January 2009

The Archives

• 01.29.09 | Posted By Lee
  Flash Player dislikes playing nicely best practices, brain monkey, impressions, rant | (3)

  I have been working on a project here at work. It is my first project in AS3 and one of the largest and most complex I have ever made. The user capabilities have made for a difficult time but the thing that keeps fighting back is a context sensitive aspect. I have a little function that helps people locate a nearby service based on their zip code. Works fine in the production environment, information is pulled from an external source and displayed to the user. However... once it is on a server it fails to do its job. I have a ...
• 01.23.09 | Posted By Lee
  It’s Time For a Change Design, brain monkey, impressions, opinion, review | (5)

  Barack Obama's team has done it again. They have taken the web 2.0 style that has surrounded the new president and pushed it onto the White House's website. The old website was not bad, but it is nice to see a fresh face on the website. I just hope this doesn't turn into a every new president gets a new website deal. Not that it would be bad, but is it really necessary? In any case I am digging the new look and feel of the site. All the small accents for images and horizontal breaks are well done. It remains ...
• 01.21.09 | Posted By jason kuhn
  Adventures in bad-designing Bad Idea, Design | (3)

  [caption id="attachment_269" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Blackboard's Digital Dropbox Interface"][/caption] Blackboard is a very popular Learning Management System. I have to use it for most of my graduate courses and it's really been nothing but a frenzied click-fest. Sections are buried deep and threads on the forums are impossible to directly link to. This quarter my professor's assignment delivery method of choice is Blackboard's Digital Dropbox. It sounds pretty friendly and easy to use but c'mon this is Blackboard! Naturally, my professor never received my solution to the assignment and it was originally graded as a 0. If you click on the image, you'll see ...
• 01.15.09 | Posted By jason kuhn
  Mixed signals Bad Idea | (1)

  I noticed this on the Cosi dinner menu. It's as if the graphic designer settled on any ol' icon that represents "technology" and retains the Cosi logo. [caption id="attachment_263" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="you keep using that icon. i do not think it means what you think it means."][/caption] Update: I would appreciate this if it didn't mimic the look of an already established icon with a completely unrelated meaning.
• 01.13.09 | Posted By Lee
  Preloaders can make or break a flash website Design, Good Idea, brain monkey, impressions, outside, review | (2)

  The Internet is full of good flash websites, and terrible flash websites. What makes a good flash site? In my opinion it is how you handle the users experience because lets face it, they are not visiting the site for pure information collection, they want to be entertained. Part of making the user experience more enjoyable is providing some entertainment while we wait for the Internet to catch up to our requests. The best way to do this is with nice, attractive preloaders. Enter Big Spaceship... Big Spaceship has put together a small gallery of preloaders they have created for clients ...
• 01.05.09 | Posted By Lee
  AS3 Garbage Truck Driven By Drunk Person best practices, brain monkey, impressions, opinion, rant | (1)

  So I'm programming AS3 over the last couple of months I learned a very important lesson this weekend. The AS3 garbage collection process is random and unpredictable and can cause tweens to end early, among other things. I was getting ready to launch a new site this past weekend. One of my last QA fixes was to figure out why some tweens were ending prematurely. I stumbled upon some answers on the web. Apparently when you type a variable as a tween inside a function, AS3 garbage collection collects it, even if the tween is not complete. This did not ...

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