Just got back from seeing Indiana Jones 4 this afternoon with the rest of the mediaRAIN crew.
Indy rocked.
(I wasn’t exactly a huge fan of the ending, but I was more than satisfied with it.)
By now you’ve seen and heard plenty about Flash Player 10. One feature that I’m in love with right now is the new text rendering provided by Saffron 3.1. Among other things, this provides better anti-aliasing for fonts, including device fonts.
Why does this matter? Because now you can use device fonts in your TextFields, and do things like adjust their opacity, or rotate them without needing to embed the font. How sexy is that? Obviously, if you’re using a custom font, you’ll need to embed that, but for device fonts, it’s no longer a requirement just to adjust the alpha value of a TextField.
Check this out (You’ll need Flash Player 10 installed).
Download the source: AstroTest.as.
This is a really simple demo, but it’s enough to get the point across.
The last project I had the privilege of working on while at Footnote.com launched earlier today.
Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial
You can view the entire wall, and do more than just view the names of the men killed in the war - you learn about these men.
Initially, the info provided about these guys is just the basics - birth/death, military info, etc., however, as time goes on, and more content is added, you’ll be able to see photos, and read histories of these men. Much of this content will be user-contributed, by the friends and family of the men memorialized by this monument.
Working on this project was great - it was a chance to stretch my talents, and see what I could do as a Flash developer, but it also gave me a greater appreciation for the lives these men gave. I wasn’t alive during this time period, and so I can’t pretend to understand the full impact of the Vietnam War, or the impact that had on the lives of the people that lived it, but working on this project at least made a bit of history feel a bit more “real” to me.
With the recent release of Safari 3.1, I was curious to see a before and after comparison of how Safari 3.0 and 3.1 would render the Acid 3 test. For those who don’t know, the Acid tests are designed to determine how well a browser follows various web standards. Currently, no browsers pass the Acid3 test with 100%, but they are getting closer.
Once I checked out the two versions of Safari, I got curious to see how well some other browsers performed. And so here are the results of my completely unscientific testing, sorted by the respective scores of each browser. Now, on to the results!
So my plan to reveal 100 facts about myself in 100 days turned into about 17 facts before I went on a vacation, and forgot to resume the posts.
I’ll resume that undertaking in the future, but for now, I think I’ll just have to leave it at the 17 for now until I get inspired enough to come up with 83 more facts to share.
Fact 17
It’s a good thing the schools I attended only transfer credit, and not the actual grades.
When I was dating my wife, I was attending Salt Lake Community College. I was doing OK with my grades until it came time to start making the wedding plans, and them my grades went south big time. I managed to pass my classes, but it wasn’t pretty.
After we got married, I decided to join the Multimedia Communications program at Utah Valley State College, so I transferred my existing credits from SLCC down to UVSC. I managed to keep my grades up at UVSC until I graduated, finishing with a 3.7 GPA, instead of the 2.something I was rocking at SLCC.
Fact 16
I can’t give blood. Not that I have any weird diseases or anything, it’s just that I’m a big wuss.
I get really squeamish just thinking about it, and the few times I have given blood in the past, I’ve either passed out, or had to lie down for a few hours afterwards. I can’t even have my blood drawn at the doctor’s office without having to lie down.
This week is the annual Game Developers Conference, which I love, not for game announcements like we get with the other game shows, but for all the geeky developer stuff we get to see. There’s some awesome stuff coming out of the conference so far, and one of my favorites so far is the announcement of the XNA Community Games from Microsoft.
Read the rest of this entry »
Fact 15
The things you do for love…
All of my life, I’ve been allergic to cats. When I was dating my wife, it really wasn’t much of an issue that she had two cats, because they both lived outdoors, and I just didn’t touch them. After we got married, my wife wanted a cat, but our landlords wouldn’t allow it.
Fact 14
Since I’ve decided that I wanted to lose weight, I haven’t really been able to pack the food down in my gut like I used to. Which, actually is a good thing. But there was a time in my life where eating as much as possible wasn’t really an issue.