Moveable Type has a new web site, and a new version 2.2, which is a biggie - support for MySql databases... which has several advantages, including a removal of my one pet peeve with the system, slow rebuild time. More thoughts posted in the near future as I hopefully can carve some time to upgrade this weekend.
If you're looking for information about, or are a fan of, Macromedia's Cold Fusion, you'll want to check out cfblog, a new weblog about this powerful middleware product. Cfblog was started by Robert, who is also a guest author on this site.
Whoops, time is flying out the window. Lots of transitions going on in my work life, but we will get back on the ball soon.
You may not have been wondering, but I did some testing, and it seems QTVR files can be imported into Flash MX, but they are converted by the Sorenson importer into a regular MOV file. So, if you have a QTVR file which allows the user to rotate an object in 3D space (for example), it will end up as a movie of the object rotating the full 360 degrees, but without the QTVR controls which allow movement control (sideways and up/down), and without zoom/pan.
As a somewhat recent lawsuit has revealed, the compresion schemes are different between sorenson apple and sorenson macromedia. I wonder if this is why Macromedia's documentation of the exporter is a bit thin compaired to other aspects of Flash MX.
The good news is that QTVR files CAN be imported - this is a nice feature to have, especially considering that supporting them fully would probably be a whole other ball of wax, I'm glad that at least a workaround is available.
To make things very complicated, Flash files can be brought into Quicktime and Quicktime (VR or otherwise) can be brought into Flash. This means that you can have a QTVR file which takes advantage of custom made Flash interface elements. Those elements can be "hotspoted" wtihin the QTVR movie. Confused? There are some interesting experements to be found along this thought.
Webgraphics has been the victim of identity theft, some lowlife is using an non-existant web-graphics email address as the "source" of their spam. This was brought to my attention by another vicitm, someone who's server was being used for mail relaying. If anyone has any advice on how to take action against this, please email me or leave comments. Thanks.
List of User-Agents (Spider, Robots, Browser). For the next time you sift through your access logs.
Amazon mockup, in Valid table-free XHTML. The future beckons. Via Simon Willison.
Meryl conducts an interview for Digital Web magazine: An interview with Eric Meyer, CSS expert
Easy hierarchical menus for DOM browsers.
Your page markup just contains a normal nested UL; a javascript on the page turns its behaviour into an interactive hierarchical menu. Via CSS-discuss.
We all know where our loyalties lie, but if you're still trying to decide on one, here's a handyfeature comparison chart of 13 major blogging tools. (Hardly all, though.)
The WaSP has relaunched. (And is now powered by Moveable Type!)
From the Wired article:
"But one HTML contractor, who asked not to be named, illustrated the uphill battle the WaSP faces in getting programmers to lay aside their old browser-specific tricks: 'Do you know how much I get paid for knowing this stuff?'"
Good response on Meyerweb:
"Yep. And can you imagine how much more you'd be paid if you knew how to code to standards, thus delivering a superior product with outstanding delivery capabilities? Not to mention what kind of reputation you'd build up for doing so, and how much more you could charge then?"
If AOL adopts Mozilla as it's default embedded browser, we may get a workaround to AOL's sneaky image caching and re-compression and it's associated problems.
First a little background info: AOL uses it's own proprietary (".art" format) compression technique (developed by Johnson-Grace) to recompress and cache images before they are delivered to AOL subcribers. This introduces the following issues for us web designers - it is difficult to predict (many images show no ill effects), sometimes very ugly, and completely unavoidable. I should probably say "completely unavoidable unless your image is less than 1k, or you hold an AOL partner status", which I hear entitles you to a top secret development tool which can handle the ART format - no comercially available image editor will open or save in the ART format, not even Photoshop.
As long as AOL does not add the PNG format to their list of compressable/cacheable items, we could deliver PNGs to get around the problem - Mozilla supports them. I'm not certain on this, but it might even be possible to use css to filter png images to mozilla based browsers.
More info on the reasons for these compression issues, webreference also has more info near the bottom of this page about graphics formats.
Several years ago I ran into this issue with a site design created for a client who viewed the work from his home AOL connection. From my personal experience I'd like share a tip for combating undesireable results (massive resampling of a greyscale gradient in my case): save JPGs as progressive and use trial and error with the progressive settings. Hopefully my little snippet of advice will save someone the 3 days it took me to figure it out.
Tutorials on creating pixel art via milo
Owen from the noodle incident has released yet another valuable resource: text sizing. Find explinations of the various techniques and associated problems, find screenshots of each technique in various browsers. I've been vastly confused by this complicated issue and the various opposing viewpoints, this is the closest I've seen to making sense of it all, though he's left it to us to draw our own conclusions (probably a good idea).
London UK readers (do we have any?) may be interested in this debate next Tuesday, organised by AIGA Experience Design London, AKA Advance for Design. Like all Adv4design’s meetings, it promises to be pertinent and entertaining. This issue is one I find particularly interesting at the moment.
Bob Sawyer sent me a kind note pointing out that the webgraphics XML file was out of sorts due to a typo for & where the semicolon was missing (&). I fixed the error, but noticed beforehand that an ampersand was still displayed even though the semicolon was missing (at least in IE 5.1 for Mac Classic) and the code was invalid. This seems like sort of a big problem, especially in terms of invalidation. And it raises another question - which is where does one register IE bugs?
Just found over at Scott Andrew's this link to a tutorial on A Better Way To Display Extended Entries. I don't use Movable Type and this may be old news (I'm frantically catching up on my hours of daily surfing I've missed out on the past two weeks) but though some of you might find this info useful.
Mozilla 1.0 that is.... now it's time to party. I'll be hosting an event in Boston a week from today. While you're grabbing Mozilla, there's a brand new gestural navigation release, optimized for tab browsing (mirror).
Building Brand into Structure by Dan Saffer.
Cascading Style Sheets, Promise vs. Reality, and a Look to the Future by Mark Newhouse
I wonder if this futuristic unit was intended to be portable? I like that Johnny only has to worry about two input knobs, no clunky keyboard, simply tune in the good grades. ad access is a repository of old marketing efforts browsable by category. Link via ordinary life.
This weekend our air conditioner broke, and the last couple of days we’ve had the pleasure of a heat index at 99 degrees Fahrenheit here in Atlanta. The repairman was greeted with much jubilation this afternoon, thankfully the house is beginning to cool down. There is something about inescapable mugginess which makes one quite irritable. My irritation index is now starting to level out. Ah, finally you’ve reached the end of this pointless personal post.
