cascadingStyle the Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I am growing to love Quicksilver, which seems to be a religion among some Mac users. I've not yet reached disciple status, but I am finding it very handy. If I could make it search my mail, I would probably never open Spotlight.

That being said, I've only used it for a week or so, and while trying to figure out how exactly I could search through my mail, I accidentally used the "Open All Unread Mail" option. To say the least, hilarity ensued.

My sister was in a pretty serious one-car accident recently. She was on her way to visit our grandmother when her car started fishtailing at 70, and then she rolled twice off the highway and into some trees. I'm glad she's alive. Here's some pictures of how the car held up - as you can see, any passengers in the back would have been done for.

Stay safe out there on whatever roads you have to drive, everyone.

Firefox is my web development platform of choice. The Web Developer toolbar gives us web developers and designers an amazing array of tools, and Firebug gives us not only JavaScript debugging, but also an array of helpful CSS tools, especially tools that will help sniff out traces of the browser's built-in stylesheet (margins remaining on headings and the like, which often confuses beginning web design students who aren't using some kind of browser-style reset.)

In any case, the new Safari Web Inspector, which will not be accessible until you turn on Safari's debug menu, looks to have most of the best qualities of Firebug and Web Developer built in, and enabled the aforementioned debug menu also gets you an Inspect This Element contextual menu item when you right click something, as I am doing with an a tag in the example below.

Bravo Apple! I'm still of the opinion that Safari's Activity Window kills every other solution for debugging issues with loading external data in Flash on the web, and building in a tool like this will make it infinitely easier to debug styling issues in Apple's browser.

(I recently got a new MacBook Pro with Leopard, and this was present. This new feature has been present in WebKit for awhile, but the updated interface is part of the Safari 3.0 release.)