(v)
(v_i)
(version_industries)

recently we decided to revisit one of our first websites and revamp it a bit. it’s a site that continues to attract people’s attention and represented, back then, our first truly experimental work. we were given carte blanche to make the site any way we wanted, and in our miserable, dank, little east-london bedrooms, it meant a great deal to us to finally be able to prove our worth.

that said, we believe hugely in the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ dogma and so have made the following respectful list of subtle changes to the site that we feel were only necessary to keep it breathing and satisfying its users.

1. actionscript 3 codebase
2. xml driven content
3. h264 video
4. additional ‘water colour’ interactive ‘sketch book’
5. full screen functionality
6. UI speed increase
7. new backdrop ‘studio photos’
8. higher quality exports of ‘day’ and ‘night’ short films

we hope, if you were a fan before, that you enjoy the upgrade. for those of you who’ve never seen the site before, we hope it finds a new and satisfied audience, and of course does a handsome job of introducing you to the artist’s work.

thomasnewbolt.com

this could be something of a game-changer: flash cs5 will have an option to export your apps natively to the iphone. keyword there is ‘native’: as the proponents of c64 emulation know well, apple doesn’t permit 3rd party runtimes on the phone. more detail on the compiler changes is available here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html

at the same time they’ve opened up flash partnerships with, well, pretty much every single other mobile handset creator to bring flash to their web capabilities. so to sum up – everyone gets flash on the web except apple, who instead get their app environment opened up to a legion of as3 coders who, for one reason or another, can’t or won’t learn cocoa. personally i think apple have the best of it – i’ve yet to see a compelling use case for flash on mobile devices, especially when you have apps which can do pretty much anything a desktop app can anyway, but time will tell.

lucky pierre music just emerged again for the first time in 5 years. the last time it was around we were just fans of the music they had under their umbrella, this time we had a small hand in heralding their return.

so what’s the story? well, where to even start?

back when everything seemed to matter more, everyone at (v) got into a band called PRICK. we found the band originally because they were on nothing records, like so many other great bands back then. however what made PRICK particularly unique were the unusually crazed vocals and complex lyrical play of their mastermind, kevin mcmahon. a man, we soon discovered, that had a much larger and even more remarkable musical body of work than we could have imagined. with record releases dating back to the late 1970s, it turns out kevin’s musical scope and lyrical imagination was simply vast. in fact so beguiling and intriguing was it, that we flew from london in 2003 to see a rare performance by PRICK in their home town. since then have devoured every rare recording, morsel of news and rumor surrounding kevin’s extremely sparse and mysterious output of work. nothing like being into a cult band that always delivers, huh.

long story short, that was 6 years ago. today version industries are very proud to present the online music store for the entirety if kevin mcmahon’s body of work spanning from the late 70s to the present day, be it PRICK, lucky pierre, (sic) or fear of blue :

store.luckypierremusic.com

customized, reskinned and built with love for a guy who’s work’s kept us company in the studio since the very beginning, we hope you enjoy digging around and taking a good listen to the samples you find. we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure you can get the music in mp3 and FLAC as well as obtain physical copies of the releases. it should be a treat for newcomers and older fans alike.

before you do that though, take a listen to this song:

don’t say maybe, (lucky pierre, late 70s)

and watch this video:

attitude
from poortraits of thinking (released 2010)

both should give you a good idea of what it is we do so love about this man’s work. there really is nothing quite like it in the grand scheme of things. enjoy.

so who doesn’t enjoy particles or ironman. we enjoy both and here is a fun little gadget that combines the two, so click around to your hearts content. start clicking, and maybe some holding.

another experiment using the first playground entry to animate album artwork. this one includes a song (might take some time to load it) and animates the equalizer right into the artwork.?check it out and select your favorite artwork. again, mouse-overs create even more effects.

one of the reasons we’ve started a blog is that we’ve reopened the playground (v). as such you can look forward to all kinds of (useless) pieces of code, graphics, animations and other fun stuff. the first is?a little flash experiment codenamed ‘ballgrid’. this thing was made in order to get used to Flash’s all new AS3 language and i tried to play around with coded kinetics applied to a bunch of randomly created balls in a grid. please mouse-over for some action, or don’t… for some other action.