This past holiday weekend was fun, relaxing, and productive. Erin and I got to see a lot of our friends at various barbecues, pool parties and shows, spent some quality time together while fishing in the Wissahickon, and rearranged furniture in the house, forcing us to clean out and throw out!

We both love furniture and are moderate pack-rats but rooms were getting cluttered and floor space becoming labyrinths. We decided to take two large wood chairs to the garage for storage and our TV was moved from its emphasized placement on a long table in front of a large open wall, to a smaller adapted piece of furniture from the dining room in a corner next to our technology closet (the one with modems, routers, printer, all that clutter of cables that can easily be hidden by closing the closet door). We then moved the tall, heavy bookcase, which I made out of wooden beams, from the dining room to the open area where the TV was, completing the living room and leaving it with much better dynamics and floor space. In place of the bookcase in the dining room, we mounted our newly acquired red cabinet/curio, which came from an old pool-hall, finally giving us a place to exhibit our various fossils, rocks, and other natural global findings and again opening up our floorspace. The results were rewarding and brought renewed energy to our house and our presence within it.

With the holiday weekend behind us, I’m excited to get back to the work at-hand at DDA. A number of projects in the forms of interactive websites, medical CMEs, virtual simulations, 3D animations, and promotional videos continue down the production line, meticulously being designed, programmed, modeled, animated or edited. My focus is geared towards programming an extensive image library containing over 2,000 entries. Just like the cleaning and re-arranging of my house this past weekend, the code in the tool needs to be clean and free of clutter to function as efficiently as possible and provide the user with the best user experience each time they return to the tool.

It’s been a busy weekend for DDA Studios (including last Friday) and the business continues for the better part of this week. Last Friday we had an in-studio videoshoot that lasted all morning into the middle of the afternoon. The shoot consisted of conversations between two parents and two pediatric experts.

The setup involved a lot of green chroma key fabric to cover the background of shots from three different angles. In post-production, we’ll key out the green-screen and replace the background with views of a pediatrician’s office and exam room, customized and rendered in 3D. The videos will then be programmed into an online interactive user interface so users can quickly and easily navigate to a particular topic in the conversation.

On Sunday our photography crew went on-location to shoot models in medical office settings. The photo-shoot continues today, in-studio through Wednesday. For the in-studio shoots, we’re also using green-screen technology to place the models into various modern and customized 3D environments rendered with super realistic lighting and detail. So, let’s get the lights fired up and start snapping!

As I loaded a movie onto my iPhone last night in preparation for my elliptical run entertainment, iTunes informed me of an available update for my iPhone, iOS4! I wasn’t expecting it to be released until the new iPhone4 starts shipping but apparently iOS4 was released yesterday. So, I ended up running entertainment-less while my phone went through its updating procedure through the evening, into the night and until the wee hours of the morning while I slept. Yes, there are a ton of complaints already about the hours long procedure. I tested it out this morning while having breakfast, discovering it’s new features and those which weren’t made available to my iPhone3G. I can’t say I was blown away by anything or surprised, but I guess that will happen when the iPhone4 arrives.

Disappointingly, my topic yesterday of the embedded video playback in the Safari browser didn’t come to fruition. Although it may still be a feature with the iPhone4, with it’s faster processor and more RAM, there’s still an issue of bandwidth. With AT&T charging for bandwidth usage, users need to initiate an action that might start the transfer of a lot of data. This would obviously avoid any unintentional data transfer that could result in really high bills! Ideally, Safari should be able to detect if the user is on Wi-Fi or not and play the video accordingly. Oh, if only.

As new products and updated operating systems roll out in the growing mobile device industry, DDA stays informed and adapts to the changes that arise. Our latest department, AppleSAVVY, is all about making websites that have functionality issue with the iPhone and iPad more friendly. Flash, unfortunately, isn’t an option but thanks to CSS, Javascript and emerging html5, other options are available for interactivity websites and animation. Website videos also needs to be formatted appropriately. With this comes all sorts of other hurdles such as browser incompatibilities, but we’re sure to build wisely and test thoroughly.