A friend passed this link on to me. I live in Pennsylvania so I understand the concept as well. For those of you who don’t here is some background… and the link to the site with the video:
Groundhog Chase
Awhile ago I got into using Adobe After Effects a bit and I really liked the controls used in the layers/timeline pallet. You can click on the number value of a property and drag in any direction to change the number. Alternatively you can just click and release on the number to enter a new number in manually. I took some time to create a Flash version of this control and figured I’d share it. This was done fast so if you see any bugs or can come up with a better idea please share… You can download the FLA here. A demo of the control is below. Click on the number and drag or press and release to edit the number – then click outside the text area (sorry, no key listener for ENTER in there right now):
Recently while building a site and validating it I thought it might be cool to try to create a Flash Application that would validate a given URL’s HTML. So I traveled to http://validator.w3.org/
Now some of the following information may have been available elsewhere but I like to make life hard for myself so this details the steps I took. Upon entering a URL to be validated I found that the URL obviously gets appended to the validator URL like such:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.some.com
So doing some Google’n resulted in me finding this post:
w3cValidatorWebService
This information is available on the W3C’s website as well though. So I then saw I could get XML back! You will note upon using the application that it tells you not to rely on what comes back because it WILL change. But this was a proof of concept so we don’t care about that.
Take a look and let me know what you think. For now you have to download it (in swf or enhanced-exe format) because it will not work online as it accesses cross-domain xml and that is a no-no in Flash without the proper rights/files. So download it and run it on your desktop.
Again – this was just a test and a chance to use Flash’s xPath and CSS support. If anyone likes it maybe we will add some more functionality to it – like maybe using Zinc to somehow allow you to drag an HTML file onto the window to upload and validate it if possible.
I have a great Friday afternoon post. A friend of mine, Denny Phillips of Guerilla-Studios, is probably the best user of Photoshop that I know. He recently has been using his spare time to “zombie-fy” photos of people. So today I sent him a shot of me and my other pal Dave Karpinski of BBF Solutions acting nutty. He sent me back an awesome retouch and I just had to share it! Let us know what you think. I believe he said that for a nominal fee he is willing to do the same for others (might make some nice avatars for message boards).
Before (Click to enlarge):
After (Click to enlarge):
Before I had a blog (‘03 or so) I worked on a site that celebrated the part that Alcoa (a worldwide provider of Aluminum products) had in the last 100 years of flight. Thought I’d post it to see what anyone thought of it. If you see any holes keep in mind this was done in like a 2 week time period (rush deadline) from start to finish. The site leveraged Flash’s audio capabilities and was one of the first all prototype driven applications I had written. Wayne Lincoln, my co-worker at New Perspective, took care of getting all of the 3D and background imagery to me and I concentrated on the UI and the Flash development. Follow the URL below, read the recommended settings and click the “Enter the experience” button.
The teams at Mozilla seem to be pumping out free, quality products left and right these days. I just wanted to post about a newer project out called Sunbird. It is a redesign of the Mozilla Calendar component. Mozilla says: “At the moment Sunbird is in an experimental stage. Although it is quite stable, we recommend it for testing purposes only.” But I think it is worth giving a shot. I would like to see this wrapped into Thunderbird eventually.
On another note, I really enjoy the icon design being chosen for the Mozilla suite. Below you can see the Sunbird logo as of now:
If you are interested in learning more or checking out each icon in more detail you can do so at the following sites:
Firefox Logos
Thunderbird Logos
Sunbird Logos
And as always:
We are subscribers to DevNet where I work and I love it. Well, I really liked it when the DRKs were getting pumped out with new usable stuff. We were slightly disappointed with the last two though… Anyway… Seems that Macromedia will be halting the DRKs at #13 and doing away with the DevNet model and be moving towards the Macromedia Volume License Program. Contribute will now be sold as a MVLP option along side of the Studio MX and Flash Pro package. I think there is still time to renew DevNet one last time though. Here are two urls of interest that help answer some questions:
Are you a broadband user? Want to make your Firefox browser even faster? Check out this sweet mod.
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