Thursday, January 29, 2004

The website might not be much to look at but Hektor certainly is!

Jon 2:57 PM Permalink

After being pointed in the direction of the new Vodafone Future website by JesterXL and seeing the ideas for the use of e-paper as ultra-thin displays that couple as jewelry or folding maps that you can interact with to find your friends and receive video messages from and being generally quite excited by some of the concepts presented I then came across this news article from Yahoo which reports that Dutch firm Philips Electronics said on Monday it was preparing to mass-produce a slim, book-sized display panel onto which consumers could download newspapers and magazines then roll up and put away.

"We can produce this in batches. It's no longer a research project. We're going to build a pilot line that should be ready in 2005 to make one million displays a year," a spokesman at Philips Research said.

Jon 2:49 PM Permalink

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

As I fixed my archives I realised I was doing something very silly with my css and xhtml so I decided to make yet another change, it was very minor - switching the position of the header div to outside the container div which means I can float the nav bar left in the container div and have two seperate background tiling images one for the top and one for the main area. Simple, but bandwidth saving compared to what I was doing before.

Jon 10:37 AM Permalink

OK, so I didn't realise my archives were completely buggered. The thing is I made a few changes to my code a while back and forgot to update the archive index..doh! Oh well, no harm done I suppose.

Jon 9:47 AM Permalink

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

I just picked up on this article over at Gizmodo that reports firms are currently developing Gesture-Operable Digital Home Electronic Appliances. It seems Toshiba and Hitachi are currently leading the development at the moment but I imagine it will only be a matter of time before this kind of applicance control becomes common place.

Jon 2:04 PM Permalink

I was obviously not at work yesterday as I was enjoying the festivities of Australia Day in Sydney so I just thought I'd say a quick Happy Australia Day to everyone!

Jon 1:20 PM Permalink

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Anyone who has ever delved into home computer music production will have probably come across the software giants Propellerhead Software, first they created ReCycle - loop mashing tool, then excellent ReBirth - TB303 and TR808/909 emulator and then they dopped the bomb, Reason.

"Synthesizers, samplers, drum machine, ReCycle-based loop player, mixer, effects, pattern sequencer and more. As many of each as your computer can handle. Reason is an infinitely expandable music workstation on a CD-ROM, complete with its own realtime sequencer."

I've had my eye on this software for a while but continued on down the old Cubase VST track, however now I'm in Australia I have no sampler, no VST I wonder about its capabilities for when I get around to upgrading my computer. Well here is the answer I've been waiting for, the article on the site front page is an interview with Liam Howlett (Prodigy) who says the new album due out this year is completely written using Reason! I think that is cause to sit up and take notice.

Jon 2:04 PM Permalink

My brother posted this link to a guy who has made a lifesize Han Solo frozen in Carbonite out of Lego!! Some people have a lot of time on their hands...

Jon 1:01 PM Permalink

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Not sure how useful this will be to anyone, but I have found myself using it a few times now. I found I was repeating code a lot so created the following function to toggle buttons in Flash MX:

function toggleSubNav(mc) {
lastMC.gotoAndStop("off");
lastMC.toggled = false;
mc.gotoAndStop("toggled");
mc.toggled = true;
lastMC = mc;
}

myBtn.onRelease=function() {
if (!this.toggled) {
toggleSubNav(this);
}
}

As long as you create button movieclips with frames labelled "toggled" and "off" depicting the two states it should work!

Jon 2:20 PM Permalink

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

After just reading this article at RedDev.org and the article to which this is related over at htmldog.com I was left pondering how my skills have developed over the past 5 years. There was a time when I left Uni with a music degree that the web was a place where I downloaded samples and read about when Star Wars would start filming. The next step was that I enrolled in an html nightschool class and learned in a 4 weeks how to hand code basic web pages. This was then put into practice at work when I had to build help files for a software package. It was basic stuff but it gave me a good grounding in hand coding. Over the following years my html knowledge and netscape workarounds grew as my flash skills also improved. Suddenly I was coding and understanding actionscript, understanding OOP and feeling pretty safe in my job.

Then I came to Australia...

By the time I got here there had been a definite shift in the web world and suddenly web designers were not really in massive demand unless you were a web developer as well. So then came the next step, I taught myself basic coldfusion, mySQL and more recently I'm learning Flash Remoting. Further to that I am now striving to code with Web Standards in mind after being well and truly educated by Jeffrey Zeldman, I am not a complete table-less convert yet as I still believe my target audience may be using netscape 4.x but I have put the hybrid xhtml/css method into practice with as little presentational xhtml as possible.

So are we now Artistic Developers, Web Mechanics or Creative Technologists?

Jon 2:34 PM Permalink

Monday, January 19, 2004

I have just realised since updating my blogger template I hadn't updated my archive template, apologies to anyone who saw what a mess the place was, I've tidied up now and thrown out the old rubbish!

Jon 4:53 PM Permalink

Friday, January 16, 2004

I just popped in to one of my favourite web haunts, Gizmodo and not only has the site undergone a bit of a redesign since I last looked but is also boasting an incredible amount of new gadgetry on the market, or as near as. Here are some of the best I noticed:

The Wearable display which makes it seem as though you are looking at a 13 inch floating screen in front of you.

Extreme Segway - funny but obviously not real.

Personal Video Players - a round up of what was previewed at the CES last week.

Snowboarding Jacket with built in MP3 player - at first I was sceptical about clothing with built in gadgetry but I reckon snowboarder's will go for this kind of thing.

There's plenty more worth checking out if you are a gadget freak.

Jon 2:15 PM Permalink

Well as I had promised myself to take more time to learn correct web standards xhtml and css I decided to re-code my blog from scratch, it doesn't valitdate due to the comments code and the blogger tags but all presentational markup has been removed, my css has been refined and reduced dramatically and it now works in Opera on the mac which it should have done all along!

I have also invested in Eric Meyer's 'Eric Meyer on CSS' as recommended by Jeffrey Zeldman, the book seems very thorough and now I am armed and ready for the new year!

Update: I forgot to mention, freaksauce is now coded in xhtml 1.0 Transitional and having just tried to validate the document using the W3C validator service only the 3rd party comments javascript stopped the document from being fully compliant. My CSS also validates against the CSS 2 specification but there was 1 error for CSS 1 which is not really worth worrying about.

Jon 10:29 AM Permalink

Thursday, January 15, 2004

I just read the comments made by Robert Scoble about his lunch with the head of the Internet Explorer team via CentralMX and was a little worried by one or two of the issues raised. Firstly this:

"Another thing that the commenters generally aren't thinking of is "how to get adoption." I keep pointing out that if we fixed the CSS and PNG issues, you still wouldn't be able to use those for years. Why? Cause consumers (and companies) really don't care about those issues and won't download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues.

As a good example, Dean gave me a few companies with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of desktops, that still are using IE 5.5, or older."

If CSS and PNG issues aren't sorted out now, then this further slows down adoption of web standards and further infuriates web developers who wish to create valid xhtml and css without worrying about current support. As for the hundreds of thousands of desktops using IE 5.5 or older these will eventually be replaced as support for old OS's disappear. I was still using Windows 95 at home until recently but I can't get software for it so I upgraded, most people will upgrade to the latest platform available (unless their machine is a dinosaur in which case a new machine will be on the xmas list) which in turn will provide them with at least the latest IE release or Safari.

secondly:

"Along these lines, it's useful to think about Internet Explorer as two separate things. One is the engine underneath. This engine gets used all over the place inside Windows (and by other apps). It's what renders HTML inside Outlook Express, for instance. The second is the browser application. It's easier to change the application. Harder to change the engine. Why? Because so many things rely on it. Dean told me yesterday that when they release a patch, it needs to be tested in 400 different iterations. The support matrix is horrendous and something we, as users, never think about."

If the engine gets used so much why don't Microsoft make sure it adopts the latest W3C recommendations so it will work throughout all html rendering applications? I don't care about the Windows support matrix and I won't think about it because it shouldn't be an issue, if Mozilla can build a standalone browser that works perfectly then why is it Microsoft have such trouble?

Jon 1:59 PM Permalink

BBC report that Kodak have announced that they are stopping the sale of traditional film cameras in North America and Europe tol concentrate on digital cameras. A bold move considering:

"industry figures show that 12.5 million digital cameras were sold in the US last year, compared with 12.1 million film cameras."

I can understand concentrating on digital development, but 12 million film cameras is still quite a lot!

Jon 12:41 PM Permalink

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

An article on The Register tells of a new "mega-browser" programmed by 17 year old Adnan Osmani winner of last year's Esat BT Young Scientist competition. The performance is apparently significantly fast has included direct access to 120 search engines and incorporated five different media players for sound and video, as well as DVD functions and a talking guide named Phoebe. Osmani said he has since added 30 more audio and video features to the software, which is, wait for it, based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Shame, why didn't he model it on a decent browser?! Also there are no mentions of support for web standards. The browser is set for commercial release in the next 6 months.

Jon 1:16 PM Permalink

Monday, January 12, 2004

After reading 'Designing with Web Standards' by the aformentioned Jeffery Zeldman and then starting 'Flash Remoting: the definitive guide' I have experienced a feeling of guilt for building sites in Flash with no thought for accessibility, I also feel like a complete novice at html after coding what is now considered incorrectly for the past 5 years. So my new resolution is this, I am going to try and take on board as much as I can from Jeffrey's book and create non-presentational mark-up in XHTML transitional 1.0 and make the sites more accessible to screen readers etc. I also plan polish my CSS skills a little more so I can eventually drop the hybrid table layouts, but when time is against you on a project this is not always as easy as some make out! As for Flash, well I love flash and I'm not really feeling that guilty anymore so I am going to continue to read my Flash Remoting book and hopefully some day soon upgrade to 2004 so I can get moving on AS2.

Jon 4:50 PM Permalink

Sunday, January 04, 2004

OK, so now I understand the IE Windows CSS Box Model Hack I will (eventually) implement it on this site, I have been working on a mac for a while on standards compliant browsers so I never knew there was a problem! (Thanks Jeffrey for giving me lots to think about in 2004!)

Oh yes and Happy New Year!

Jon 6:32 AM Permalink