December 2007

After Effects and Flash 3D Animation

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Sat, 12/29/2007 - 19:11

When I do side work, I do it under the moniker of SquareBaby LLC. I've also been playing with After Effects recently, because I want to get back into digital film production.

So I created a SWF of an animated version of the logo, and then effortlessly turned into a 6-second 3D animation using After Effects. It's hosted at Vimeo, my new favorite video hosting site.

Steven Merrill

Steven Merrill is an interactive and web designer and developer. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Bradley University with a degree in Multimedia and Music and a minor in Computer Science and Information Systems. He has worked locally, and consulted for clients around the state, including doing work on the e-commerce platform used by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, building an interactive Flash map for a leading sterilization company, and building an interactive Flash application detailing the history and proper application of warning labels on Caterpillar equipment.

Brian McMurray

Brian McMurray, a web and interactive application developer, graduated with highest honors from Bradley University with a Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia. He has developed large-scale web applications and websites for clients such as the Museum of Broadcast Communications and Martin Engineering.

About

Brian McMurray and Steven Merrill are cascadingStyle, a gathering of two like minds. Steven and Brian are both web and interactive developers working in the Central Illinois area. Together they have experience in mobile applications, standards-based web design and development, and especially the use of the open-source content-management-system Drupal.

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Watch this space! cascadingStyle is coming soon!

The (ACID2 Compliant) IE8 Engine and Office 2007

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 06:16

After discovering that IE8 passes ACID2, I looked around the web a bit more. I linked to a video on MSDN's Channel 9, but there's another post on the IE blog that details a bit more information on the IE8 milestone, and it looks to include an entire code checkin report.

IE8 Passes ACID2 - With Microsoft Dev Comments

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 04:14

Straight from the horse's mouth, Microsoft's Channel9 blog has a video piece and blog post describing how IE8 is now passing the ACID2 test.

This is great news, since the included video states that they not only had to fix several bugs to do this, but there's also many CSS features they had to implement to do it.

The video is in WMV format, but it's worth a watch, since it sounds like the IE team is more standards-aware than their current browser releases would indicate :)

UPDATE: My childhood friend Jonathan Hoersch works at Microsoft, and we had a chat today about this excellent news, and he says: some of the things i worked on for acid2 include the nose (including the blue hover), borders, images (the eyes), and the hyperlink scrolling.

Here's one more excerpt from our IM conversation:

Jonathan: so you know the beginning of the video where we show the acid2 evolution?

Me: Yeah

Jonathan: its from an internal video where we had the 2001 theme in the background :-) unfortunately we couldn't include the sound

It looks like the IE8 team is working towards interoperability in this effort. Now if we can get IE6 out of the ecosystem, I think that we'll have a far happier ecosystem of web designers and developers.

Adobe Open-Sourcing BlazeDS, Aka Flex Data Services and AMF

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Fri, 12/14/2007 - 15:12

AMFPHP is a great way to get data from Drupal via the AMFPHP module (or other PHP web apps) into Flash with a minimum of processing overhead.

As of two days ago, Adobe has announced that they will open-source their BlazeDS (formerly Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES) server, as well as the complete specification for AMF (PDF link).

I'm impressed with the number of things that Adobe is open-sourcing as of late. This strategy is winning them the minds of multimedia developers, and it may end up with their domination of the web and desktop spaces as Flex and AIR roll onwards. I, for one, welcome our new Adobe overlords.

Podcast Watch: Conscious Business

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Fri, 12/14/2007 - 14:51

I'm going to post about several of the podcasts that I listen to to keep up on web design and development trends. The first that I'll spotlight is also the newest that I have started to listen to: Conscious Business by fallingfruit.tv.

In particular, the most recent episode featured an interview with Matt Westgate, co-founder of Lullabot, which is one of the largest Drupal companies in the world. This episode doesn't talk much about Drupal, though. It focuses mostly on the practice of running a virtual company, and how to keep it under control.

It sounds like an excellent podcast, and I'm now in the process of going back and listening to other episodes.

Druplash and Druplex at DrupalCamp Wisconsin!

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Thu, 12/13/2007 - 19:25

Brian McMurray and I will be presenting at DrupalCamp Wisconsin in January.

He and I will do a session on using Drupal to content-manage Flash and/or Flex sites and I may have a student who will be working on the same thing there. (We like to call these techniques Druplash and Druplex, respectively.)