Chakra Media blog

Going through some old files, I found this Flash experiment I did back in 2003 with my friend Qtip. The 5 Second Volley is an exercise in creative freedom. One participant utilizes a 5 second block of the timeline to create an animation, then passes the file to the other participant and he does his 5 seconds. Repeat until 30 seconds has been reached. There are no rules (unless you make them) and the idea is just be in the moment and create whatever comes to mind.

We decided to do two versions, each with our own choice of music and slightly different endings.

JDS

QTIP

I'm pleased to announce the launch of Sector 9 Skateboards' new web site:

https://www.sector9.com/

I've been riding a skateboard since I was seven, so this was a pretty cool project for me and I was stoked to work on it. Chakra Media teamed up with Vividminds on the design and layout while we took care of the ActionScript development and I'm amped how it all came together.

This Flash/AS3-based e-commerce RIA took a little longer than anticipated to build due to the learning curve of using ActionScript 3, but it was worth the effort. The site is using MySQL and AMFPHP and features back button/deep-linking integration via my design template framework. While not fully implemented yet, the site also features 'dynamic' deep-linking down to the product detail level using clean URLs. (I'll elaborate more on this in a later post...) This site is definitely a '1.0' piece with a lot of updates and changes coming in the future.

Computers and their Users around the world rejoiced as Adobe released a major update to the Flash Player. Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9.0.115.0) is now available and includes a slew a bug fixes and great features like:

• New audio/video options with H.264/HE-AAC codec support
• Improved Performance through multi-core support for rendering, hardware scaling in full-screen, multi-threaded video decoding, a new algorithm for image scaling, and the Flash Player cache for local caching of common platform components to reduce SWF sizes and app loading times
• Support for full-screen mode for Linux
• MSAA Accessibility support for the plugin
• Mac OS X Leopard support
• And bug fixes

Check out the list of bug fixes at Tinic's site.

Emily Huang has some other great links as well.

Dear Adobe,

Dreamweaver sucks.  I want GoLive instead.

You bought a great product from CyberStudio in 1999, and the next version came out a bloated, RAM-eating schweinhund.  Every version thereafter seemed slow as molasses.  I tried to switch to Dreamweaver but the interface was just too painful.  Now with CS3 Web Premium I'm forced encouraged to use it.  F that. I bought Coda and I love it.  But there are still those times when i need WYSIWYG, and Dreamweaver just ain't cuttin' it.  GoLive's site managment features have always been better than DW and the redesigned site panel in CS3 is a major improvement.  And now that it's intel-native the app feels speedy again.
So, can I trade you?  I'll promise to triple-secure-delete every reference to DW on my machine if you'll send me a serial number so I can unlock my 30-day trial of GL.   Come on buddy... please?
Sincerely

Justin

This past Saturday I ran in the Camp Pendleton World Famous Mud Run. The Mud Run is a challenging 10K run with hills, tire obstacles, river crossings, two 5-foot walls with mud on both sides, tunnel crawl, slippery hill climb, and the final 30-foot mud pit. This was the second time I've done the event, the first time being two years ago and it's a blast. This year I wanted to least beat my previous time (1hr 7min 16sec - 368th out of 3,500 - 57th in age group) which I did (1hr 4min 19sec - 321st overall - 50th in age group).... I'm happy about that, but I think I may have over-trained and not given myself enough time to rest, because my legs felt tired the entire race and I didn't feel 100%. I really wanted to go under an hour and I still think I can do it. Now I'm going to have to wait until next year to find out....

A company called brightroom had photographers in various places throughout the course taking pictures and they post the images on their site to view/purchase. They are supposed to identify your images by your bib number, but that doesn't really happen so you have to go through about 10,000 images to try to find ones of yourself or your friends. It's hilarious to see some the expressions on peoples faces. Luckily mine weren't too bad. Here's a few I found this year...

there's been a lot of updates going on with some of my favorites technologies and most of them have been blogged to death... here's my cliff-note version

iPhone: damn i want one. where's the API? Web 2.0 without Flash? i don't think so.... Prediction: Adobe Air is the first 'third-party' software to appear on the iPhone allowing developers to create applications using Flash/Flex along with CSS/AJAX. .... say, doesn't the Air runtime use the Safari WebKit? hmmm....

Leopard: cool Finder improvements ... love the CoverFlow view. Finally, a 'unified' look... nice.

Safari 3: Now for Windows. ... found a bug - registration form wouldn't work on a blogspot site... cool feature that you can resize any HTML textfield.

Flex 3: downloaded the Flex Builder beta... haven't played with it yet. Open Source.. cool. Deeplinking... cool. Smaller Flex apps by caching the Flex framework in the Flash Player... uber cool. it's exciting to see this great tool getting better.... lot's to new stuff to keep up with!

Adobe Integrated Runtime (Air): the cross-operating system runtime formally known as Apollo finally gets it's official moniker.

Flash Player 9 update: mip mapping! multithreading! full-screen hardware scaling! caching of the Flex framework! yay!

Path Finder: update to 4.7 - finally fixed the bug where you couldn't open .as files by double-clicking on them.

I had the pleasure of meeting a talented writer by the name of Nathan Myers at my regular morning hangout/office.  Nathan writes for some major surfing publications and is currently working on a piece for the LA Times on Eric Jordan and 2Advanced.  He asked me if I'd heard of EJ and 2A (what web designer hasn't?) and asked if I'd like to read a rough draft to check for errors and give some feedback.  Nathan didn't know much about Flash before starting this article and wanted to make sure his terminology was accurate (which was for the most part).  Anyway, since the article isn't out yet I won't comment on it's contents (I will say it's good though!). If it comes out on the web, I'll link to it.  The point of this post is after reading about Eric Jordan and 2A I was reminded about his other job as a DJ and how he puts out free (as in beer) monthly sets of music for people to download on his site Neverrain.  I'm not a huge techno fan, but I find this music is great to work to.  I've been super-busy these past few weeks and this helps me get down in the trenches and just start hammering on the never ending pile of tasks.  His latest set is called Shade & Aura and he's released Volume 1 which is the darker of the two mixes. Check it out.

Just launched a new site for client David Robinson Design Inc (DRD), who is one of today's foremost design firms with an emphasis concentrating on restaurant design. Robinson himself is positioned among the industry’s most innovative and accomplished designers in Southern California. The site is all Flash and is back button/deep-link enabled using SWFAddress. The portfolio is XML-driven allowing for easy updates to the images and descriptions.

http://davidrobinsondesigninc.com/

Forget the Bones Brigade - the crew from Logan, Utah (a skateboarding mecca) shows you how it's done. I think I'm the only person with a digital copy of this video from 1990, so I figured it was my duty to make sure everyone in the world can enjoy this masterpiece in all it's encoded-from-a-degraded-VHS-tape glory.

Just posted a new site for my friend/neighbor Bridget Moss.  I took this on as sort of a 'charity' project as her old site was taken down and she wasn't given a copy of it by her previous web host.  This is a good example of putting that design template to work... I was able to create this simple site that is back button - deep link enabled and search engine optimized with minimal time and effort.