Opthumb

Snap and Drag Screen Shots

One of my friends just passed along an interesting tool called Snap and Drag: http://www.yellowmug.com/snapndrag/ .  Some of it’s keyfeatures include taking screen shots off of dvds playing in iDVD.  Extremely handy.

Flash IDE player is not the real world

Every flash developer has used the Flash IDE to debug and test his/her application.  Simple test the movie and you get a quick preview of your application.  However, the player in the flash IDE isn’t a standard player.  Here’s a list of things that will surely grow as my testing continues:

• Flash IDE has no crossdomain security because it assumes that anything loaded while testing is safe.  When testing cross domain issues, I tend to use javascript calls to console.log(a feature in firebug) to output errors.
• Flash IDE does not support stage.addEventListener(Event.MOUSE_LEAVE, foo).  This command is ignored when moving the mouse off the stage.  It seems to work when the application is slotted in a webpage.
• URLs with params do not work in flash IDE.  IE….. a relative path like “./event.jpg” is not logically equivalent to “./event.jpg?timestamp=123″ .  Flash IDE doesn’t know how to interpret the get params and throws errors when attempting to find event.jpg.

nginx as a marketing case study

I’ve been searching around the web for different interesting marketing examples.  I read somewhere that the average user makes a judgment about a website within 2 seconds.  This is a scary number.  We all like sites that look good.  With that said, marketing to your audience should be the focus of the site.  Case and point…. http://nginx.net/.  At first glance, this site looks like it’s straight out of Doug Englebart’s sketch book from the 80′s.  There’s an underlying brilliance to their site.  It’s simple, to the point, and it screams speed and performance are paramount.  In many ways, their site seems to be the perfect example of marketing to an audience of hypernerds (including myself) who only want information.

Thus….. It’s not just the visual design of a site that grabs the attention of the user.  It’s about creating a visual design that illustrates the overall pysche of the product and the potential user base.

Every programmer should avoid this:

http://www.projectsidewalk.com/images/flowchart2.jpg

Ingestion…… is there a better term for this process?

Just working on some file ingestion specifically for converting PPT files into flash.  The web output from PowerPoint is woahfully lacking.  So….. I’m going to use hpricot and standard folder traversing to ingest all the content in our power point presentations.  I’ll setup watch folders that we can drop files into for automated ingestion. Here are some initial links:

• file traversal: http://cf-bill.blogspot.com/2007/02/ruby-directory-traversal.html
• hpricot: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/