Pitch Labs

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted last and I’ve thought several times to just close the blog since it doesn’t see much use. But before I do so (if I do so), I wanted to throw out a few things about everything new at Pitch.

I’ll be speaking again this year at FlashBelt 2009, which I’m super stoked about. This year will be more of a focus of some of our favorite (and recent work) and talk about the process and inspiration that went into it. Most of what I’m going to show has not been seen by anyone outside our studio… concepts of unfinished works or variations to already published pieces.

We also recently took the twitter plung and are now at @pitchinteractiv. Follow us there to keep up to date with what we are working on and doing. What I find most amazing is the richness of information you can cram into 140 characters and what so many talented people we follow have to share. Also, it’s a huge time saver form having to write in a blog. So the near future may very well see twitter replacing this site.

As for current works. We recently worked with Firstborn on a campaign for AirTran (www.everyflight.com) where we helped with all of the server-side code and build a Flex-based admin tool and we are working on a few other slick Flex gigs that we will be launching this summer.

What else is in the works? On the radar is a data visualization project for a global bank we are working with to visualize over 14 million rows of data. We’re also about to start up a new hybrid Website (jquery, ajax, flash, flex, php, mysql…. fully loaded) and talks are starting now for a potentially huge data viz gig for an online retailer that would start in the [hopefully] not so distant future. And we have a hand full of experiments cooking.

We’ve also recently been published in Polish magazine focus.pl, Swiss magazine Form.de, on the ExpeditionZukunft (ExpeditionFuture) train in Germany funded by the German minister of Education and Max Planck Society, and we are set to be in a UK-based book “Diagrams” that is set to release autumn 2009. What an exciting year!

Nick and I have been working on this one for a few weeks now, as time has permitted. It involved visualizing over 1.4 million rows of data provided by the Federal Electoral Commission to examine patterns in the types of donations given to both presidential candidates running this election. Read more about it >

In AS2, when you wanted to load in an external file (i.e. .jpg) from a remote server that did not have a crossdomain.xml file allowing you to communicate with the server, you could easily override this with the MovieClipLoader class. As long as you did not try to alter the image with the Bitmap object, you were in good shape for the most part.

With MovieClipLoader depreciated in AS3, you can still override the absense of crossdomain.xml utilized on the remote server when loading in images. However, the way to do it is a little trickier. Observe:

package {

import flash.display.*;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.*;
import flash.system.LoaderContext;

public class FeaturedProduct extends Sprite {

public var imgLoader:Loader;
public var context:LoaderContext;

public function FeaturedProduct(){

buildImage();
}

private function buildImage():void {
context = new LoaderContext();
context.checkPolicyFile = false;

imgLoader = new Loader();
imgLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeListener);
var urlRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(”http://www.someremoteurl.com/images/sampleimg.jpg”);
imgLoader.load(urlRequest,context);
}

private function completeListener(e:Event):void {
this.addChild(imgLoader);
}
}
}

In particular, look at the LoaderContext() usage. Without going too much into detail, you can read much more thorough documentation on this at Adobe

Google has made some great API’s that can be super handy. However, I was updating a new [temp]orary site for Pitch that loads the current weather in Madison, WI using Google’s Weather API. Building this locally took me about an hour and everything worked great here. I was thrilled to be able to load in the XML data and parse it with E4x easily. However, when I published the page, the weather wasn’t loading. Sure enough, Google’s crossdomain.xml policy does not let just any ol’ domain request information from it. However, there is a way around this that is actually pretty easy with PHP. Using a proxy approach, you can ‘trick’ the URL path you are calling. So instead of calling “http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=New York, NY” directly, you can call: “xml_proxy.php?url=http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=New York, NY” and have PHP retrieve your data for you.

In that xml_proxy.php file resides the following code:

<?php
$post_data = $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA;
$header[] = “Content-type: text/xml”;
$header[] = “Content-length: “.strlen($post_data);

// create a new cURL resource
$ch = curl_init( $_GET[’url’] );
// set Return Transfer, Timout and Htttp Header
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_data);

// grab URL and pass it to the browser
$xmlData = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
echo curl_error($ch);
} else {
curl_close($ch);
echo $xmlData;
}
?>

And then in ActionScript (I’m using AS3 here), you just point to the URL like this:

//load in xml file
var xmlLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
xmlLoader.addEventListener( Event.COMPLETE, handleComplete );
xmlLoader.load( new URLRequest (’xml_proxy.php?url=http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=New York,NY’) );

Make sure the xml_proxy.php file is on your server and that you are pointing to it correctly.

Until the end of December, One Laptop Per Child is offering something I was a little surprised (and excited) to see. If you are in the US or Canada, you can take part in their Give One Get One program, where you can donate a laptop to a child in the developing world and get one for yourself… ur… “the child in your life”. What I think is cool about this is that it allows you to have hands on experience with these laptops, since this is the first time they are being made to the general public and see, first hand, what the target recipients are going to experience.

I was a little torn with the idea of ‘I give you, you give me’ approach which is so typical in our society, but at the same time I want to see what all of the fuss is about and I would think that by buying one for myself, I’m helping counter the R&D costs that went into this. Eventually though, if I’m convinced enough, my plan is to donate more in 2008 and hopefully convince others to do the same. The idea sounds great.

I’m super excited about the release of FF Meta Serif. While I’ve been using FF Meta (sans) for Pitch branding, it seemed like such a good font not to have a serif version to accompany it. Last week, FontShop released the good news. So here we are:

There’s a great article with the background of building this font here. It’s definitely a pricey font, but if you are serious about your type faces, this shouldn’t be a sticker shock… especially if you find a client to cover the cost.

Imagine being able to convert C/C++ into ActionScript 3. Holy crap. At Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago this year, one of the “potential” upcoming features in Flash 10 will be just that. Peter Elst had a few sneak peaks where he demonstrated this feature along with a few others. I hope they’re not just pulling our chain. This would be amazing.

I’m heading out to Brighton, UK in November for my fourth conference this year. Highly recommended for anyone in the area or, like me, who just want to have a good reason to go to England and meet up with a bunch of friends. The speaker list is pretty amazing too.

Adobe recently posted updated penetration stats for the Flash 9 player. It’s great to see it hit over 90% and I glad I’ve been working with AS3 on several projects so far this year. Can’t wait for more and this is a great tool to justify it to clients.

I just posted a site that covers a topic I brought up at FlashBelt this year. Taking everyday accessible information and making it visually accessible. As a sample, I used fast food nutritional data. You can view the site and download the source code (AS3 and XML) here.