I have a new favorite Firefox extension that I thought I’d share. It is called Reveal. It works much like the Expose Feature in Mac OS X. It will take all of the tabs you currently have open and display thimbnails on the screen of each screen. You can then select one or even reorder them. Below is a screen shot of what happens when I press F2:

Another sweet feature is the history preview (as I call it). When you mouse over the back button you get a preview of that page.

Check it out – I hope development continues.
Get Reveal Now

Saw over at Flash Stream Works that the awesome IKEA site that I posted about previously has been updated with new “rooms”. Great “intro” build into the site too. Take a look.

http://www.ikea.com/ms/sv_SE/kampanj/fy06_dromkok/dromkok.html

You have probably seen the posts on your favorite blogs that Microsoft® Expression™ Interactive Designer has been released as a CTP (Community Technology Preview). You probably heard all the hype back in the day about it being a potential “Flash Killer”. Today I downloaded the CTP and figured I would write my initial personal take on the program formerly know as “Sparkle”. This review is written from the perspective of a long time Flash Developer. I know this is a CTP and not a final version but since they released it at all I figure I’d give my thoughts.

The Start Screen

The start screen is becoming common place with Visual Studio, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc. Above is a screen shot of the MEID (Microsoft® Expression™ Interactive Designer) start screen. The initial install and everything went pretty well so not much to complain about from that point of view.

The Main IDE Window

The workspace is a weird mix between Visual Studio and Flash. I am not a fan of “custom” UI styles such as changing button styles and such. The reason is because it is rarely done well. One of the few times I have seen it done nicely is with Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. So even though its nit pickey – it bothered me a bit.

Using It
So I got into the interface and found my way into one of the tutorials via the Help menu. Started working through it and everything went pretty well. The way things work are much different than your typical Flash IDE interface. To the left you can see a picture of the Tools window.

The “Tree” view is not something I was fond of. This is the way you handle nested items vs. movie clips inside of movie clips.

I did think two things were pretty interesting though, the fact that there is a C# file associated with the XAML code and that the code IDE is handled very much like visual studio with the Design and Code view. See below:

The other thing that I really liked was the ability to take a rectangle that I drew on the stage and drag a handle to control the radius of the corners. This is a great feature for modifying a rectangle or square that you have already drawn to the stage. Wish Flash had that…

And finally we come to the properties window. Now I am young when it comes to C# and Windows development so its not super hard to scare me with properties and such I have no idea about – This is exactly what MEID did to me. Check out the properties window below:

Bottom Line
Ok – let me reiterate that yes, I know this is an early release of the product. Also let me reemphasize that I am coming at this from a Flasher’s point of view and with the foreknowledge that this product has been called a “Flash Killer”. I think for application for Windows Vista this might be nice. But here’s my two cents.

Cent 1) It is not a Flash Killer. I think that only hardcore programmers will be into this sort of IDE and development workflow and most of the time the hardcore developers aren’t designers… MOST of the time – I know that’s not the rule. I find most good Flashers can program and design as well. I just think that if they think Flashers are going to migrate to this platform – they are wrong.

Cent 2) The IDE is confusing. Granted I messed with it for only a bit but again – coming from something so intuitive as the Flash IDE this was cumbersome.

Closing
I don’t like it. I think that “Sparkle” has a place for Microsoft Developers but have a hard time believing that it will ever catch on and have the broad spread that Flash has. I also think that Flash will always have better designers that use it. I went into Sparkle wanting to like it but was left wanting. You can google around for some more details on the data side of what is offered but I am not sure that this will turn it around for me.

I was reading an interesting post from digg and learned a new trick that I was unaware of. Wanna mess with your buddies at work? Go on their mac and press “Control ALT Apple 8″. It will invert the screen colors. Pretty wicked. I didn’t know about that one! Doing that key combo again will restore the colors. Supposedly using it inverted will save you up to 30 min of battery life on your iBook…

While I’m at it sharing useless mac tips as a PC user I thought I’d share the “Slow Genie Effect” trick in case you didn’t know that one either. You know how an open window on OS X will squeeze down into the dock when you minimize it (known as the Genie Effect)? Well hold down the Shift key and minimize one… When restoring it from the dock hold Shift again and it will restore slowly as well. There you go – slow genie effect.

Hope these useless tips brighten your day!

Ok so I have uploaded my example perspective file using the DistordImage class by Kiroukou. You can drag the corners of the picture below to change the perspective. If you want to see why I love this class so much visit the direct url to my file here http://www.pixelfumes.com/blog/jan06/perspectiveDistort.swf. Once you get there drag the image and enlarge it – it still looks good way above the original size (320×214). Wanna see something sick? (in a good way) Twist the image around and watch it render. Thought I’d share. Download the class from Sandy Blog and check it out.

Thanks to everyone who replied to my previous post on transforming and skewing objects in flash via code. Not just a normal skew mind you (see the previous post). Alan Shaw posted a link to Thomas Pfeiffer’s Sandy Blog that had some amazing code (an idea from Andre Michelle) that puts what I was working on to shame.

Sandy Blog Transform Mesh

Great work! This will do exactly what I need it to do. I am extremely impressed with the performance as well. Enjoy all who have journeyed down this path of frustration.

Today I wanted to try a new effect and thought it would be a good time to get my hands dirty with the Matrix Transformations in Flash 8. It was fairly easy to get a transformation on my BitmapData object and get some skewing going on. That was until I wanted to get a “keystone” effect. I have seen this done using the Drawing API back in the day and figured it would be easy enough to do the same now that Flash 8 was here. I researched a bunch on blogs and hit my Flash buddies up for ideas and as of right now we are stumped. I may be missing something or maybe don’t know about a new method or class. It does not seem possible to get the effect I am looking for, at least not by the way of any example code I have seen. That’s why I figured I’d post my cry for help here.

In the image below you can see in the left column what I want to achieve and in the right column what I have been able to achieve. Any insight, leads, code, etc would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!