February 26, 2004
Beautiful Flash math
Every now and then, someone does things with Flash that just make me gaze in wonder.
A variety of amazing, math-driven, Flash-based art projects.
February 25, 2004
Some new Flash-charting toys to consider
[via swftools]
This new charting/dashboard set looks like a pretty good deal. Lots of features and it's XML-driven, so it's easy to integrate. Cheap, too, with a $99 site license.
Their other charting app, FusionCharts seems pretty spiffy as well, and the pricing ($99!) totally crushes the pricing model of my other favorite charting app, Corda's PopChart.
February 20, 2004
Switching to Flash-based MT comments
The kind folks at gotoandplay.ca have a Flash-based replacement to the MT blog comments form called MTgotoAndComment.
I posted the files to my MT box, and with a little tweaking of the MT templates through the web interface, got everything up and running.
There may still be some glitches with the way I set it up, especially since I disabled the cookies code, because it was throwing JS errors looking for the old form.
Anyway, I hope this will ward off the blogspammers for a while...we'll see.
February 04, 2004
Match your monitor resolution to your task
My monitor's resolution goes up to 1280x1024. Most of them do these days. People like having lots of room for toolbars, palettes, web browsers, etc. So why did I switch back to 1024x768?
I'm an interface designer. I design screens for OTHER people to look at. Most of your users won't use a resolution above 1024. The text is too small for a lot of folks to read comfortably. So I need to see things the way the user would see them. ("Is that font too big?") I found myself losing touch with how small/large design elements and fonts should be. Switching back puts me back in line with the user.
Big resolution still has its place. Cakewalk Sonar is an audio-editing package with a MASSIVE interface. The more room, the better. Since I'm not doing anything visual, I can safely crank up the resolution to get more space.
Another solution is to double your horizontal resolution by getting a second monitor. This works great. You can still see fonts and designs at the appropriate size, but have twice as much room for tool palettes and apps.
February 01, 2004
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Today I completed the PC game "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time."
This is one fo the BEST games I've played in years. The gameplay is great, the artwork is fantastic, the story is well done, it's simply a masterpiece.
At every turn I was simply amazed at how fun this game was to play.