The past few weeks has been background layouts and animation keys. The movie is taking form and shaping up nicely. I've been working on a nushift.net redesign which will lend itself to robiety.com. While that's going on, I plan to do some color tests this weekend to see what style is best suited for the film.

At SXSW this year, we had the pleasure of interviewing a stellar group of people. We asked our interviewees to tell us a little bit about themselves, what Citrix products they use, how they stay connected while traveling, their favorite travel tips and gadgets and their favorite SXSW memory. We are delighted that we were able to capture these insights from a few of the most influential people in the social media industry. Check out the interviews below, featuring Lewis Howes, author and founder of the Sports Executive Association and Jason Sadler, founder of I Wear Your Shirt, an advertising company that uses T-shirts to advertise businesses. Check out our other SXSW interviews here, including Amber Naslund, Aaron Strout, Adam Keats, AJ Leon, C.C. Chapman, Howard Greenstein and Steve Garfield.

I've been long past due for a progress update. This past week I've been designing and modeling the city of where the story takes place. It's not totally complete, but for most of the shots it will suffice.Welcome to Sector51.Still playing with render settings, so nothing is set in stone yet, but it will be toon shaded to fit with the movie.This is the first shot in which we meet our protagonist, SIMB. We learn of his role in the factory workplace, see how he is treated amongst other robots, and much more in this single shot.

These are some of the background layouts I've been working with, used to determine position and spacing for characters. Some are good, some are bad. Most of these are preliminary and will have detail painted in when I get around to that phase of production. As for now, they work for what I need them for and I hope to show more animation tests in the coming weeks.

Many organizations are seeking to add social support to their service portfolio since customers of today are often looking to company’s self-service sites (knowledge bases and support portals) and social sites for their customer service related issues. In many cases, especially for highly technical and interactive products, self-service isn’t enough. Technical customers need a deeper level of service which allows them to share their screens with technicians and support professionals. The ideal solution for businesses who sell and support technical products is the ability to connect with their users where they can combine the value of self-service with technical depth by escalating directly into a remote support session (full screen-sharing session) directly from self-service site or community. GoToAssist, market leading remote support tool, now allows help requests to be initiated directly from community portals where end users congregate online. Users can transition from community, self-service support to full-service support, with customer-initiated support. This new feature allows one-click chat access and the ability to seamlessly escalate the chat session to full screen. Current and new customers have the ability to set up this new social support feature directly from their web UI. To learn how easy it is to set up, check out the quick start video. At Synergy (May 9-11, 2012), the conference where mobile workstyles and cloud services meet, Citrix unveiled customer-initiated support, a new feature of their award-winning GoToAssist Remote Support cloud-based tool. In addition, they introduced an integration with Get Satisfaction, a leading customer engagement platform provider with 65,000 customer communities. The GoToAssist and Get Satisfaction integration shows how organizations enable their users (both customers and employees) to leverage communities for self-service with Get Satisfaction, but when needed, receive real-time support through chat or screen sharing with GoToAssist. In this way, organizations can now deliver a complete range of support services to their end users. When self-service through your support community is not enough to resolve your customer’s issues, why not allow them to request live agent-based support directly from your community site using GoToAssist. Self-service support to full-service support with one-click - respond & resolve customer issues directly from your support community! GoToAssist Remote enables support organizations to deliver the most comprehensive social support!

Not quite, but sort of. Over Christmas vacation, I plan on getting some major things done for Robiety. In an effort to maintain motivation and keep production going, I will be posting what I have worked on during the day and show any progress that I've made.I have tried painting a few different backgrounds in different styles, trying to decide upon which fits the movie best. This is what I came up with for today:It's not complete but it's a step in the right direction. I'm happy with how it's looking right now and if I don't hate it tomorrow, then it's probably a keeper.

You may not find evidence of it in medical journals, but growing pains afflict more than just children. Organizations suffer from them too. Even though growth is often a key measure of success, it requires constant rethinking and reorganizing. So when your organization has communication needs, it’s best to invest in a service that provides painless scalability. And that’s what we aim to do at Citrix, as evidenced by our web conferencing tools. GoToMeeting gives you one-click collaboration for everyday online meetings. GoToWebinar makes planning and hosting webinars a simple, do-it-yourself operation. And now we’re introducing GoToWebinar Premier Event, an extension of GoToWebinar that allows customers to host webcasts for events with up to 20,000 attendees and features professional support before, during and after your event. GoToWebinar Premier Event is the result of our customers asking for ways to host large events on their timeline with a tool that would allow them to either show slides or incorporate slides and video for a truly professional experience for their viewers. With GoToWebinar Premier Event, our customers can take advantage of a single vendor relationship with Citrix and satisfy all of their collaboration needs. Here’s some of what GoToWebinar Premier offers: Scalable to thousands of viewers Pay per event or purchase a bulk event plan Option to stream live video of the event Mobile access from iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry Playbook And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. To learn more about GoToWebinar Premier, read this fact sheet, visit our website or contact us for a free demo toll-free at 1 866 962 6492.

I worked on the grassy field background a bit more, adding in more details and got it to a place where it looks pretty good. I'm happy with the result.Another shot of the grassy field, but will be used for a closeup.Ideally one background a day would be good, but I'm not setting any goals other than to consistently put work into the project, alleviating the workload come next year. No doubt there will be some exploratory color designs in the coming days which will slow down production, but it must be done to achieve the look I am striving for.

Every two or three years, Microsoft releases a new version of Windows. Windows 7 will be three years old this fall, and its successor will be there right on schedule. Windows 8 is a complex product packed with big and small changes. If you’re an IT pro, Windows 8 will increasingly be on your radar screen over the next few months. This post focuses on answering the key questions you (and your boss) are likely to ask first. What is Windows 8? Windows 8 is the successor to Windows 7. It is built on the same foundation as Windows 7, and it runs virtually all the same programs that run on Windows 7 (the exceptions are system-level utilities that might need an update). On your enterprise network, it supports the same networking and security features as Windows 7. What’s new? What’s different? There are many small improvements in Windows 8 designed to make it faster and less resource-intensive than previous versions. It starts up and shuts down faster than Windows 7 on similar hardware, and its system requirements are unchanged. The biggest difference is that Windows 8 supports a new class of applications in addition to traditional Windows 7 programs. These new apps take up the full screen and are designed to be usable on touch-enabled devices. The new apps embody a distinctive visual style called Metro. That same style is embodied in the new Start and search screens, which also use the full screen, and are designed with finger-friendly arrangements of tiles for access to apps and information. Is it available now? Microsoft has made a preliminary version of Windows 8 available for use by the general public. In techier times, this would have been called a "beta." Instead, it goes by a much friendlier name: "The Windows 8 Consumer Preview." Don’t let the name fool you: this edition includes business and enterprise features, but its focus is to introduce the new product to early adopters, enthusiasts and IT decision-makers. Anyone can download and install the Consumer Preview on a desktop or notebook PC (or on one of the few Windows tablets available today). It’s free. Microsoft promises that a new test version, called a Release Preview, will be available in the first week of June. This release should be nearly identical to the final product, with bug fixes and a near-final user interface. When will it be finished? Even within Microsoft, the target dates for Windows 8 are a closely held secret. But the smart money says it will be released to manufacturing (and available for download by IT pros and developers) in August. I expect the General Availability date, when it’s available in shrink-wrapped boxes and on new PCs, to be in late October. How many editions will there be? On retail shelves and on new PCs, you will be able to select from two editions. The first is called simply Windows 8. It contains most of the features you find today in Windows 7 Home Premium. An upgrade version called Windows 8 Pro includes advanced features that power users and enterprises will find attractive or essential, like the ability to join a domain and to safeguard a drive’s data with BitLocker encryption. For enterprise customers with Software Assurance subscriptions, Microsoft will offer an upgrade to Windows 8 Enterprise edition that includes a handful of features and licensing rights that are useful in large organizations. The final member of the Windows 8 family is called Windows RT. It is designed to run on new devices (tablets and small PCs, for example) that use low-power ARM chips. This edition will include a free version of Microsoft Office 15 and some features from the Windows Desktop, such as Windows Explorer. But it will not run traditional Windows programs. How much will it cost? Sorry, that hasn’t been announced yet. But most observers think the prices will be no greater than their equivalent Windows 7 editions. For more on this topic, watch my recent webinar "The Ins and Outs of Windows 8 - What IT Pros Need to Know and Why". Image Credit: Ceo1O17

I took the weekend off to chill but got right back into production this evening.This is the start of a closeup of the grass and water.This is a shot of what will be an animated waterfall.Hope to work on them both more tomorrow.