Archive for September, 2004

This should work for most form fields, try it out and see what happens. For text field your cursor will change from a pointer to a typing tool to indicate to the user what should be done in that box.

Conan to replace Leno

I heard on the radio today that Conan O’Brien is the announced successor to Jay Leno when he retires in 2009. I love Conan, and can hardly envision him in that role of Late Night host. But talk about over hyped, it was all over the TV tonight. It’s five years! They interviewed everyone from Mrs. Brady to Conan’s socks. What can ya do, that’s Hollywood.

The best possible image quality in Flash MX

Working with Photos in Flash can be a tricky proposition.

I have had problems before when importing photos for use in a Flash presentation. Many times photo quality can seriously decrease disproportionately to the quality level that is set in the publish settings.

Today, I read a post regarding image quality on Macromedia forums saying that “You cannot scale photos in Flash”. Having problems with a Flash file that contained photos, I tried out this theory.

I had imported three photos into a flash file, scaled them down approximately 20% and I had set my publish settings to a reasonable 92%. The images looked jagged and all text used in the images was illegible. Even when the publish settings were set to 100% quality, the text still looked jagged.

By resizing this images to the exact size needed in Fireworks and then re-importing them into Flash, all text was legible, and images were crisp. I was even able to reduce my export quality back down to 94% and have the images and text look presentable. Also, surprisingly, I reduced the overall movie size by 200-300K.

This would be my advice to all of you out there.

If working with photos in Flash and you can’t figure out why they look so bad, use the tips above to troubleshoot.

I would always advocate that any and every webpage is first laid out in Fireworks. That way no image adjustments will be made in Flash. All image size decisions will have already been made in the layout.

If there is an instance where layout decisions are being made in Flash and you are scaling an image multiple times to try to make a layout work, when the final size is chosen, the image should then be sized correctly in Fireworks and re-imported into Flash.

29th September 2004

I got more free stuff today!

For $20 today I got a second monitor! I have connections. So when I got home I got to rearrange my office a little to accomodate it, which I always enjoy trying to make my office flow together.

Now all I need is a new Video Card that has a VGA and DVI outputs with a converter and I am all set to go with a dual monitor environment. I know how excited you all are so I will make sure to take a picture sometime and show you where all this magic happens.

Sections Updated: Flash, TV

Design your own CSS website Part 1: The Wrapper

When I first started disecting CSS websites, which is sometimes the best way to learn, I found that each site has a “wrapper”. This not really a jargon term, but I found it showing up time and time again in designers CSS style sheets as the first layer entry. When I started to read tutorials and explanations on the internet I found out that the “wrapper” contains all of your content. See my entry below for more information.

So knowing now what the most basic building block was, I started as I usually do, in Macromedia Fireworks.

By laying out my sites, meaning, designing the front page of the site down to the pixel, I then have the roadmap for everything I am going to need when building my site. I have exact dimensions, I have color codes to pull from, and I have already created the images so all I need to do is crop them into their own seperate files, export them, and start making my site.

One of my goals with this site was to have a cool looking background. Originally I had this gradient in Purple and Blue, but for some reason, it seemed too overpowering to me and not what I had originally pictured my blog to look like.

I have always been a strong advocate of detail. Detail is what will set you apart from the crop. When I started to design my background I made the image that you see repeated at about 400 x 400 pixels and shrunk it down. In fact, here is the base pattern;

I tried to draw on other websites, logos I had found, and even a little Art Noveau to come up with my idea. Now, you may saw, why design it so huge when it will be so small and most of that detail will be lost. I say because it is that consideration of the detail that most users won’t pick up, but at the same time they won’t pause and go, “Gosh, that looks kind of funny.” Remember, everything looks that much better reduced when it was created a million times larger.

I then created a orange to red gradient, repeated the symbol pattern at a set height, {in this case the background image is 40px wide by 1350px high} and set my blending mode on the background pattern to multiply. Check out this link to see the background alone. Finally, in the Body selector I set up the background image and the repeat declaration;

Body {

background-image:url(http://www.rotheblog.com/images/background5.jpg);

background-repeat:repeat-x;

margin:0px;

padding:0px;

background-color:#960E0E;

}

Remember for the background-repeat declaration, repeat-x will repeat horizontally. I also set the margin and the padding to 0 in the Body so that my website butted right up against the sides of the browser. Finally, I set the background color to the same as the bottom of the image so that the pattern faded into a solid color. I didn’t want to have to plan for how tall my pages could get with however many entries, so I limited the height of my background pattern and had it fade out.

With my site designed in Fireworks, I can now make the declaration for my “wrapper” div block because I have the defined width of the site.

I know that most of this doesn’t apply to CSS, but this is the basis for my site. Tune in for Part 2 of my series when I get into how I made the second step of the website, the header and maybe even in part 2, the navigation.

Catwoman (2004)

I knew as soon as previews came out for this movie that I would have to see it for cheap because even the trailers made it
look stupid. But in some respects, you have gotta give this movie props for making it through 10 years of cast and directorial changes, out of development hell to the big screen.

I think though that was kind of the point. The audience after Batman Returns has long since past. This movie wasn’t poorly made, just got lost for maybe a thought originally to cash in on the popularity of Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.

It didn’t suffer from bad dialogue, but almost worst, just a really stupid plot. A cat breathes on Halle Berry and she has magical
powers. I asked myself, is that so much different than a radioactive spider? Yes, at least that is a little believable. Halle Berry
looks painted gold and walks like a robot most of the movie, and the action sequences which are nicely envisioned are so choppy it is hard to follow.

Either way, I didn’t expect much and I got what I expected.

The difference between flypage.html and results.html

I have been having a problem at work with the Interchange site I am building. The flypage, which is exactly what it is titled (A page that generates on the fly based on user input) was not applying the template. Every page of my site had the correct template except the flypage, and even then, it only seemed to be in a product category with all of the products listed respectively.

If you clicked on a specific product, the page came up with the correct template. Well, in the Pages folder there is a file called results.html. This is the page that is used solely to generate another page on the fly, this time only displaying the results of a user chosen category.

After I went in and set the correct template for that page everything seemed to work fine. And easy mistake to make, my boss actually pointed this out to me since this is the first site I have built that has steered away significantly from the base template.