ricardocabellov5.5

Is it just me or these days Microsoft are "sending" a lot of updates and which forces you to restart the system almost everyday?

I'm tired of moving the window of 'Restart now' to outside the screen so it stops asking me for it :(

I'm gonna be a mac fan here... I don't remember the last time I had to restart MacOS.

One of the things you can't do when you work on a team is to adapt the new technologies as fast as you can as when you work by your own.

This is just an example... when I was working for Spring Digital, we were a team of 6/7 designers. Since Photoshop CS2 was released I knew there was something called variables that could let us save a lot of time and HD space when designing flatscreens for websites. I tried it quickly and saw that it worked great, I tried to introduce it as a new way to design the sites but I failed. Also I wasn't able to use it because my flatscreens had to be easy to modify by the other designers, and none of them had Photoshop CS2 installed... Oh well...

Luckily I'm now working by my own and I can use that way of developing flatscreens. At this point you will be thinking, so what's that? Ok.. Developers will love this one.

When you design the flatscreens for a standard website, you end up doing it in 2 ways:

1st way:

projectname_aboutus.psd
projectname_technology.psd
projectname_services.psd
projectname_contactus.psd

So each .psd has the content and layout for each section.

Benefits: You can save each file as a png for showing it to the client easily, the whole data is split in a couple of files, so loading/saving them should be fast.
Problems: If the client wants you to change the header or the footer of the site, you have to go flatscreen by flatscreen modifying it.

2nd way:

projectname_design.psd (with folders inside it for each section)

Benefits: If you do it properly, you should be have to modify only once if the client asks a change on the header/footer (or any other common part).
Problems: The file may get quite big with all the data inside, and if you're working against a server it can get annoying. You can only reuse the header, as the footer will be probably on different heights. Anytime you save the the files as png for the client you'll have to hide/unhide each folder.


Well, for a developer, this is like writting a code without writting functions, all the time duplicating the same code. Ugly, uh?! Here is what you want to see:

3rd way: (the good one)

includes/projectname_header.psd
includes/projectname_footer.psd
projectname_aboutus.psd
projectname_technology.psd
projectname_services.psd
projectname_contactus.psd

The good news with Photoshop CS2 (although it was released years ago) is that you have Variables, which basically lets you attach an external file to a normal layer. So any time you update that external file it will update it to the other files that are attaching that external file on-the-fly. Some people call this concept instances ;)

How-to:

1. Create a new file.
2. Add a text inside it.
3. Save it as footer.psd.
4. Create another file.
5. Create a layer (I named it footer container).
6. Draw anything inside the created layer.
7. Go to Image / Variables / Define...
8. On the layer selector, select the layer that you created.
9. Check the Pixel replacement checkbox, put a name to the variable (I called it "footer") and use the method "As is".
10. Click on next (Data sets), and then click on that little disk with an arrow pointing down.
11. If will probably autoselect the variable you created as its the only one, so then you only have to click on the RadioBox to enable the Select File... button.
12. Select the file footer.psd
13. Click on Apply and then OK

At this point you should be seeing whatever content you had on that external file replacing the layer you created.

Clean, fast, and without duplications.

Right, maybe it needs a bit of extra work but I'm quite happy with it by now and need to keep working on other stuff. I believe the new ID is more friendly and attractive than the one before (I didn't really like it).

In order to 'celebrate' it I did another test with PV3D. Although whatever you do after Ralph's bump+reflection test will look cheap. Oh well.. here you have:



Well, took a while but it's finally done. Now I only have to do good enough works to populate the portfolio :)

This is how the calendar looks like this year... I'm afraid that Barcelona won't be on the list this year.

February 22 - 26:  Reykjavik, Iceland
March 31 - April 8:  Sevilla, Spain
May 4 - 7: Dublin, Ireland
June 6 - 13: Menorca, Spain
August 2 - 5: Helsinki, Finland (Assembly)

So, If you have ever been to any of these places, I'll love to 'hear' some recommendations and tips for places to go :)

PS: Mum: hope you like to be aware of the travels before I do them instead of after this time ;)

http://www.beatport.com/

This is probably one of the best flash website ever done. Very good example of how Flash can make the user experience much better than a fully accessible website. Compare it to any other online store, and compare how's you listen the previews of the tracks and how many clicks you have to do. I guess this is a good example that sometimes is better to not concentrate on accessibility and concentrate on doing a good service which then ends in a good business.

I'll probably buy some tracks there :)

Edit: I forgot to say iTunes sucks!

I've spent a lot of hours today trying to do something that I thought it was going to be quite easy. While I was doing the Effect01 of the audioVisualizations I realised that testing different mp3s on it just to see how the visuals were going to react was actually very fun. After a couple of mp3 tests I found out that there was something else, the experiment was showing me parts of the tune that I never paid attention before. So I had the idea to make it 'public', so anyone could test it with their own mp3s and have some fun too.

Easy concept, same experiment but with a inputBox where you paste the link to the mp3. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of flash sandbox limitations on that matter. Apparently you can't load mp3's from other servers that doesn't have the policyFile.xml.

I know that you could do a php script to jump the sandbox, but this would mean a lot of bandwidth on my server, which I don't fancy right now :P

This is how I left the project:
http://mrdoob.com/lab/PV3D/vis/effect01/custom/

In fact, if you try it with a link to some MP3 (you can find a lot here), the swf loads the tune, you can listen to it, but the ENTER_FRAME stops and if you're running the debug version of the player it warns you with the limitation.

Do you know any solution for this besides the php script?

I've been having problems with this for a long time now. My experiments always use mouseX and mouseY for controlling the values (in instance, the camera position). So when you click outside the browser, clicking in another window for example, the player will still receive mouseX positions anytime you click.

The problem is that those mouseX positions are well far from real. 100,000px and stuff like that. So this means that when you click on a window outside the browser the 3D scene disappears. I thought that I was just that, just disappearing, but if you wait a bit (which I didn't until today), 5/6 seconds, you'll see how the 3dscene was really far that you weren't able to see it and it the camera will travel to the normal postion by itself, so you would see the scene again. Something similar happens when you click on the address bar from the browser.

This only happens with the Firefox/Mac version tho.

UPDATE: Some people of the flash player dev team approached me already about this bug and after helping them to reproduce it looks like they're already fixing it. I've also reported some other bugs, so don't expect any other bug report in this blog.

After checking Sephiroth's SoundMixer experiment I thought something nicer could be done working a little bit more on that field. Long time ago I did some Visualization system for r08028. With flash7/8 you weren't able to get even the volume of the Sound so I had to do a quick tool with C++ for generating .txt files with the data. Luckily with Flash9/AS3 you can get that data on-the-fly!!

So, this is how the experiments ended up like:


source file, music by Paniq (contemplation)


source file, music by Crankshaft (from the demo Ocean Machine)


source file, music by rydmlego (fire tree)

The source files won't work as it needs some custom objects I've done (cube, piramid), but at least you can get the idea of how everything works.

Enjoy!

UPDATE:
I've updated the files and source files with a better algorithm for showing the spectrum (well, better than nothing, and there wasn't any algorithm in place before :P)

UPDATE 2:
I've added a little bit of decay to the movements, now they look nicer.

"Bustamante se acaba de comprar una casa de 500 ks. de las antiguas pesetas en solo CUATRO AÑOS DE CARRERA MUSICAL."

Pero que super fuerte me parece!!! Hace falta que diga que todo esto es gracias a la television y un claro ejemplo de como saben mover a las masas como si fuesen becerros para ver lo que ellos quieren. Si Bustamante tiene todo ese dinero en 4 años, cuanto tendran los de Gestmusic? Si es que ni siquiera se preocupan de hacerse una web, pa que?

Asi que, compañeros... Sigan viendo la TV, sigan hablando de lo que sale en la TV, sigan marujeando/criticando de los que salen en la TV, hagan publicidad gratis para ellos. Y luego quejense que España esta mal y quejense de que no tienen dinero para pagar un piso. Claro, se han pasado la vida trabajando gratis como simples postes publicitarios moviles en vez de preocuparse por sus propios negocios. Sigan viendo la TV.

I saw somewhere a comment from a guy saying that the pink ball, was cool but wasn't useful at all. I know that the stuff I usually do is too conceptual that is hard to see it being used on the real world. So, here it's another example with the same stuff but with more sense on the commercial world out there ;)



It is still having problems with some polygons, but, don't blame PV3D, blame me instead ;) I just optimised the 3dmodel a little bit, in case I had to create a model from scratch I will make sure it renders properly on the engine.

Well, enjoy the views, and don't look at the glitches ;)