So I’m on about pushing these skills and broadening myself in new ways…and I’ve come across a thought. Actually this has spawned from a comment just made about my new as3 interactive piece; highlighting that it “needs colour!”.

You know what, I absolutely agree, and this is the thing. Ever since I can remember; A-Level, GCSE, Year 2, before that even, I’ve always worked with pencils and charcoal as mediums of choice in my art. Everything was very dark, subtle, discreet and overall pretty darn grayscale :-S.

It seems like this influence is still taking an affect on my work and I think its about time I experimented with different visual mediums/theory/techniques, whatever you want to call it - and added some colour!!!!

Recently I’ve been quite heavily engaged with the things I’d like to be doing. The things I’d like to get my teeth into, explore and all out consume! To list a few :-S

• The words ‘Ruby’ and  ‘Rails’ have been idling on my dashboard stickies for some months with the intention of exploring what everyone seems to swear by and recommend. Well, I got around to doing a bit of research last night and came acorss this: http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov. I’ll just say that this mov did it all! - The title of this post echoed nicely in conjunction with my intended point! - Well, well! worth a look for anyone interested as a very quick-fire, almost comical route to web development.
• As mentioned before I’m really getting into the AS3 side of creative development, and have felt myself being drawn to API’s such as flickr, youtube, facebook, and even google. - Luckily these are things I hope to incorporate into my final projects this term so I’ll get around to these in the near future.
• I’m a grand fan of php myself as my lang/tool of choice, however I must get to grips with the OO side of this alongside Smarty as a way of pushing this skill and developing my own library/system…..that would be swell.
• Second to last is the exploration of AJAX, which will hopefully come hand-in-hand with either the push of OOP PHP / Ruby on Rails.
• I was going to mention Flex and AIR, but yea….I’ll keep them on the burner for now
• Of course, the list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the iphone’s SDK! and so once I get my hands on an iphone I’m all over this. I guess this spawns learning Cocoa and everything attached to it too so this is one I’m really looking forward to.

I’ve recently just got back from NYC, and my first visit to the states. So I just thought I’d post up one of my flicks from the towering peak that is the Rockerfeller building. Such awe.

Of course, I couldn’t be tempted away from the 5th Ave Apple store either.

I look forward to returning in the near future, perhaps for an end of degree trip away to soak up the more cultural vibrancy of the city, but we’ll see.