Bill Napier Design

DMX Zone is now offering a Flash based HTML editor which allows you to write XHTML from any browser. Pretty cool.

Both of the machines I work on are still PowerPCs. The newest being a G5, 2.3 GHZ which I got last year.

However, like everything else, I will need to upgrade. To what? Possibly a MacBook Pro. At least that is where I’m leaning most.

But a nagging question to me has been, “Will an Intel machine run Mac OS Classic?” After all, I really don’t want to give up my Classic apps.

Why? Because I can basically do all the stuff I do now with Adobe Photoshop 6, Quark 4.1, Illustrator 8, Adobe Dimensions 2, Flash 5, Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, Fireworks, etc.

Why haven’t I moved on? I have. Most of the apps I just listed I have upgraded to the latest version.

But my point is, that those old pieces of software took less Ram and still got the job done. That’s all that anyone really needs after all.

So when I get the MacBook Pro I can’t fire up Classic, eh?

Well, think again. Enter SheepShaver SheepShaver runs PowerPC emulation software with Mac OS 7.5.2 - 9.0.4 on Linux, Mac OS X (Universal Binary) and Windows NT.

Haven’t tried it yet but its nice to know its a possibility.

Last week, I purchased an additional Seagate ATA hard drive. I had a hard drive scare back in August which forced me to get an external Western Digital drive. Until last week, the Western Digital drive had served as a backup to my one internal drive.

But I knew I only had a matter of time before that drive failed.

When I purchased the drive I realized what I was up against. I needed not only to make sure everything was backed up to the external drive but was also copied, as is, onto the new internal drive.

During a Google search I stumbled across Carbon Copy Cloner by Mike Bombich. Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent little piece of software which is capable of cloning Mac OS 10.1 - 10.4 systems.

It works great. Simply download the software. Select a source and a target drive after running Disk Utility to clear up any boot errors. Then, let Carbon Copy Cloner run (you must have be connected to a Fire Wire or ATA/internal drive.) Depending on the number of files you clone, it could take a while to process. However, once its complete, you have a totally bootable drive with all your applications and files ready to go. You don’t have to spend hours reinstalling Applications and resetting Preferences.

Not only should everyone with a Mac use this software, you should also make a contribution to Mike Bombich for its use. (A drop down menu indicates he’ll take as little as $5. That’s a bargin!)

Currently I’m designing a Flash location map (which may or may not be tied to an xml file.) One nice reference to the type of map I’m producing is available from the National Geographic site.

Its titled, “Discover Appalachia” and shows events a series of icons across the Appalachian region. These icons represent Cultural, Natural, Historical and Festival type events in the region.

The map is clean, simple and to the point. Just what the user is looking for. Nice.

smashing magazine now offers a great collection of links to CSS-based forms.

They note with Web 2.0 registration and feedback forms are everywhere. Because they are the first contact from your company to the consumer (your potential customer) they need to be well-designed, in addition to be easy to use.

They showcase a number of “modern” solutions that a company or web designer can use. One browser based solution is jotForm in which you can actually design and stylize your form inside of your browser. Pretty cool for non-developers.

Monoslideshow is an xml driven Flash app for photos and portfolios.

The really cool thing is that you can easily implement your photos into Monoslideshow without opening and changing things inside of the Flash IDE. (Well, that’s neat for people who either don’t own Flash or don’t require a customized portfolio viewer.)

I found the reference to Monoslideshow here.

Adobe revealed their Creative Suite 3 software icons at the end of December. Their have been a lot of comments made concerning their design. Some people (myself included) feel that they resemble the symbols used by the periodic table of elements.

But even though that is the case it doesn’t mean that its a bad thing. For users of Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc. the most important thing is to be able to distinguish application from application. And because most software is updated on a frequent basis (every year or so) each version should have a new visual look. Its important for the end user to be able to tell at a glance that the software is new and updated.

As a Flash user I want to be able to tell immediately if the icon in my dock on my desktop represents Flash MX or Flash 9. And with the new look I can do that.

See the new Adobe CS3 icons in a Flash carousel at the Flash blog.

Or read more comments concerning the icons from this blog which was one of the first to deal with this issue.

From MXNA this morning I stumbled across this very cool Flash blog.

Tim Wilson, a young talented Flash developer from Austrailia, has done an excellent job of integreting a Word Press powered blog with Flash. He has Flash make a SQL request from a database via PHP and then post the results as blog entries. Flash also makes separate requests from the database for individual posts.

Chris Georgenes, a full-time Flash freelancer, has posted a great tutorial on animating characters in Flash. In this tutorial, Chris details how to take characters from sketches to vector drawings in Flash to “2.5D” (almost 3D, just not quite

For more on Chris Georgenes, check out his portfolio (www.mudbubble.com) or his blog (www.keyframer.com.) He is also a member of Team Macromedia.

Flash with video and sound at this point is still a little foreign to me. However, I thought I would mention putting an MP3 into Flash after reading a discussion on the Flashnewbie mailing list.

The Flash manual (as quoted by Helen Triolo) suggests that you can load an MP3 into your swf and set it to streaming.

//code from Helen
loadSound (Sound.loadSound method)
public loadSound(url:String, isStreaming:Boolean) : Void

//Loads an MP3 file into a Sound object. You can use the isStreaming
parameter to indicate whether the sound is an event or a streaming sound.

//Event sounds are completely loaded before they play. They are managed by
the ActionScript Sound class and respond to all methods and properties
of this class.

//Streaming sounds play while they are downloading. Playback begins when
sufficient data has been received to start the decompressor.

Jason Merrill, another list member, argued however that even though this method was documented as being streaming audio it was not true streaming audio. It was actually a progressive download. Meaning that audio was not played as it was downloaded. But rather it was loaded and then played. He noted that to in fact stream audio from Flash you needed a Flash media server in place. (The Flash media server is expensive and cost prohibitive to most designers/developers.)