If you send headers to a domain that does not match the domain where the SWF is hosted, you need update your crossdomain.xml file to allow them to continue to work with Flash Player 9.0.124.0. While this is discussed in the ADC pre-announcement, it could use a bit more detail. Flash Player support wrote a great technote on details of how to set up <allow-http-request-headers-from>.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb403185

One of the examples from the article is:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM “http://www.adobe.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd”>
<cross-domain-policy>

<!– This domain can accept a MyHeader header from a SWF file on www.example.com –>
<allow-http-request-headers-from domain=”www.example.com” headers=”MyHeader”/>

</cross-domain-policy>

Also, it is worth reiterating that the new header crossdomain syntax is required for both send and sendAndLoad network APIs. For network requests without additional headers, traditional crossdomain syntax and behavior continues.

Whew!, I’m so happy that “new media” stopped being the code word for Flash. Flash really isn’t new any more, plus “Rich media” is far more accurate. Now you are probably wondering about why I’m writing this in 2005 and not say 4 years ago when people stopped using “new media” as a common description for Flash. Enter Jeff Gannon aka James Guckert aka pseudo-military prostitue. From Wonkette I ended up clicking over to his site mostly from shock that he is trying to stay around after his 15 minutes were up.

Jeff Gannon has styled himself the “voice of the new media.” Thank goodness that isn’t us anymore! no siree we are “Rich” media now, and not a moment too soon. Luckily, having Gannon as our voice was probably not going to happen anytime soon anyway, certainly not with those PhotoShop skills. Take a look at Gannon in front of a flag (above). It seems the flag didn’t want anything more to do with Gannon than the rest of us. But really, a tip for the novice PhotoShop user: if you are evil, *don’t* include your dark aura in the picture! It scares the children.

It’s either that or he isn’t really bald. his hair just moves really really fast and even with high shutter speed it can only be caught as a diffuse blur.

Ms. Mary Engelbreit, do you realize that you just took credit for the design of a paper towel? While your style isn’t really one of my personal favorites, are you really excited as your site would have us believe that it is a good fit for paper towels, a bastion of poor design?

Certainly nothing says Brawny Man tough like illustrated florals! I’ve always wondered why paper manufacturers seemed determined to add these cheesy sort of prints to paper towels. Mind you, I’m not completely opposed to prints, I just find it cynical that the companies believe 90% of Americans are as tacky as to have kitchens in which the normal paper towel prints aesthetically work. Because of the types of prints available, I for one go for that trendy minimalist approach to my paper towels with just plain white.

I know for a fact that Georgia Pacific can recognize better design than this. Look at the website for Brawny, the brand of paper towel that the Engelbreit prints are going on. That is a pretty nice looking Flash site (notice also that the rolls on the site have no prints). Speaking of good design and marketing on brawny.com, you MUST check out the Brawny Innocent Escapes.

Innocent Escapes is a Flash Video campaign produced by Fallon New York where you can play out warped fantasies of the ultra-sensitive yet masculine brawny man. He comforts you when you’ve had a bad day and can be an oh, so good listener (a badly spliced video loop of “uh huh”, “interesting”, “uh huh”). The whole thing is too funny.

So, good design is good anywhere, but bad design can make me even think of what my paper towels look like. I don’t have the sort of brain cells needed for that, so let’s just agree here and now that its ok for paper towels to be blank so that we can all create pollockesque art form after you’ve cleaned up your spills.

Ray did ask for one caveat though. If Thomas Kinkade should ever want to do printed toilet paper, let him. It would be the perfect synergy of form and function.

John Cleese shifts from one dot com to another and does a hilarious job for liveVault.com at a promotional site heavily using Flash video, backuptrauma.com. Cleese plays Dr. Twain Weck for the Backup Trauma Institute guiding crazed IT professionals back to reality through solutions like liveVault’s data backup products. There is even a gag video that is pretty funny.

I’m not sure how much extra business will come out of this for liveVault, but liveVault seems happy. Let’s hope this encourages other companies to do such excellent work. Anyone out there know which agency worked on that? I’m guessing we will see it in some upcoming award shows.

Edit: This site is a product of Thunder Sky Pictures and Captains of Industry. Good job!

And whatever you do, don’t press the third button!

There are a few bugs in the site, so it you have trouble navigating, just go back to the hallway area.

I want to make a list of all conferences for which Flash is relevant. Those will include the regulars, but also I’d like to go beyond just “Flash Conferences.” If you are into games, GDC and E3 are still relevant. If you are into devices 3GSM and CTIA are good. What are the ones for every nuance of Flash that are good to attend? Also geography and language are irrelevant for the purposes of this thought exercise

So far I’m thinking of Flash, Mobile/device/gadget, Design, Animation, and Game conferences. If you can think of other good subcategories, let me know!

Click Here to see the permanent page and add more conferences! Once I get a good list going I will add it to my left-side navigation.

While fighting off a cold I went to see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I liked it a lot. I thought it was cute, funny and did a good job of sifting out gags that just wouldn’t play out as well visually. One of my favorite parts though was the Guide itself. That sure looked like some Flashified goodness to me though it could be cell-shaded 3D or something else. The credits listed Shynola as the firm that did the work on the guide. Looking at their site was interesting, but not useful in trying to figure out the whether or not it actually was Flash.

After adding a comment to a friend’s blog today about a tool I use a lot, I thought I would share here.

Color Schemer Online is a tool that takes any color and gives 15 derived color complements. You can then lighten or darken the entire scheme and click and swatch to see that color’s complements. This tool is available online for free or you can download WIN/MAC versions for $40.

If you are like me and have just enough design sense to get you into color trouble, this tool is fantastic. My designs often start out by wanting to go in a new direction, and then I pick some overall colors to set the mood. At that point I’m already sunk because I’ve then spent two more days tweaking colors and am still not happy so I just go to gray with maybe one color (can’t go too wrong there). This let’s me get into the ballpark and then find out some good values without the wrangling. The best part is that it comes up with choices I might never have even thought of but add a certain interesting quality to the finished product.

So here’s to less pulled out hair and freedom to go in new directions with the color-sense that god gave my cat.

Having thus far been very positive about Yahoo! on my blog (and generally in life), I do want to take a moment to spew some negativity in light of the new policy about blogging at Yahoo! Don’t worry, I still love the policy, but it does say that we are free to express our opinions, both positive and negative as long as we explain our claims.

So let the Yahoo! negativity begin:

For a very long time, Business cards at Yahoo! have featured the “Y Guy!,” a yellow “Y” shaped stick figure jumping for joy. Apparently brand wanted to get rid of him ,but he is much beloved by employees. Keeping in mind that I have yet to meet anyone that loves him, I was not heartbroken when a new option was presented last month when getting business cards.

We now have the choice of our beloved, or we can choose the new card which unfortunately is the epitome of boring. The new card sports the Yahoo! logo in purple, the Y! logo (pronounced Y-bang) and then our info in purple and black. More than blandness, it really is pretty unfortunate because of the alignment in the design. There are just four elements (big logo, little logo, name/tile, and contact info) shoved into the four corners of the card. The strange thing is that the sides have different borders, and no part aligns especially well to any other part on the card. In fact, with my title under my name, the two aren’t even justified correctly. To add insult to design injury, the new card is even on flimsy paper.

I ended up with the bland design for two reasons only. I wanted a change. I have never been at a company for three years, much less had the same business card for three years. Heck, at eStudio we had three business card redesigns in 2 years. The other reason is that I hate business cards that are portrait rather than landscape. To accommodate the Y guy, the old design was vertical. Blandness and convention at least fit on a landscape card.

I hope I am not the only Yahoo! employee that when they started here thought the corporate colors were red and yellow. Apparently our colors are actually purple and yellow. If I didn’t know it coming in I know it now. Boy howdy, do I know it now. Our color scheme infects our campus. If it can be one or both colors it is. The carpet, the cubes, the signs, the grape and banana jolly ranchers in the cafeteria. Believe me, if you came here you’d notice pretty fast.

I’m all for color branding, but there is something here that crosses the line. The food served by the cafeteria should not be color coordinated to our company. Yellow squash and purple cauliflower is a common occurrence for veggies here. When it is time for roasted potatoes, they are Yukon gold, and those Peruvian purple potatoes that I have otherwise only seen on jetBlue and on cooking shows. It turned my stomach the first time I tried it, but I have conditioned myself on it. Today though crossed the line. Purple potato salad was too much. Chunks of purple potatoes peaking out from behind mayo. *shudder*

Seriously people, there is research on color and taste/quality perception! Here is a little test you can even run yourself.

Last week I was wandering about in the city and came across Room & Board furniture store. Holy bejesus, finally, a real furniture store that has interesting furniture that can fit in a loft apartment. All three huge floors of showroom had just tons of beautiful stuff. But I had one objective.

For months now, I’ve been searching for a comfy chair that will fit in my office and be fun and maybe even just a bit funky. I found the perfect chair (elsewhere) but when I measured the room and returned to reality where the chair would *be* the room, I realized I need to downsize my chair dimensions, and probably my ass.

Having decided that a smaller armless chair would be the way to go, I was amazed at how many armless chairs the store has. On the website there are thir

The Gigi is a very very fun chair and pretty comfy. Pondering hours and hours of X-box Halo 2 training in the chair though, I tend towards the Renzo. It is a beautiful chair, but not completely my style (and certainly not in that fabric), but man it is comfortable, and it comes in a really fun alternate fabric. I could sit in that chair all day and my butt will only have to hurt metaphorically as I play the part of skeet in the Halo 2 shootout.

As a last comment about the wonder that is Room & Board, they have a parking lot! for those of us coming from the burbs, this makes me want to kiss the sales rep before they even show me the first chair.

ty one choices! So after plunking my butt in all of them, I am down to two possibilities

I just ran across http://www.comeclean.com on the Barbarian Group’s news section. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. This virtual confessional (that reminds me of THX 1138) writes your deepest darkest sins on your hands to be washed away in moments (with method products, the client for the project). The whole thing is done in Flash video and has some DB connection for storing confessions.

After scrubbing your hands clean over and over like some bad made for TV movie about OCD, you can sit back and watch the confessions of others. What really makes the site fun though is the voice over of the person who absolves you as you wash your hands. reload the page several times and try a lot of confessions to hear the various comments. There are also very humorous alerts along the bottom of the screen telling you what percentage of people are confessing to what, and even one saying “we’ve had a few murder confessions… we hope you were kidding.”

Anyway, another fun viral web campaign made possible with Flash. Oh yeah, and its good clean fun (har har).