April 2007

Illustrator Doodling with the Blend Tool

Submitted by Various Mobile ... on Sat, 04/21/2007 - 06:25

pastedGraphic.tiff

I'd never used the Illustrator Blend tool before today.

It lets you make pseudo-3D images like that in a few seconds. There
are certainly more appropriate things to do with it, like actual
blending of path shapes and colors, but this is another neat way,
when used with the "Specified Steps" blend option.

Drupal Ambient Remix

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Sat, 04/14/2007 - 19:44

I have to give props to Chad for deciding to do a remix of the unofficial Drupal theme created by lullabot.

Not to be outdone, I decided to go for a more ambient feel to the whole thing. (You've got to love GarageBand.)

[audio:drupalambientmix.mp3]

Drupal + Flash = A Bad Case of Druplash??

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Sun, 04/08/2007 - 17:08

Okay, Druplash isn't a real trademark, but I will say that I've been playing with the Drupal Services module and AMFPHP modules, and I think that the potential to serve up a site using SWFObject, SWFAddress and Drupal 5 is incredible. In a nutshell, Drupal 5 lets you send entire blocks of content into a Flash movie of your choosing, and there's no performance hit on the Flash side. AMFPHP sends objects to Flash / Flex in a native binary format, so that you don't have to spend processing power on the client computer decoding XML.

In combination with SWFObject and SWFAddress, you could also serve up HTML content under each Flash page, and with the Mobit module, you could also maintain a mobile version.

WebDAV Not Included

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Sun, 04/08/2007 - 09:58

What can I say? I'm a sucker for convenience.

I love the fact that 1and1 accounts come with WebDAV enabled by default (with their admittedly obtuse usernames.) With WebDAV, I can mount my web server in the OS X Finder and work with files drag-and-drop style.

WebDAV can be a pain to set up, however, and some hosts just don't offer it.

One awesome (yet still early-alpha) solution is MacFUSE, a Google Code project. Included in the downloads for that project is sshfs, a plugin which allows you to mount any ssh/sftp server as a drive on your Mac. The whole project is a very early release, and they include lots of disclaimers, but it has worked out fine thus far for me mounting my web space to play with jQuery / make template changes quickly.

$ versus $ (or "Battle of the JavaScript Libraries")

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Sun, 04/08/2007 - 09:52

Anyone familiar with recent trends in JavaScript as it relates to web development has probably heard of either jQuery or Prototype.

They're both very useful JavaScript libraries. I've done a little tinkering over the weekend, and I think that jQuery looks to be my favorite of the two. I've gone so far as to install jQuery in this WordPress theme and do a little tinkering. My first demo is very simple, but easy to implement: hover over any link in the meta-information above this post, and you'll see a gradual fade in the color from a lighter grey back to the original.

Ben Folds

Submitted by Various Mobile ... on Mon, 04/02/2007 - 01:44

Ben Folds

Mugsy's in Bloomington has some of the best wings I've ever tasted, and it's almost time to rock...

The fragmented state of mobile app development

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Sun, 04/01/2007 - 19:08

I'm not a huge fan of FlashLite 1.1. I've been playing around with it for the last few days in a mobile development class I'm taking, and I find myself really just waiting to move on to FlashLite 2.0 or something else entirely.

It isn't that FlashLite 1.1 is bad its just different. And inconsistent. I'm very glad that Adobe (Macromedia at the time) worked in what of the dot syntax they could, but I find myself wishing they had done more.