RIP Paul Hester

This morning I learned the devastating news that Paul Hester, drummer for Crowded House and Split Enz, took his own life over the Easter weekend. Paul was probably at the top of my "Who influenced your music the most?" list (along with Neil Finn and Crowded House in general). I never got to meet him in person, but saw him play a number of times and always regarded him as the drummer I wished I could be.

"Don't Dream It's Over" was the song that made me want to be in a 3-piece band, and strip back from the big rock 5-6 piece bands I had been playing in up until that point (and I joined "Pale" not long after that). It was also the start of a long period of my life where Crowded House and Paul's playing would influence my life and music in many ways.

I can't believe he's gone. For me, it's the Kurt Cobain of the 2000's. It's funny that you feel so incredibily sad for people that you actually never really knew, but with musicians and performers, you always feel like you do because they're out there on the stage giving up a piece of themselves to you. When I used to watch him play, I would imagine myself up there in his place - laying down simple but clever beats for Neil and Nick. But his wit from behind the drumkit is something I never thought of trying to replicate - he was in a space all his own there, mixing his natural percussive talent with a humour that made a live Crowded House show something personal for everyone.

I loved that in amongst the genius of Neil Finn, he had the courage to write his own material and that the guys even recorded and released them. "Italian Plastic" from the Woodface album was a piece of art that was quite different from your usual CH track (but so was the whole Woodface album really), and showed a glimpse of the talent of man behind the skins.

So Paul, I honestly don't know where you are right now, but I hope to finally meet you one day mate.

Whack Attack on Macromedia Exchange

Further to our last post, "Whack Attack" is now available through the Macromedia Flash Lite Exchange. Thanks to Bill Perry for also listing it in the "Our Picks" category :)

Download Whack Attack from the Flash Lite Exchange here

While you're there, check out some of the other great mobile apps that are being published. Fav game of mine right now is Go Sushi from Blue Sky North - love ya work boys.

Whack Attack is here

Part of the MXDU Mobile Flash Lite we built recently was a stress relief game called "Whack Attack". If you remember the good ol' days of video game and entertainment arcades back in the eighties (remember TOPS in the Myer Centre in Brisbane ... anyone ... Bueller?), you'll remember the "whack-a-mole" games where you beat the crap out of little furry puppets with your nerf bat when they popped out from holes ... ahh those were the days!

Well now relive those days on your Symbian Series 60, Flash enabled mobile phone!

Download Whack Attack here, or if you don't have the Flash Player on your phone yet, go to the MM online store here.

This is the first of a series of public release Flash Lite applications we have planned, all leading up to the new announcement of something new from DRD in the mobile space... stay tuned :)

Whack on!

Alert over mobile content war

A very interesting development in the burgeoning (spelling?) mobile space in Australia. I was just speaking with another MD this week abut the future poential of mobile devices, and the main thing he could see was that it was the content providers who would make the most money. Well with the storm brewing over exclusive rights to mobile (and internet) content, it'll be interesting to see if in fact it's not still the telcos who basically win at the end of the day ... again. Read more.

MXDU Mobile goes OS

News of our MXDU Mobile Flash Lite app has reached the far shores of Atlanta, USA - home to Jesse Warden (another MXDU-ite), and his good pal Michael Hagel. Michael's an active member of the Flash community in Atlanta, and I've been swapping emails with him lately after he got wind of what we'd done at MXDU. He's busy developing a conference guide for the very cool South by South West (SXSW) Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. Michael's done some very cool work for cool companies, which you can check out at http://www.michaelhagel.com/ so it's great to join him and other Flash Lite developers around in helping to excite and extend ideas in this little niche area of Flash development.

Chinese proverb

The hotel where I'm staying in Sydney is right on the edge of Chinatown, so I ducked out for some good Chinese for dinner. Didn't find it in the restaurant I ended up at unfortunately. There was this old Chinese waiter guy, who literally stood beside my table (and th table of others close by to me) and watched us all eat our meals. As soon as we had finished with a glass, bowl, plate, prawn ... he snatched it away to clear things off and then come back and wait for the next bit ...

Anyway, he left me with an interesting fortune cookie, which read, "The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up". Interesting... if you're going to fail, hurry up and do it quickly so that there's plenty of time to get back up and keep going. If you fail at the last minute, there's no time left to redeem yourself. Funny that I'm down here early because of some issues the client was having with the application befire the launch event on Wednesday! I hope that I've already fallen behind and that there's no catching up to do before we get a room full of Sydney business people together to show them how good this thing is :) Time will tell.

Heading back to Sydney

Well it seems I can't get enough of Sydney this year! I'm heading back down again this week to be part of the launch of the St George Bank Flash Com application we developed, and hopefully I'll have some time to catch up with some people I met at MXDU.

Launches are always nervous times, for both the client and the developer, so I'm going down with plenty of time to make sure everything is running well and as it should.

Been getting some great correspondance from some fellow Flash developers OS which has been great. Looking forward to growing the Flash Lite community with those others of us around the world who think "mobile" is going to be huge :)

And on a non-web front, the AFL season is only weeks away from starting! Whoo! Go the Lions! My North Melbourne mate and his boys are already gearing up for a big season, and I'm hoping the year for Brisbane is as bright as it has been for the past 4. Must try and make it to more games this year!

More from Sydney soon ...