I’m pleased to formally announce the relaunch of my portfolio at www.agitcraft.com. It’s been a long,  winding, mostly poorly organized effort on my part consisting of numerous missteps and restarts. I’ve technically been working on this iteration of the site for about 4 months (from scratch), although I’ve been grinding away at redesign efforts both with this domain and with my previous portfolio at altpixel.net for well over two years now. To give you a vague idea of how long this has been brewing, the svn I’ve been working out of is currently in revision 381 after going through at least 4 branches, and I’m the only person developing this.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due:

• Jack Doyle for the greensock tweening platform (which makes all the animation in the site possible), without which I’m sure I would have gone crazy long ago.
• The entire Papervision3d team for their excellent 3D package, which powers the 3D “solar system” motif that I use to display my interface.
• The team of developers who’ve thus far worked on as3syndicationlib. There were a couple issues I ran into, but they were minor in the long run and they certainly don’t take away from the fact that I was able to parse and consolidate 5 feeds in real time with only a few lines of code. Awesome!
• The developers of PureMVC, for making a framework that has literally changed the way that I work on large projects and made my site possible.
• Matt McInerny at the League of Movable Type for providing the fantastic “Raleway” typeface I’m using both in my logo and for section headers.
• An anonymous sound fx provider at flashkit.com for providing the ominous intro tune that plays when the site loads. I say anonymous because I was inattentive when I grabbed the audio and forgot to take note of the name/location of the file I snagged. I dug around today but could not, for the life of me, find the file on there. If anybody recognizes it let me know and I’ll give a proper shout out.

The wealth of libraries and tools freely available is part of what makes Flash such an exciting platform to develop for. I certainly could not have completed a project of this scale without them.

Anyway, if you like the site let other people see it. If you have problems with it let me know. I’m hoping this remains a growing work rather than a one-off showpiece.

Today TechCrunch posted an image of the poster for the upcoming film about facebook entitled “The Social Network.” Now, I’m not posting this because I’m even remotely intrigued by the idea of a film about Mark Zuckerberg, but rather because the poster seemed very familiar to me. Check it out below:

Nice, right? Now check out the cover to the Criterion edition of Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (starring David Bowie!).

This is pretty obvious, isn’t it? With the exception of the browser bar overlaid on the right of the poster for “The Social Network,” and the slight difference in typography, these are practically the same composition. For my part, I prefer both the typeface and the quality of the photography in the Bowie cover. I don’t know that I care for the “washed out” look of the Zuckerberg cover. Here’s a side-by-side comparison to assist. Bowie is on the left (I hope that’s obvious) and Zuckerberg is on the right.

I’ve always loved the original cover, and I’m glad to see that other people (clearly) do too.

My App Icon

I spent a little bit of time developing the icon for my first publicly released AIR application. I’m not telling what it does yet, but hopefully I’ll be offering up the first version of it some time soon. What do you think?