Home page mock up
2 Comments Published by David Kingsnorth on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 9:48 PM.
It's nearly 6am and I'm just finishing my first mock up for ArtCrowd.com. I'm pretty pleased with how it's looking and I think I have a good theme to style the rest of my pages by. Hopefully I'll get some feedback from Shaun so that I can get my final mock up done today and crack on with the rest of the pages and maybe even start building my flash elements.
While I was looking at some design blogs and pdf magazines, I found this interactive 3D tag cloud at http://www.designdiary.org/. It's made in Flash, probably using a 3D engine like papervision. It's surprisingly easy to select each link despite the different depths and it responds to mouse movement perfectly. Thought I'd post it as an example of implementing flash elements in to a static html page well. It blends in to the design seemlessly instead of being plonked in the middle of the page with a box around it and gives the page some movement and additional interactivity.
Check Browser Compatibility
1 Comments Published by David Kingsnorth on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 8:19 AM.
http://browsershots.org/
Found this resource while I was bored at work. Basically, you can tick any number of standard or obscure browser types (up to about 80 supported browsers) and this site will generate a screenshot of how the page will display in each of them. You have to bookmark the page and come back later because it can take anywhere between 20 minutes and a couple of hours. Seems like it could be useful if your set on testing your pages on a wide range of browsers.
Found this resource while I was bored at work. Basically, you can tick any number of standard or obscure browser types (up to about 80 supported browsers) and this site will generate a screenshot of how the page will display in each of them. You have to bookmark the page and come back later because it can take anywhere between 20 minutes and a couple of hours. Seems like it could be useful if your set on testing your pages on a wide range of browsers.
Embedding a swf & validating your HTML
0 Comments Published by David Kingsnorth on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 5:02 AM.
After reading Will's post and checking out his links, I tested some of the described methods. Below is a list of the files that should be in your folder and an example of a working, valid script for embedding a swf. This is mostly for my own reference but hope it helps someone out.
1. Your HTML file
2. Your SWF
3. swfobject.js (download this file from here)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Testing SWF Object</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="flashbanner">
<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject('fd.swf','mpl','80','80','9');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so. addParam('flashvars','file=playlist.xml&autostart=true');
so.write('flashbanner');
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>
1. Your HTML file
2. Your SWF
3. swfobject.js (download this file from here)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Testing SWF Object</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="flashbanner">
<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject('fd.swf','mpl','80','80','9');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so. addParam('flashvars','file=playlist.xml&autostart=true');
so.write('flashbanner');
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Google's answer to the iPhone
0 Comments Published by David Kingsnorth on Tuesday, November 04, 2008 at 4:27 AM.
The new G1 from google seems to be a like-for-like alternative to the iPhone. It's difficult to compete with apple in terms of style and design but there is a key feature to the G1 that has the potential to change the way we use mobile phones. The G1 runs an operating system called Android. Android is able to run multiple applications in parallel the same way a PC would, but the feature that impresses me the most is it's open source SDK that allows developers to create their own java based apps and upload them to Android Market. I know that apple sells applications for the iPhone online but the key feature to an Android-powered phone is that any developer can create them and upload them for people to use. This will inevitably lead to a wider and more interesting range of applications being available for mobile devices. Shame I renewed my mobile contract last week.
Quick Halloween flash banner for David Downes Seminar. A combination of programmatic tweening and timeline animation. In terms of interactivity, the banner just has two rollovers. One for 'trick' and one for 'treat', both triggering a different animation. The over states for each option have an obvious drop shadow to create some depth and make it obvious that the text is clickable.
You can view a slightly scaled version of the swf HERE
You can view a slightly scaled version of the swf HERE
Original Contact Form with Awesome Effect
0 Comments Published by David Kingsnorth on Saturday, November 01, 2008 at 4:18 AM.
Just wanted people to see how mad the effect on this contact form is. Really original and quite fun.