I was reading Full As A Goog and came across some really interesting stuff at Colin Moock's site from the guys at WEFAIL. They've got some interesting things to say about usability. I think often designers get so carried away with creativity that they lose usability altogether. However, the only way to truly advance, is through new ideas and experimentation. Make sure to check out some of the stuff their doing—very strange and unusual. I do really like what they did with the Bob Schneider site. I suspect that site probably really reflects the artist as well. Here's what Colin had to say:
well, i found the wefail presentation slides from flash in the can.
man do i ever love martin&jordan's wefail work. man...
>> view wefail presentation slides
>> play donkey game
>> view wefail client site: bob schneider music
>> please yourself at wefail home
wow.
Here's a nice little Mozilla/Firefox tip:
Mozilla has a nice way to view files that are in both your memory and file cache. In the Address Bar, type - about:cache. This will take you to a page that allows you to view a summary of your browser cache and also will allow you to browse the files stored in the cache.
Christophe Coenraets, the Macromedia Flex Evangelist, has blogged a cool little entry that not only shows a Flex Blog RSS/RDF Reader, but it also shows the entire code used to build the application.
This is the most revealing information I've seen to do date on how Flex operates and the types of applications you can build with it.
NOTE:Be sure to check out his follow up post—in which he posts the external CSS and XML files he used.
Macromedia official released some public information on Royale this morning. The new official name is "Macromedia Flex." There's a brief online presention done in Breeze which you can view—it gives an overview of the product, how to use it and where it fits in.
They've also released a "white paper" and several other articles at the Macromedia Flex home page.
For more information, see the official press release.
Macromedia announces today they've formally applied for membership to ECMA International. This is the organization that oversees ECMAScript (ECMA-262 and ISO/IEC 16262)—which is widely referred to as JavaScript (Microsoft JScript, Macromedia ActionScript, etc.)
For more information, see the official press release.
Well, Macromedia has finally announced "publically" announced their "Royale Initiative." There's not much there, but the FAQ does cover some very basic questions I've heard asked. I really wonder how close the stuff Macromedia is working on will resemble what Laszlo Systems has been working on.
I've been very intrigued by their product since I first saw their idea. I like the idea of XML In, Flash Out. If you haven't seen what the Laszlo Presentation Server can do, go check out their demo page. The XML Editing demo actually allows you to view the XML used to generate the demo. You can even change the XML around and view your change on-the-fly!
I originally blogged about Royale back on March 28, 2003. I does appear that Royale may be a little more than a fancy form generation tool. I'm really interested to see what they come with.
Claus Wahlers has just released a public beta of his "Deng" browser. The "Deng" browser is a Flash MX-based browser. Here's a quote about what it is from Claus' website:
If you are on a machine with Windows OS, you can now download an early beta version of The DENG Browser! The DENG Browser basically is the DENG Modular XBrowser Flash MX Component wrapped into a Screenweaver C++ Shell. The final release version is going to support CSS2, CSS3 Namespaces, SVG Mobile Profile, XHTML Tiny, XForms, XFrames and much more. All of these technologies are already ready to use in this Beta (with limited functionality yet though.. Also note that this is not supposed to replace your Mozilla or IE6). The Browser also comes together with a set of sample XHTML, SVG and XForms documents.
Mike Chambers has started posting example of the new Flash UI Components Set 5 that comes with Macromedia Developers Resource Kit (Volume 3.) If you're looking for some examples to get you started, then head over to Mike's blog.
DRK 3: Week View Example 1
DRK 3: Accordion Pane / Slider Examples
DRK 3: Tab Component Example 1
Well, the modern day "browser" is no officially 10 years. The first version of Mosaic was released 10 years ago today. Mosaic was written by several college students at the University of Illinois. Prior to the release of Mosaic, "surfing the web" was text-based only. Mosaic brought many of the common day functions to web browsing, such as: back/forward buttons, search, image support and the home button. Anyway, whether they knew it at the time or not, this little program affected the life of millions—including myself. I don't know what I'd be doing today if I weren't designing web applications.
On April 22, 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a piece of computer code designed to get information from various public networks. Little did they know that their pet project, a humble application named Mosaic, would fundamentally change everyday life. While Web browsers with graphical interfaces had traded hands among academics years earlier, Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet.- CNET
The Data Connection Kit provides prebuilt connections to web services, XML data, databases, and application servers so you can easily access, save, and display data. With its component-based application framework and support for multiple data sources, the Data Connection Kit lets developers focus on what's important—the delivery of great Internet applications.
Macromedia's released the third volume of their DevNet Resource Kit. I haven't had a chance to purchase any of the resource kits yet, but I generally hear good things about them. Out of all the resources on the CD, the one that sparked my immediate interest was the Lindex add-on for CFMX that uses the Lucene open-source, Java-based text indexing engine.
ZDNet recently published an article covering what the terms "encryption", "hashing" and "obfuscation" mean. If you're familiar with these terms, don't bother reading the article—you won't learn anything you don't already know. However, if you uncertain what the terms mean or simply unfamiliar with them, it does a good job of defining the words and provides some good examples.
Here's an interesting presentation on the future of many web-based technologies. The presentation, written by Gerald Bauer, covers XUL, XForms, Curl, Rebol—just to name a few. If you're a web developer, or just interesting in where the web is going, this is an interesting read.
Someone posted a link to this site on the Flashcoders mailing list today. There's some very interesting Flash stuff and other miscellaneous programming related things on the site. However, you must check out The Flash-based version of "Donkey Kong." It's obvious a lot of time was spent to replicate the game engine, graphics and sound.
Look in the middle section for the "Games" icon--the first
icon to the right of that will launch the game.
Donkey Kong