Minty Hunter

In case you weren't aware, this month is officially Movember. It's all about men's health, so at the excellent urging of the might Karl, we're jumping on board and have made ourselves all sparkly smooth in preparation for the month-long slide into rampant 70's style moustache madness.

I know I've posted this a bit late, but whether you be a Mo-Bro or a Mo-Sista, we salute you!

(I probably could have smiled in the photo, but hey, I'm a very serious dude. And I'm deeply contemplating the quandary that if I do manage to grow any sort of mo, it'll probably look like some sleazy porn-star job, and will have a largely deleterious effect on my love-life. That in turn will impact my mental health, so we return again to Newton's third law. Sigh. It's amazing I don't look more distraught!)

Hey, this actually happened at Nectarine! And to our good friend Jack Curry, although to protect his identity we've called him 'Phil' in this strip. We're discrete like that...

Thanks to the translation efforts of Erko Bridee of PortalJava.com, the first three Barely Out Of Beta strips are now available in Brazilian Portuguese!

Barely Out Of Beta 1 & 2- Brazilian Portuguese
Barely Out Of Beta 3 - Brazilian Portuguese

If you've got hankering to bring our strips into your language, and think you can make tricky stuff like acronym jokes survive translation, then drop me a line: minty{at}nectarine.com.au.

Adeus, meus amigos!

A fresh and purty new Barely Out Of Beta for your edification, topped with our tasty new title treatment:



(For those of you from out of town and wondering about the title of this particular strip, iHug is a NZ/AU ISP. How hilarious are we, huh?)

Having (for the moment!) mined the RIA gag for as much as we can, we'll be moving on to other aspects of the great and glorious Rich Media Industry. Hey, wait, that's RMI. Wow! All right, from now on, when people ask me what I do, I'm telling them I'm "in the Army". Check out my G.I Joe Kung-fu grip!

But seriously, if you were thinking "Hey, do these guys only have one idea?", then ponder no more. We've got at least two or three others. Some of them are even good.

And we're even looking into one of those domain name thingies and a site for Barely Out Of Beta. We've heard they can be quite useful.

Okay, I know I said it'd be a week before we'd have the next strip out, but given the overwhelming demand by our fans (hi Mum!), we've leapt into number two.

Hmmm, that sounded bad. Suffice to say, we've done another comic strip.

WARNING: If you didn't see the first Barely Out Of Beta then this won't make a lick of sense. But hey, maybe you like living in a mysterious universe- it's up to you.





(I was really tempted to have a ragged little voice at the end, coming out of the fight, saying "Did someone mention ten dollars?". But comics are about distilling down to the essence of joke, and you only have so much room. So I didn't push Steve to shove yet another bloody balloon over his gorgeous artwork.)

We realise there's only so many RIA acronym gags you can make before people, well, gag (and believe me, we still had heaps more!). So you'll be pleased to know that soon we'll be taking potshots at others areas of this great, wide development landscape...

Here at our Nectarine bat-cave, as well as being code geeks, we're animators and therefore huge fans of a wide variety of comic strips. We've been meaning to do our own one for ages, and finally, after some inspiring barracking from Scott Barnes, we have lift off!

Presenting the very first "Barely Out Of Beta" strip:





And yes, something like this really did happen at Web On The Piste. You know you should have been there...

Anyway, love it or hate, we're happy to hear your opinion. And there'll be a fresh new one next week! Woot!

Well, I'm back from a glorious week in Queenstown and trying to come back down to reality.

Web On The Piste featured fantastic speaker sessions, Adobe and Microsoft showing off their latest wares, and a whole bunch of cutting-edge geeks chatting about life, death, RIAs, boardgames, the web and interesting combinations of alcohol. Oh, and then there was the little matter of a smidgen of skiing and boarding. If you didn't make it this year, you'll want to start your preparations for next year now! It was brilliant.

And, naturally, so were our animations (admittedly, modesty was never our strong suit). If you're keen to catch a little taste of what went down at WOTP, then toodle along here.

Finally, if you were one of those 'secret society of lapsed or active board-gamers' that I chatted to, and you're ever in the Wairarapa, make sure you swing past All Aboard in Featherston, and chat to Robyn and Graham about their astonishing selection of games. Then wander on down the road to Carterton and I'll rope you in for some Settlers, or Reiner's LOTR, or Nexus Ops, or Bohnanza or... hell, I'm buying another set of shelves, so you name and I'll probably have it :)

Okay, so that title sounds all Anthony Robbins, but stick with us: we really have found the guaranteed way to get your dream job. I'll get to the precise solution in a moment, but I need a momentary digression to set the scene.

Mum always said working really hard makes you see things that aren't there, and it's much better to start the day with a Japanese Slipper (the cocktail, you fools!) and just ease into things. Or was it the other way around?

Fact is, it's a mad house here at Nectarine. In a good way: we’re extremely busy but we work for clients so nice and lovely we want to take them home and feed them Japanese slippers (..must…stop…now…)

Happily we have found some great new and renewed Nectarinos in the form of Luke and Matthew, stars at coding and animation.

But - and feel free to whistle the twilight zone tune here - we also added a new member of staff without knowing it. That’s right – we’re way past that old fashioned stuff of hiring our people and knowing who works for us.

Even better, this person has apparently even been the lead here at Nectarine and we don’t even know what he looks like or if he can count to ten. (Which is a bit odd, because being incredibly handsome, smart, sexually dynamite and largely modest is usually a prerequisite for that kind of role here at Nectarine.) Are we slowly going insane getting more insane?

Check out this screen shot from NewGrounds where 'Jack Currie', also known as Generate, is posing as a member of Nectarine and creator of our glorious Flash animations! (We'd love to point you to the original site, but it got pulled by NewGrounds excellent admin, Tom Fulp).


So Generate has stolen our animations, created a whole persona and work history, and begun some fictional merger between 'NectarineInc' and 'Generate'. He has hundreds of reviews and votes for our animations and even a couple of NewGrounds awards! Reading through the various posts (before the account was pulled) was very weird; it was like entering into Bizarro World!

Here's Jack Currie's rip-off of our bios, replete with spelling mistakes, lack of punctuation and bad grammar:



Even though he was ripping all our animation and claiming it as his own, we do see the funny side, and imitation is next to godliness (did I get that right?). But one downside to all this is that 'Jack' was using Nectarine cred to solicit free work by unwary Flash folk for his Generate company. Bad Jack, bad!

Anyway, there you have it. If you've got a dream job you're after, don't go through all the hassle of applying for the position. Make it up! It's a virtual world- get virtually hired!

Postscript:
He's a busy one, that Jack. He's got himself into FlashRing.com too.

If you have any Jack/Generate/NectarineInc sightings, let us know!

Our great, glorious (and now in-need-of-an-update-due-to-CS3) animation detailing the shocking and almost true history of Flash just picked up the Netizen's Award at SICAF (Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival).

I'm not sure if that makes us the winners of Korean Internet Idol, but I'm sure that all the great netizens of that fine land wanted to show their love not only by voting, but with generous donations of cash.

Unfortunately, the payment system wasn't ready to go at the time of the competition, but never fear, our fine Asian mates- you can send any amount of moolah directly to us, and we promise to spend it. (Well, first we'd pool all the Won together until we were mmmmmmwaahahhhha BILLIONAIRES - not quite as impressive as it may at first seen, given the exchange rate, but nothing we'd sneer at.)

Anyway, can you believe the cool award? I have to admit, it does put me in mind of a very cute version of the "Ship-It" awards in Douglas Coupland's seminal "Microserfs" (and, I guess, real life at Micro$oft).

We've now also been invited to a Chinese Animation festival. At this rate, Flash 10 will be storming across the great Asian continent like Sun Tzu on a particularly grumpy day... onwards to more awards!

I'm feeling all "lady-friend of Chef from South Park" after reading Tim Buntel's post; it's full of chocolate covered lovin'! He does need a quick smack, though, for his mis-spelling of 'thier'; it's that kind of lack of attention to detail that leads to far too many incidents of builder's crack exposure in this world.

And hey, we've been bootlegged on YouTube! This internet thingy is almost like some big, mass-connected web of content...

So if you've been wondering about the true power of Scorpio, head over to Tim's blog and pick your poision: YouTube shaky-cam live-performance with real laughter, or pristine Flash video without a laugh track.

Hmmm. Laugh track. Maybe we need one of those- it worked for Different Strokes and Family Ties...

As we all know, the total is often greater than the sum of its parts. And where is this more apparent than the Wonder-Twin-like power combination of Mike Chambers and Mike Downey?

Racing across the planet like some force of Flash-weilding nature, they bring happiness and joy to all the little children of the world, showering them with presents and devouring untold gallons of milk and metric tonnes of biscuits, only then to fly back to the North Pole- no, wait, that's Santa. But the comparison is in many ways apt, because who would deny that AS3 made all our Christmases come at once?

Alright, enough slavish fan-drooling; get thee away to view the animation that is Mike Squared.

In the great tradition of truth in advertising, we present one more animation from the fabulous WebDU 2007 conference. So if you want to be faster, stronger and cooooooler, check it out. Ahhhh, Flashlites!

Would we lie to you?

We take the piss out of Flash and Flex this time with two more animations from the WebDU 2007 conference!

So if you've been eating too many carrots recently, check out the sugary goodness of FlashOs!

And you Flex users- are you men or mice? Hard core coders or scaredy little kittens? Our animated Flex program will put you on the ROAD TO SUCCESS! You can do it!

Standard warning applies: the animations contain humour and parody. For some viewers, this may cause stress, tension, outrage and wild geese attacks. View with care!

And always end every paragraph with an exclamation mark! Or two!! Or three!!! Or (please make it stop) four!!!!

Ahem. Of course, my carefully checked post was missing only one thing: a link to the animations.

So, once more with feeling: here are the first two WebDU 2007 animations.

Alright, I'm off to have a little lie down until my brain begins functioning some level beyond merely sustaining my autonomous functions...

Due to overwhelming demand (mostly by our mums), we've just uploaded the first couple of animations from the great WebDU 2007 conference.

Once we've got the rest web-optimised, we'll stick them up too, so watch this space,or sign up to our mailing list to stay in the loop.

WebDU was too much fun. Fab people, brilliant sessions, Kath and Kim impersonators, and endless white-chocolate éclairs. Mmmmm-yummy!