Archive for the ‘web/coding’ Category

I recently finished a website design for Eagle Jewelry (http://www.eaglejewelrysf.com) that has some very nice movement and animation all done jQuery.  With the No Flash on the Apple iPads many of the flash sites are just nice big blank screens on the iPad.  The alternative text on most flash sites is a link to download and install Flash but with no support on an iPad you don’t even see that message since it isn’t an alternative.

Eagle Jewelry on the iPad

I personally don’t own an iPad but there is a handy little tool out there to check a website on an iPad screen called iPadPeek.  Just type in the URL and you can see your website (see screenshot).

I’m still learning jQuery but it is a really nice alternative.  I have to look forward to learning HTML5 soon for some of the same reasons but for now this worked out fine.

The world according to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer must not be a very pretty one.  I wish I could just ignore that #$@^%$# browser entirely because it just seems that I rarely have problems with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and web pages work just fine or are relatively easy to fix.  There is always one online viewer out of 100′s that use ie that seem to be the first ones to see the site and then since they don’t have real lives anyway….immediately let everyone know your page “in their world” doesn’t look right.  They must really be tired of complaining (and they do) about how websites look.

So I had an issue with a WordPress site that has a pretty crazy template based on WP-Frameworks that I inherited and everything seemed to be fine in ie8 but not for all.  I found that when people had their “compatibility view” on for ie7 this is what messed it up.  Fortunately, there is a code you can put in your headers’ meta-tags that fixes that issue without having to work up a completely differnt css for ie.  Now of course, for those that are truly using ie7….I just have to say “I’m sorry”,  but I’m sure they are just used to life being miserable anyways.  (*Note:  I will have to fix it for ie7 eventually but the template really needs to be truly fixed but right now, launching is more important.)

…can you tell I’m in a bad mood abut this?!?

Not a very recent post but this is where I found my quickfix on TheSiteWizard.com.

Additional sites that made me feel better were:

http://www.IhateIE.com

I hate IE Blog

I Hate Internet Explorer Facebook page

I finally finished…or rather cleaned up my demo area of Archetype Marketing.  I have always had an area that I upload programs like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and other open source programs so I can learn them and use them to test modules, etc. before installing them on client sites.  I also use the area to do walk-throughs.  Clients “think” they can do certain things and after they try it they make think otherwise.  The other thing that I started to do is to design templates that will work on several of the options so that if a client changes their mind and wants to use WordPress instead of Drupal for example then I don’t have to start all over again from a design standpoint.  Sometimes the best solutions is to combine a few options to so this helps with keeping the branding to go across the various platforms.

I’ve also loaded a few template examples across multiple platforms so you can see how they can be loaded on several options.  This is really going to help me and MAN…I am so glad I got this done.

Yippy for me.  Another thing off my 2010 list.  I’m smoking right now.

Archetype Marketing's Demo Area

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Wow, how exciting.

Honestly, I never made the entire jump to Flash CS4 and have been using CS3 but have improved my AS3 programming to a comfortable not so scary state but I will have to make the jump to CS5.

From the preview there are so many things that look great.  The code snippets are great, I have such a hard time keeping track of all my tweens, etc. and end up with a lot of external classes that I can’t remember if I am using in the final design or not and have to go back over everything.  The drawing tools and the ability to manipulate any videos on screen.

One of the big issues and hurdles I have to get through is the deeplinking in Flash.  I have GOT TO GET A GRASP on SWFaddress.  Would be nice if this was built into Flash CS5, seems like a no brainer on that one but maybe it’s just me.

Watch a preview of Flash CS5 – love the flv editing ability, love the font embed, love the swf history size feature. (Screenshots below are all from the preview…watch it).

For some reason I always have a little bit of a mental block on controlling sounds in Flash.  So I’m posting so I can find it myself.

I had this issue with a client website.  There is an intro that automatically plays and a “skip intro” button that should stop the sound of the intro.  There may be a better way but this worked for me.

When you have sound in AS3 from an external source that doesn’t have media controls you may need a button for a mute/unmute.  Here is some basic code to start your buttons.

//playBtn and pauseBtn are two basic buttons
playBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, playSound);
pauseBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, pauseSound);

function playSound(event:MouseEvent):void{
SoundMixer.soundTransform = new SoundTransform(1); //This will unmute all sound from SWF.
}
function pauseSound(event:MouseEvent):void{

SoundMixer.soundTransform = new SoundTransform(0); //This will mute all sound from SWF.
}

You can add a SoundMixer.stopAll(); to buttons leaving the frame/movie if you want to stop all the sounds completely.