The story begins with me having a small problem with my American Express card so I called their customer service to fix it. I have talked for a couple of minutes with some very nice guy there trying to help me and he needed to put me on hold to find out something from one of their department. And then it happened.

The “elevator music”, the dreadful “on hold – wait for us” music was actually a very nice surprise for me – Van Halen. I was literally blown away. This was the best experience ever I’ve had staying on hold on a phone.

And then I thought, I am a rock fan and that music was a perfect match for me. I could have stayed without problem half an hour at the phone listening to rock. What if everybody that is placed on hold on the phone could benefit from the same experience? What if the customer service from each company could benefit from having my profile and target me with a better selection of music?

I know that what happened to me was just pure luck (on my side) but it definitely created a positive impression on my side for the American Express company. Translate this to the thousands customer that call them each day and that can be quite beneficial for their business IF they could target even 50% of the calls and provide the right music.

Omniture Test&Target for Flash Professional CS5 – how-to in images.

Campaign with three experiences.

Having this place to start from, what it remains is to add an external image to the flash and to create variations for this image. To add an external image to your file just go in the Components panel and drag a UILoader to the stage.

Add an UILoader to the stage.

To actually add the external image to the stage, just go into the Properties panel and change the source property to point to an image. I have used as source an image from my previous article.

Add a source for UILoader.

The next thing to do is to add the UILoader to the campaign an create variations for this image. For that, just select the component on the stage and press the Include button. You can see now in the panel the image being part of all experiences.

Include the UILoader to flashbox.

Previewing the experiences will render the same external image for all of them. You will need to create now the variations for each of the experiences. The process simple. Open the symbol created for the UILoader when it was included into the flashbox (double click on it) and change the source property for each of the experiences. When previewing each experience you should be able to see each different image.

All three experiences have different images.

The UILoader is not restricted however just to images, you can also load other SWFs.

Lemmings vs. Predator

of course after this we’ve started to let our mind run wild thinking about scenarios for this game. Lemmings will have to escape from an alien infested extraterrestrial base. You will also have 2 very powerful weapons: two “sigourney weaver”s  that lemmings will be able to use at any time to get out of a tight situation. However bonus points will be rewarded for each sigourney weaver you have at the end of the game. Great multi-player capabilities

Another possible title: Aladdin and the enchanted Terminator. Aladdin rubs magic iLamp to bring our the enchanted Terminator, something like T-X v2.0.

After a sudden surge in traffic yesterday to my blog, I have found the culprit: 64 high-ranked blogs for developers.

Thank you.

It is a very funny episode on http://www.pidjin.net

mocking the marketing power of Apple (we have to admit it, they are goooood).

Do not worry, Gugustuck dies often, is an aviary version of Kenny.

This links have brought also some comments for my articles. Some of them were good some were spam. Most of them were in Cyrillic. Due to my 3 years of learning Russian in school (let’s not forget Romania was under communism for quite a while and a good friend of Russia) I can still understand the alphabet. That doesn’t mean I can understand what is saying in a comment but most of the time I can figure out if it is a spam. However I decided not to allow any comment written using the Cyrillic alphabet or even not written in English.

You have my apologies if I deleted your valid comment but this is an English (or at least as English as I can write ) blog. Please write your comments in English.

We are using more and more paper per person every day but also we are using less and less paper every day. How comes that? Well we are using more and more paper and more and more trees are cut to produce that paper. We are reading more newspapers and magazines, everything we buy is packaged in paper, we even take our groceries back home in paper bags.

On the other hand more and more information is available in electronic format. I read less and less things on paper, most of the information I acquire is coming from the web or emails or different documents.

How big was the impact of web on our forests? I guess nobody ever calculated that. Nobody calculated how many trees were saved because we are using PDF documents to pass around information this days. If I print all the documents stored on my computer I will consume maybe 100kg of paper (and I was shy with this estimate). So in that respect the Internet might be one of the most environment friendly structure/entity on the planet.

P.S. to bad Internet needs electricity to run