the March launch of our addictively awesome game, Snacker Stacker (don’t say we didn’t warn you!).
These days, there’s no short-supply of opinions extolling the demise of Adobe’s Flash. Last month, Adobe announced that they would stop putting efforts into continuing the Flash player for mobile devices. This isn’t terribly surprising for those following Adobe’s efforts. They haven’t proved that the mobile Flash player is stable or ready for wide-spread adoption. For performance-critical or multimedia-rich applications on mobile hardware, there’s an enormous performance cost of running applications through a browser plugin or virtual machine. The hardware offered today on mobile devices is still far from the capabilities of even a low-end desktop computer.
The nature of content in the Flash Player has been shifting over the last few years, even before Steve Jobs was openly critical about it, or before the iPhone or iPad. The things that you should do with Flash are becoming a smaller subset of things you can do with Flash. Rich application development, video streaming, and website creating are much better done these days as browser-native. As the JavaScript, CSS and HTML implementation in browsers has improved, the need for Flash to do certain things has decreased.
Flash’s long-term future as a distribution platform through a browser plugin (what’s referred to here as the “Player”) is dying a slow death, at best. The success of Apple’s App Store has underscored a shift towards device-native mobile apps downloaded through a marketplace as opposed to content delivered through web browser open-standards. However, in all this chatter about Flash, there are some overlooked aspects that, we believe, are important in understanding the future of this technology and why it isn’t going to disappear.
Flash Platform vs. HTML5
While Apple, Google and Adobe have agreed to support the HTML5 specification, the W3C which maintains and publishes the specifications for web standards has only released the Work Draft of HTML5, which was started back in 2004 (by comparison the first iPhone was released in 2007). Standards take a long time to create and an even longer time to adopt. As a developer who implements these standards, it often requires lots of programming hacks, workarounds and platform-agnostic libraries (e.g., jQuery) to compensate for the browser and platform fragmentation.
The landscape for HTML5 has gotten even more complicated than the days of Netscape versus Internet Explorer and HTML4. Not only are there more browsers, but the platform landscape is now a diversity of hardware, audio & video codecs, as well as different javascript capabilities. Asking “why do I want to build a house on mud?” is not dissimilar from asking and “why would I want to create a game with HTML5?”.
Flash’s Identity Crisis: Solved!
In the wake of Adobe ditching the mobile Flash effort, the coverage tended to overlook that Adobe was going to concentrate their efforts on native app publishing (Android and iOS) using Flash. We believe this marks an important shift from Flash as a publishing platform (via the Flash Player) to Flash as a publishing tool (via the authoring environment). The strength of Flash is largely attributed to Flash as an authoring tool. It’s one of the reasons why Microsoft’s Silverlight hasn’t enjoyed such wide-spread adoption. Even with significant blows to the Flash player, the authoring tool is still great for animation, storyboarding, and rapid prototyping. It’s still the best authoring environment available for creative people to create multimedia-rich experiences with very little programming knowledge.
Adobe has been working over the last several years on a compiler which builds Flash content to native iOS apps (formerly called iPhonePackager). In recent years, this functionality has been replaced with ADT (AIR Developer Tool) and iOS publishing in Flash CS5+, which allows the same functionality using a model built for publishing AIR Desktop applications. The tools are still in development but have already shown a lot of promise. Building content for multiple platforms in one authoring environment is the holy grail of device-native development, and Flash now has the best opportunity to make a go at it.
