ricardocabellov5.5

Last time I saw one was the first time I went to work on Germany, while being in London I've rarely seen a sunrise. I mean, properly, with the beach or a mountain being on top of the sun, instead of a bunch of bricks. Specially because I leave to work at 9am, but I would like to see the light going in the windows while trying to wake up.

Somehow I woke up at 7am today, and I was able to see the sunrise today, but not the real one, this one...



I guess that will do... not!

It was about time to put the showcase on the homepage again. When I released it first time it worked more or less fine for a month and then Firefox released a new version that made the site very buggy. At the point it was a flash menu that when clicked setted the URL address with swfaddress and loaded the actual link on a iframe. That double action code seemed to be a bit of a problem.

http://mrdoob.com/

This time it's a mix of PHP5 and Javascript. It's my first time with PHP5, but SimpleXML was very easy to get used to. In half an hour the PHP was reading the xml and creating the structure. On the Javascript side, I have already tested jQuery before, so I wanted to give it a try to MooTools. I liked the fact that once you're done you can create your own .js file with the things you are really using. This one took more time, but in the end it was also very simple, just take a look at the code.

This time doesn't use the #/XX style links, it reloads the menu every time you select an item, but I've done my best to keep it very small and also it would get cached anyway. It is still not finished, still have to put the source links and visited links graphic but the base is there.

Browser Testing time...

I developed it on Firefox/Linux, and I noticed it was a bit choppy sometimes. Specially when the swf piece at the bottom is a bit cpu heavy. Interestingly enough this didn't happen when it was 2 swf, I guess the vm is doing some magic there. Once it was finished I tried it on IE7/Windows first thing, and for my surprise the layout was all perfect (!!!), although the click didn't work too well, I'll work on it other day. Then on Chrome/Windows everything seems to be just perfect, no chopy animation at any point. I still have to try it on Safari but I got the feeling the results will be like on Chrome. Opera/Linux is the worst in this case, when mouseovering the menu items the swf just stops. Ha.

If it doesn't behave nicely in your browser, feel free to email me with the details and I'll see what I can do. :)

I usually don't blog about other people's work, but Zeh Fernando's (read Tweener) work always creates in me the urge of sharing with everyone. His latest work is, in my opinion, his best work so far and is something I've been silently following since he started. Fnk is, basically, a vvvv done in actionscript.

In a few weeks, if I came up with an effect I want to try, I can tell you that the first thing I'll try is to prototype it in Fnk and if it's good enough then I can try to code it myself for getting the fastest speed. But think about Fnk for prototyping by now as it's a bit slow at the moment. I'm sure it will be optimized at some point.

It's always admirable how the man can spend so much time on his projects until they take the desired shape. Fnk is still in alpha version, and as a matter of fact, mouse interactivity output from the Display node has been just added, but now that he is on the actual development phase the project is improving at a impressive speed.

Here you have a couple of videos to see what's all the buzz about: