Via gijs nijholt

I don’t usually link to people’s opinion pieces, but I thought this post on why the Internet is shit was a good read, and the last paragraph reflected a feeling that plagues me.

When I first got into web design (a whopping 9 years ago), everything was new, everyone was excited, and I was kept in a constant state of awe as the modern “rich” internet emerged from the primordial soup of HTML 1.0. Maybe I’m just getting old and jaded, but lately that awe has receeded – I rarely see web work anymore that really excites me. There have been a few pieces that really caught my attention as good examples of what can be done (really, what should be done), but nothing that makes me really feel that the pea-brained dinosaurs of the present-day web will be replaced with smarter, more adaptable successors.

I’m left in a constant state of anticipation – I feel like something has to happen, some new concept has to begin defining what the web is going to be 5 years from now. This serves to define much of my professional life, I’m fortunate in that I can usually pick and choose the clients I work with, and I typically do so on the basis of how progressive or interesting the project (or the client) is. It also drives me to tackle monolithic projects with little hope of recompense, just to prove to myself and the community that things can (and should) move forwards (see: FlashOS, FlashOS2, gModeler, etc).

I think the most exciting thing I’ve seen recently is the involvement of talented writers, with a firm understanding of the medium, in the development of websites. A good writer goes beyond copy-writing to help define the narrative of a site, establish a repoire with the user, effectively (and engagingly) communicate the core messages of the site, and work with the designer to develop the user experience.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love my job, and I think the Flash community is phenomenal, I’m just left wondering if there isn’t more that we could do to evolve this medium to the benefit of our clients before the meteor (longhorn?) hits.

PS. If you’ve built a Flash intro in the past 3 months, without discussing with your client why its a waste of their money and what their alternatives are, kindly raise your hand and exit the blog – you’re holding us all back, mate.

[EDIT:] Wow, I really must be getting old and cranky… too many complaining posts in the last few days… must… post… something… positive. 🙂

It’s tough to be green… especially when Cloe the Clown is giving it to you from behind. Sure, it’s immature, but my girlfriend and I almost fell out of our chairs laughing when I stumbled onto these photos of a lecherous, smiling doll sodomizing poor kermit at the NYC thanksgiving parade (I think he’s drunk, look at his face in the first picture).

Read on for the photos…

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Sam Neff recently explored how setStyle notifies components of style changes, and the results are definitely worth noting (this may save you some major headaches, so listen up). It seems that every time you call setStyle, it calls notifyStyleChangeInChildren(), which iterates through EVERY movieclip in your movie, checking to see if it should notify it of the style change… ouch! Double-ouch even.

This was very useful information for me, as I’m presently working on a (top secret) project that has 100+ components instantiated at a time, and I was a little confounded as to why initializing the first interface was taking about 12 seconds. It all became very clear when I realized that I was setting about 40 different styles, which resulted in literally TENS of THOUSANDS of movieclip “style checks”. Moving the setStyle calls to the first frame solved the problem completely.

The moral of this story: always set all of your global style information before instantiating ANY movieclips, and then don’t change it – at least until Macromedia changes their EULA, and someone can legally distribute a fix for it (jab, jab). 😉

Well, the -20c temperatures (that’s -4f for those of you stuck with archaic systems of measurement), and 20cm+ of snow (8″) we got over the past week tells me it’s about time to dust off the old snowflakes code, and make it available to the community. There’s a lot of code available for simulating snow, but I think my extensive real-life experience (brrr!) gives mine an edge, plus it comes with a cute peacenik snowman.

This is the same FlashMX version that’s been available on my site for a year and a bit now, with a few minor modifications. I plan to post an MX 2004 class based version, just for the helluvit, in the near future.

You can take a look at the Flash snowfall swf, then download the free FLA. Peace on Earth, and goodwill to men. 🙂

Also, here’s a nice (though completely uncredited – Oscar, you bastard! 🙂 usage of my code with some nice snowflake artwork tossed in.

My apologies for the lack of posts lately – things have been comfortably busy, with client projects, and a few other endeavours, one of which is a new advanced Flash course I will be instructing at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in January and February ’04.

If you’re an intermediate Flash developer in Edmonton or area, check it out – it might be “the course to take your game to another level”. It also helps that NAIT is running it for an amazingly good price.

Read on for the full press release from NAIT…

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