Flash in the news

Verizon Wireless to Use Flash Technology – Flash can be used intelligently or stupidly … lets hope Verizon goes with the former.
I’ve submitted a trouble ticket to Adobe Labs regarding the blurry text with the Flash 9 plug-in. I’m not sure what can be done now with people that have the possibly defective plug-in other than release a new build of it with a higher version number, i.e. – 9,0,21 … thus prompting people with a pop-up to update their plug-in.
Yahoo! Flash Developer Center – looks like it could be a great little resource.

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Technology

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Cingular redesigns

cingular_redesign.jpg
When I logged into my Cingular account the other day I was happy to see that they relaunched their site. The Good news is that it’s well designed, and the better news is their code looks nice and clean, utilizing divs instead of tables.
Well done Cingular.

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Image

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Text displaying fuzzy with Flash 9,0,16,0 plug-in

The Flash 9 player is not rendering the body copy on my site in the crisp, ‘anti-alias for readability’ setting. My site was published in Flash 8 so it could take advantage of this new text rendering feature. Before I upgraded to Flash 9, the Flash 8 plug-in was rendering my text perfectly. Now it was looking like this:
tcc_fuzzy.jpg

The left side of this image was viewed with Flash player 9,0,19 while the right side was viewed with Flash player 9,0,16. Uhhhh, what the hell……

Continue…

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Technology

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Real estate brokers can kiss my ass

As of October 15th, 2006, my wife, my dog and I will be in our new apartment on Roosevelt Island, NYC. My 1.5 hour commute from Morristown, NJ is over.
Apartment hunting is never a fun process, and you always have to stay on point, ask the right questions and make sure you’re never getting suckered into anything. Many people turn to real estate brokers to do a lot of the leg work in finding the good apartments. Real estate brokers in Manhattan take approximately a 10-15% commission off of you. So if they find an property for you with a rent of say, $2000/month, this is the math:
$2000 x 12 months = $24,000 x .12 (12% commission) = $2,880
Maybe some of you are saying, “Eh, that’s not too bad.”
Fine, but remember that most of the time you’re going to have to factor in first and last months rent when you sign the lease:

Continue…

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Community

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A day with good things

What things? Mostly nerd things:
Mozilla Firefox 2 RC 2 Release – they’ve fixed the stupid Flash focusing problem, added drag ‘n drop tabs, moved the tab close button onto the tab like Safari.
*note – if you have a lot of FF extensions installed, they might not all work yet.
CD/DVD Scratch Repair Kit – apparently this works on iPods too.
Ofiicial Google Mac Blog – sounds good to me and makes sense, considering Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board now.
This is potentially, inevitably good news:
Apple about to announce wireless video iPod?

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Technology

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Clearing floats, margins and other Windows IE delights

I probably should have known about this bug a long time ago, but apparently Windows IE (I’ve only tested v6) likes to double your margins on floating DIVs. What’s the solution? A tiny-ass, stupid line of code:

display: inline;

Other CSS tips:
How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup – now this one I have known about for a while and its very handy.
What I like to do when I’m testing out my CSS is to turn on borders all all DIVs in my document. Many times it takes the guessing out of why your page is behaving like it is:

div {
border: 1px #333 solid;
}

and if by some chance you’re old school and having table issues, you can do the same:

table td {
border: 1px #333 solid;
}

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Technology

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Games on iTunes

itunes_games.jpg
Aside from some freebie codes my friend gave me from Continental Airlines, I haven’t bought any new albums from the iTunes Store since version 6 – basically since Apple changed their DRM, breaking the open source program JHymn created by hymn.
I want my music like the 40 gigs I ripped from my CD collection – free. If I can’t unshackle my legally purchased tracks, then I’m not buying anything from the iTunes Store.
With that said – I have bought a few iPod games from the iTunes Store and they’re great – they make my crappy commute from Morristown, NJ to DUMBO, Brooklyn fly by. ZUMA and Texas Hold ’em are pretty fun.
update: Achtung, baby! Why DRM might kill your music collection

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Technology

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GoToAndLearn();

I actually had a chunk of time today to take another one of the tutorials over at GoToAndLearn.com. Not only does Lee Brimelow know his sh%t, but he has the ability to convey it in a way that is understable to designers and developers with an intermediate level of understanding of Flash (and he includes source code for all his examples).
Before you go blow a ton of cash on some flash courses at some college like SVA, go through some of his tutorials. Start with his Flash Video lessons. Video in Flash is only going to get more popular in interactive design, and he shows you how to tackle it.

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Technology

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TCC Quoted at Campaign Monitor

campaignmonitor_quote.jpg
Nothing earth-shattering, but the crew over at Campaign Monitor were listening to my praise for their products.
For all you designers out there, Campaign Monitor is the best email campaign service out there. From launching email newsletters and blasts to resources on how to format HTML emails, their site has it all.
Set up a free account, as long as you’re sending out less emails to less than 10 or so people the service is free and you can see for yourself how dope their product is.

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Community

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