Buzzword is a pretty neat word processor. Superior to Google Docs and Zoho, from what I can see. It’s visually much more appealing and it’s built on Flex. So that’s pretty neat. Also, the typography is cool.

I read Halo: The fall of Reach as well as Halo: First Strike a few weeks ago. I went back and replayed the first Halo game inbetween those books to make the story fit in, my intention was to then go on and play Halo 2. All I had at the time was a PC, so I got a copy of Halo 2 for the PC and tried to play through the first person campaign to get the next chapters in the story. Unfortunately Halo 2 was unplayable on the PC. It was atrocious, simply terrible. There was no support for widescreen resolutions. Movement was slow like I was moving through peanut butter at sub-zero temperatures. The aiming reticle wasn’t even centered in the screen! It was incredibly un-fun to play. I don’t know what Microsoft/Bungie did to that game when they ported it to the PC but they did an awful job of it, I cannot believe anybody would have actually payed money for that game. So I abandoned the game after the first chapter/level which is when it demands you activate the game with Microsoft. I tried to read up on the story line of Halo 2 online to get an idea of what I was missing.

Last weekend I recieved an XBOX 360 from Becca for Christmas (score!) and a copy of Halo 3. I started up Halo 3 and started playing. I realized that the sluggishness and difficulty with aiming that I experienced on the PC version of Halo 2 was probably and attempt to hobble PC users to bring them down to the level of console gamers. I still don’t understand what happened to the aiming reticle, but whatever. Playing with the XBOX 360 controller I was eventually able to get used to playing a first person shooter with those feeble and imprecise input methods, and started really having fun. I wonder if HALO 2 might actually be fun if you play it on a console, but I don’t know if I’ll bother going back now.

Anyways, the story of HALO was really quite compelling. Right up the very end.

SPOILER ALERT

What the crap was up with how they killed Master Chief? So was the explosion somehow able to kill him in the hanger, but not able to reach all the way up the Arbiter in the cockpit? I don’t get it. He escaped… but he didn’t?

Hey, here’s our version of a Christmas card for all of our friends and family! Enjoy.

Christmas Decorating 2007 from sirtimbly on Vimeo.

I am a designer and I love web-design, but I’m lucky enough to get some opportunities to do development also. I’ve dabbled a little in Javascript, PHP, and ASP web development. I’ve been exposed to a pretty decent amount of ActionScript programming through various Flash projects over the years. My only programming classes were 2 semesters of 100 level Java my freshman year of college, 4 years ago.

I’m telling you all of this so you know where I’m coming from, and why perhaps my workflow is shaped the way it is. This is simply what seems to be working for me, there are certainly better ways to do anything.

I am only on my 3rd Flex 2 Rich Internet Application (RIA) now, so I’m a newb, but here’s my process.

First things first, Design! Yes, get some of the homepage design pinned down, first. Colors, shapes, textures, size of the page, target audience, simplicity of interaction. These are the things to consider before starting a Flex project. Flex is a very visual environment, I think it’s important to mock up the entire application in photoshop before starting anything else. The client gets a chance to see their final product first, they can give their approval for the look and feel and give very insightful feedback on the functionality of the application if they get to see the app right off the bat.

So after a couple design revisions (or just one) you should have a PSD that looks like a flex application. I keep Flex open when I’m doing the design comp to check on what controls are available and what they look like.

After design is approved, start working on your data, this time I created an Entity Relationship Diagram to get a good feel for how the database was going to be structured, and ultimately what data objects I’ll need to be working with in my Flex app. Bring a developer in on this for their knowledge of normalizing databases, etc if you can. The client got to see this diagram also and again we refined the structure of the application in important ways based on their feedback.

OK, next is to get started in Flex Builder. If the crappy Eclipse IDE will launch and run, good for you! You Win! Seriously though, the next step is to layout the interface in Flex, put all the controls, canvases, accordions, and tile lists you will need in place. Export graphics from the PSD to embed as skins for the various UI controls. Test the interface with no code to make sure the basic functionality of the UI components is all there first. I do as much as possible in an external style sheet for my Flex App now, very handy to keep the MXML file somewhat clean. Also, create any custom component that you know you will need (custom item renderer’s etc.).

Next, once the interface in your Flex app looks just like the photoshop mockup minus the data, start setting up your data. I use XML for all the data input, the developers create ASP pages to generate XML files from the database. But first I need to create a flat XML file locally that matches up the Entity Relationship Diagram that I created earlier. Fill in all the data from an imaginary data set, create the images you might need to refer to, make up a full featured XML data structure to keep locally.

Now I create an external .as file to store all of the code for my project, I know theres some stuff you can do with custom classes and true OOP but I just put it all together in one big actionscript document per mxml file. I import any components that I’m pretty sure I’ll need, set up a couple local objects to store my current data. Create the HTTPService objects for getting my XML data into the application. And start creating empty functions. Set arguments and return types if you know them, most of mine have one or no arguments and return type :void. Create a function for all of the buttons in your UI, create a function that is reusable if you can. public function deleteItem(itemID:string):void {} is usually better than creating 50 of these: public function deleteMySpecificItem():void {}.

I don’t worry about actually writing the code into the functions yet, I just create a bunch of empty functions and put one or two lines of comments into the function to describe what I will do there.

Now it’s time to make your data go into the correct places of the interface. Make the data show up where it’s supposed to and how it’s supposed to.

Then worry about functionality and writing the code that allows you to move the data around inside the application and interact with the UI elements.

Finally creat all the HTTPService request to write the data back out to server side scripts that will update the database.

Those last two steps take the longest and are the most tedious. But seeing it all come together is so awesome. Testing, bug squashing, and more testing is not very fun either, but still very satisfying when done.

So, I just thought I would share how I’ve been doing my Flex development. I don’t know who will read this, but I hope it can help someone who is just getting started.

I love being a designer but sometimes you just have to shake your head and sigh at the common requests that clients have. This video effectively pokes fun at what clients think they really want. It’s funny because we all know someone who likes this stuff.

[http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

](http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/)

NBC “Video Rewind” sucks. We missed 10 minutes of the office on TV last night, so tonight we went to nbc.com to watch those first 10 minutes. Was it to much to hope for that their online episodes were as easy to watch as ABC’s? Apparently, yes. NBC is completely incapable of delivering video online. It would have been much easier to download it over bit-torrent. Also, the little bit of the video that did load was at the wrong aspect ratio. Widescreen squeezed into a 4:3 player. Weak. Commercials load and play just fine, they are even larger than the video provided for the actual show. In fact I’ve sat here writing this while waiting for NBC’s crappy video player to buffer, of course I have no idea if it is buffering, because there is no busy indication or loading bar.

And I would try to submit a complaint to NBC, but that is entirely impossible. I’ve looked before, all you can find online is a general survey form that offers no field for comments or questions. So, they want to prevent you from watching their shows on their website through their new video player, and you can’t let them know when it doesn’t work. So here I am… here we are… fun.

Oh, and yes, I’m on windows, and I tried both IE and Fire Fox. Same problems in both.

May I submit for your perusal, a proposal to institute a new internationall observed holiday?

Today I cleaned up the contents of my iPod, an activity that should have been completed a long time ago. My MP3 collection stretches back at least 7 years, and this is my second ipod. I almost never used the shuffle feature of the iPod anymore because of the annoying need to skip through three tracks everytime one song that I enjoy listening to ended.

I primarily use my iPod as background noise while I’m working, but needing to skip repeat songs and songs you hate (why did I have 4 copies of the Jeopardy theme song?!?!) can really break a persons flow. When I find music, I usually use the artists menu, but this doesn’t work when everyon mispells artist names all the time. This is a common problem with songs you get from P2P networks, especially with the songs I got from older ones like Kazaa and Napster. Remember kids, buying music ensures higher bitrates and accurate ID3 tags!

So I spent a little time viewing all the songs that just had filenames with no artist info in iTunes and applying the right artist info, or deleting songs I have always hated. Also, going through the entire library sorted by artist alphabetically shows where artist were named inconsistently. Red Hot Chili Peppers was spelled 8 different ways, and I think Guns ‘n Roses came close to that as well. It’s much easier to find music now on my iPod.

So, please tell your friends, the second Friday in October every year is International iPod Cleanup Day.

Clever editing, perfect simplicity, funny without needing voice-overs and fan-made effects, truly an exercise in comedic timing.

Flashpaper was always underappreciated, but here’s another way to share documents in a similar way. Actually maybe it is still flash-paper, but let’s see what it does with a big image… snip

Ok… nope, that’s just annoying. It says it can do previews of images and PDF’s but that’s an image and there is no preview… so I guess this service is pretty much useless. And it trys to open a popup window, and there’s no option to turn that off. So, nope Adobe Share kinda sucks in beta.

I just had a chance to play with the iPhone. Unbefrickenlievable. You don’t understand how crisp and bright the screen is, no, you think you can imagine, but you can’t. The interface is a joy to behold - smooth animation galore, the future is indeed here. For some reason I thought you could only access one mailbox at a time. This is not true - you can have multiple email accounts.

Also, let’s take a moment and thank the DoJ (Department of Justice) for being the mindless puppets of the telecommunication industries biggest players. See here to observe their ridiculous assertions, they sound very familiar. It’s really frustrating to have to wait for these things to be tested all the way up to the supreme court whenever they make it through legislation. In the mean time, the potential for restriction of freedom of speech is given entirely up to private corporate interests. Awesome.

Also, seriously, you wouldn’t think there were so many reasons to hate a big-mac, but people really go off the deep end. This blog post seemed pretty one sided to me.

Here’s a fairly detailed article about transportation costs of food.

Perhaps I should have reconsidered sending this comment in a recent customer service satisfaction survey to the web.com (Interland) tech support people.

“Congratulations on establishing the low end of the spectrum of all of my personal customer service experiences.”

But seriously, these people were really really unhelpful.

We have returned from your vacation, it was awesome. Here are photos from the middle section of the trip. We spent time at Rifle Falls Park in Colorado and at Arches in Utah. Utah is unbearably hot in August, and our tent was not really up to the night time sand-storm. Still, totally awesome.