joshbuhler.com

Got home from MAX, and the next morning I fired up my Xbox360 to get the dashboard update. Best feature so far? The Netflix streaming. I love 30 Rock, and one of my favorite episodes is “Hard Ball”, especially the ending musical number. (Season 1, ep 15, if you’d like to watch it.) That was the first thing I watched once I got my Netflix account linked to the Xbox. Being able to stream several seasons of 30 Rock, The Office, and even The Addams Family has been great so far.

Another feature I didn’t really think I’d have too much fun with was the Avatars. I built mine last night, and think I did a fair job getting something that looks like me. Of course, if I could get a black Fender or Flex hat for the little guy, he’d look even more like me. Though, the most fun I’ve had with this guy is playing with my (almost) 2-year old daughter Brooklynn. You can use the controller to move the avatar’s head around, make them talk, etc. Once this guy appeared on the screen, Brooklynn was captivated, and we spent a fair amount of time with me controlling him like a virtual puppet, and her giggling. Good times.

So, did you guys get avatar’d, and do they look anything like you? You can share your avatars easily online by using the following URL:

http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/GAMERTAG/avatar-body.png

Just replace GAMERTAG with your own, and you’re in business.

Many Xbox gamers know of the upcoming “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) that’ll be hitting next month on the 19th. Among other new features included with this update, you’ll be able to create your very own Mii’s Avatars to represent yourself online.

It appears that some of these Avatars have begun to appear in the wild, and there’s a possibility that Microsoft may have something in the works social network-wise for these little guys. Each gamertag has a URL that can be used to load a PNG of your Avatar, which I’d imagine is for use on blogs, forum avatars, Twitter, etc. However, if you try visiting these URLs in your browser (except for IE) you’ll just receive a bunch of text, and won’t be able to view the Avatar image, unless you download and save the contents of the URL as a .png file.

I wanted to check out some of these Avatars, and since saving and loading each URL was a bit tedious, I decided to build a quick & dirty Flex app to load the various Avatar images. (Much faster, right?)

Here’s the app: http://blog.joshbuhler.com/flash/360avatars/

You can either select from a list of known Gamertags that already have Avatars, or enter in a Gamertag of your choice. Though, if the Gamertag doesn’t have an Avatar yet, the image won’t load.

(By the way, the skin for the app is the slick Undefined by Alberto Alcaraz, winner of ScaleNine’s Skin to Win Challenge.)