Virus infects car
This news I’ve been expecting for quiet some time now: Mobile virus infects Lexus cars
We’ve gotten used to lower standards in reliability on digital devices mainly due to increased complexity (an analog phone really couldn’t crash, but you also couldn’t take take video-footage with it…), but imagine your new car’s brakes failing beacuse it can now talk you around traffic-jams.
Benchmark Capital invests in Sulake
Sulake, developers of the Habbo-hotel community (shockwave is still alive!) have yet again secured a round of investements, this time 23.5$ from Benchmark Capital (and co-investors).
It’s been very interesting to follow Aapo’s and Sampo’s (founders, Sulake) venture into the digital hotel business. They started of with a small but neat visual chat application called Mobiles Disco back in -99 (or was it -98?), which I found very interesting. I had been working with both Aapo and Sampo back in the old days and they also tried to hire me as their third employee in 2000, but I decided to head for Razorfish Helsinki instead.
Five years later they have 160 employees in 12 countries and three million unique users visiting their virtual hotels every month. How can one cope with such growth? And with the new round of investement it’s unlikely that things will slow down. I’m quite sure we can expect lots of new virtual hotels in the most remote corners of the world as well as great new multiplayer concepts in the near future from them.
iPod gains momentum
Shortly after the introduction of iPod shuffle people are truly eager to get their hands on one. Check out the Amazon.com Early Adopter Electronics-page, where (to date) iPod shuffle players take rank #1 and #2. All in all 9 products in the top 20 are iPod-related.
Dell’s CEO Kevin Rollins is still not impressed:
"It’s interesting the iPod has been out for three years and it’s only this past year it’s become a raging success. Well those things that become fads rage and then they drop off."
Read his full interview at silicon.com.
_rotation & redraws
While developing a rather complex spiderweb-UI with loads of nodes and sub-nodes that are connected to each other I wondered why my CPU jumped to 100% although nothing was moving on the screen.
When moving a lot of MC’s around the screen with ease-outs or on elastic paths I usually just update the _x-property of all MC’s without checking if it really needs updating (reached it’s end-position), since Flash is smart enough not to redraw the MC if the the property’s value has not changed from the last update.
As it turns out, Flash is not so smart when it comes to the _rotation-property. Setting the _rotation-property will make Flash redraw the MC no matter even if the value does not change. So mClip._rotation = mClip._rotation will make Flash redraw the element, where mClip._x = mClip._x will not.
Reclaim the CPU!
About this blog
Hello world!
This is the first post to Valve’s officially unofficial blog. Official in the way that the authors decided to put this blog together to write about bits and pieces that affect our daily work. Unnoficial in the way that the writings in most cases are individual views and may also involve stuff that is not associated with our company, Valve.
Currently we have five guys blogging here.
- Karri Ojanen, conceptualizer and DJ
- Peter Aulén, client guy and beer enthusiast.
- Paavo Perttula, client guy
- Me, flash-guy
I’ll leave more thorough introductions to them…
If you’re one of the very early birds you’ll be seeing this blog like it’s not supposed to be seen. We sure are thinking of designing some neat skins for this blog so you don’t have to look at this, hmm, crappy green (Note to self: remember to edit this post after the design goes live).
Happy-happy joy-joy, have a nice day.
[Update] None of this is true anymore;) This merely was a failed experiment on having multiple persons host a blog. I now know that – in the long run – a blog cannot be co-written.
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