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North-American studio Firstborn releases their new portfolio, not only showcasing 10 years of a great collection of websites developed but also showing how Flash can be integrated with the browser to allow full history navigation and bookmarking. The result’s pretty good, and a website worth exploring.

Also, apparently they’re still looking for people to join their ranks on their New York and Los Angeles offices, so if anyone’s interested, here’s my recommendation of a great company to work at.

Keita-kun – my favorite japanese-speaking person that I can actually understand – has just debuted his first major work for NON-GRID: the website for the REC YOU campaign. It’s a website for the new Sony Walkman, showing features of the walkman, attempting to show that it can do pretty much everything. It’s all in japanese, but pretty easy to navigate as there’s english cues on all menu items.

The fun part is that anyone can upload his/her own picture (“S” section of the menu) and have their own pictures synced to the music being played on the background. While some of the coolness of the campaign is lost in the (lack of) translation, it’s an eerie experience and an awesome website.

What a load of news on the past few days, uh? I mean, Apollo is now AIR, a new beta version of the Flash Player includes plenty of goodness (including mip map support when resizing images, goodbye Moiré effects!), Apple presents a lot of stuff (including a glimpse of id Software’s next project!)… exciting times.

I’ve also been busy as hell lately (hence why I haven’t posted so much). So as I do once in a while, I’d like to show you the final product of those long hours.

Still Alive is a website the company I freelance for (Gringo.nu) has built for Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, a metal and mining company. Despite being a big client and all that, it’s a playful website, meant to teach people about some of the company’s reforestation projects. It’s also designed by Victor Sahate and developed by me.

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The Gringo studio has a new website; check it out here (now a real portfolio, instead of a joke). The flash piece was procuded by Arthur Debert and Gabriel Laet, both from Gringo, and I helped creating some of the small website previews.

Gringo is a web development studio located in São Paulo, Brazil. With only one year of existence, it’s already one of the coolest studios in the country, and in the world, in my opinion. It’s also the company I’m doing most of my freelance work nowadays. They have some pretty nice projects created, so check them out and remember their name.

Well, here it is: the third version of this blog. The first one was done with MovableType; then I moved it to WordPress; and now, I’m still using WordPress, but created a new template and moved it to a new location.

In fact, it’s not as if I changed the site, but rather it was engulfed by my new website – labs.zeh.com.br, the place where I’ll be putting all my non-commercial projects from now on (instead of scattering it around other websites).

One thing I should say is that, although I don’t work much with HTML nowadays – I do use it, but of course 90% of my work revolves around Flash – I decided I finally wanted to make a website that was pure CSS, using all that new, shiny tableless-jingaling-Web 2.0 stuff you can think of. Just to be cool, you know. So I’ve done a simple layout on Photoshop, and when I started cutting it and getting it to HTML, CSS simply couldn’t do it. I had a fixed width column (on the center) and some liquid columns (on the sides) that I needed to properly align the background the way I wanted, and all sorts of hacks and column layouts and holy grails in CSS couldn’t even begin to make it work the way I wanted (same height, the liquid columns to have a properly aligned background, etc). The only way to do it was with some huge CSS hacks, including a lot of scripting. A real mess.

Using tables, I could do that with no sweat at all. Just one single table row, no hacks, and it would be compatible with all browsers.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally dig using styles, I’ve been using it since day one, but is that the advantage of tableless, CSS layout? Having so much work for something that I could otherwise make in around 10 seconds?

Anyway, I ended up tired of that all and instead of giving up and using tables (like I did in the past) I gave up and built an extremely simple website instead — which is, well, this one. Featuring CSS styles and three image files only. It works and it’s efficient enough. Less is more.

Is the morale of your office’s team down due to your boss’ inability to lead? Is he a dick when it comes to managing projects or being reasonable? When that happens, most employees just go to a bar where they can drink to their anger while they tell everybody – usually fellow employees – how much their boss sucks. But now you can make an anonymous video and send it to your boss – with complaints from all the team members, such as the programmer, the webdesigners and the account manager – by way of the Middle Finger Pub, Gringo.nu’s debut website.

This Flash website was developed in around a month and, to me, it’s a fine example of something that we will see a lot more in the future in Flash 8 websites – special effects. Sure, we’ve seen all kinds of crazy tricks done on Flash interfaces, but I believe that right now, due to the new Flash 8 features (specially BitmapData) we’re getting to a state where the question is not whether Flash can do something or not, then use it on the entire navigation concept, but whether if the developer can do it or not (or if he has the time to do it); it’s moving the limits further away from the boundaries of the tool features and more to the limits of the developer knowledge or time spent on visual gimmicks.

In concept, the Middle Finger Pub is a simple website – select some videos, sort them out, preview them, and send them away. However, time has been invested in making some of the interface elements a bit better visually, be it with the pseudo-3d video selection cylinder, or with the animation of placing the video on the list that emulates OSX’s genie effect (which I hope doesn’t make Apple sue us since it’s just a parody).

In the end, the new features in Flash 8 do help a lot in current development – I must have used the BitmapData class for just about everything on that site – but it’s in creating new stuff on something that otherwise could be pretty plain (and still work well) that I think the term special effects fits best; programmatical makeup of sorts, but one that can help on many visual-driven websites.

Well, it has begun. Apparently, we don’t even need the good news that Flash Player 8 adoption has been faster than all other versions: just a mention of some of the new features (specially related to video and the new express install) was enough to convince the client that Flash 8 was the better option.

The result is Bossa Nova Film’s new website (in both english and brazilian portuguese) – designed by the fine folks from Grafikonstruct then assembled/coded by me using Flash 8. And here’s a warning (if you’re at work and use speakers): the site contains some small sound on the language selection menu, when selecting areas from the main menu, and when playing video.

Apart from the superior video quality and express installation, a few of the other new features make their appearance on this work too: blurring on a few transitions, subtle motion blurring when moving blocks of text (both using MC Tween), duplicating loaded images (with the new BitmapData class), and superior text quality thanks to the new font rendering engine (the submenus look so crisp now – you had to see them on previous versions of Flash).

So yeah, it kicks ass. While there’s always the occasional gig that has to be done on some previous version – like ads – I can honestly say I’m pretty comfortable in never looking back anymore.

Okey, it’s finally online, public, and on a more-or-less stable state: the Online Gaming Zeitgeist.

What this site does is gather the number of players online for several first-person shooters games through GameSpy’s stats page and save them to a database. Later, it creates some graphs showing the fluctuation of players from one game to another. It’s something simple I did to learn a bit more of PHP, but I think the end result is cool enough. In one or two years, it’ll be nice to look at it and recall the rise and fall of some games’ online presence.