December 22, 2003
Your grandfather's internet
In 1934, this fellow realized that it would be handy to have all of the world's information stored on index cards, in a machine that could spin about and help you find whatever you were searching for. The cards would even have relational references...or "links" to other cards.
A sort of "web" of knowledge, he said.
And you could one day telephone in, and view the cards by some form of projection onto a screen in front of you from remote locations.
Fantastic! I'll take two.
You know, I've grown to like this giant, electric-telescope, card-flipping, relational-document machine.
I think I'll keep it.
December 16, 2003
Screenweaver updated to 3.0.6.7
I just noticed that there is a new build of Screenweaver.
This build is supposed to fix issues involving how FlashMX2004 SWFs are processed by the Builder tool.
December 10, 2003
Calling a function on right-click (Win IE & MX)
Huge thanks to Shock at ground.gr for posting this great tutorial a few months back on trapping the right-click event in the browser to prevent the Flash menu from popping up.
I needed this trick in a big way this afternoon.
If you don't use a "menu" movieclip, but instead create an empty movieclip with a stop() in the first frame and any function call in the third frame, that function will get fired on right-click with no adverse side-effects.
(Putting the function call in the second frame doesn't seem to give Flash enough time to properly respond).
Handy Color Picker for Windows: ColorCop
I needed a utility that would let me grab hex colors from any pixel on my monitor. I had one a long time ago, but had forgotten the name of it.
Color Cop did the trick perfectly. It can live in your system tray, and has a magnifier to make it easier to see which pixel to grab the color from. It copies the hex straight to your clipboard, so you can paste it into your Flash color picker or HTML. It also does averaging, which is handy when you're trying to grab a color from a JPEG which can have slight pixel-to-pixel color variations, depending on the compression.
It's free, and doesn't seem to be spyware of any kind.
What's your favorite color picker utility?
December 09, 2003
Spam Stats
I saw this cool page on Postini.com that has a ton of stats on how bad the spam problem really is. Postini makes spam-blocking network tools, and I'm not trying to promote their products. I just wanted to relay the alarming stats.
Stats of note:
- 84.2% of email they process is spam.
- There were 74,183,813 spam messages processed by Postini's servers TODAY.
- 2.4 Billion spam messages seen by Postini's servers in the past 30 days.
Nice to see them using Flash to present their stats, too.
December 05, 2003
WinXP & Apple Aqua icon design guidelines
If you need to design a Flash app that matches the WindowsXP interface, you might want to have a look at this article on MSDN, "Creating Windows XP Icons."
It has GREAT guidelines for how to match the style of the XP icon set, including recommended color palettes, Photoshop settings, and even the perspective grid used to draw the 3D look.
Likewise, if you want more of the Appla Aqua look & feel, read this article on Apple's site, "Introduction to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines." Look down the left menu, in Part III you'll find the pages on icon design. There are also several cool pages on how other UI controls should look and function.
In design, you don't usually have to follow other people's rules and guidelines. When you do, however, it's helpful to know just what those rules and guidelines ARE.