I was checking out the ads for Flash template sites on my site tonight and it reminded me of something that I meant to blog about long ago.  Early this past Spring I got a call from an old friend of mine who wanted a photography site (a flashy one..) set up.  I was super busy, but I wanted to help him out so I agreed to set him up with a site.  He takes some amazing outdoor shots, and has been to some nice spots.  Check out his site..

Anyway, back to the Flash template thing.  So remember this was when I was really busy and all, so I told him just to pick out a template from one of the sites and I’d drop his photos in and all would be good.  I figured It’d take a couple of hours tops.  And so he went and picked out a template, bought it, downloaded it, and e-mailed it to me.  I opened it the evening before we were going to get together and work on it and immediately knew I was in for more than a couple of hours.  What I found was code from the Flash 5 (maybe even 4) days, the library and layers were all one flat structure without folders, symbols in the library weren’t named in any logical way, it was built to ONLY have the exact number of photos and categories that were already in it, the original SWF was around 5Mb, and on and on..  It was a freaking mess….  but it worked.  And that’s the important thing. 

My buddy was able to look at the original SWF, tell me what he wanted changed, and after an evening and a couple of hours in the morning it was all working and he was happy.  There are a ton of things on the site that could be improved, but that can happen later.  The Flash template was a starting point, and that’s all it was supposed to do.  Even though I had to spend some time fixing the template (somewhat) to my standards I still saved a ton of time by using it.

ok, I've been under a rock too long apparently, because I stumbled onto flashfilterlab for the first time and spent a couple of minutes editing the dancer in the box. It took a minute to figure out where things are and how things worked, but literally within a couple of minutes I made the changes that I wanted to make and was having fun with it. I'm sure this was the buzz at some point, but I've been consumed with projects lately.

Ahh.. it's fun to see stuff like this and remember back to the early days. My how times have changed.

Back to work.

The Cisco Networking Academy is getting ready to celebrate it's 10th year and so launched a new site to help spread information about the program and also give people who have been involved a place to interact. If you're a fan of data visualized in a 3D space then you'll have some fun with how they've organized the information. They have a global map that you can explore down to the local scale and find facts about the surrounding academies (academies are high schools, community colleges, colleges, universities, etc that use the Cisco curriculum to teach networking and other skills).

There's a summary page (11,345 academies worldwide and over 2 Million students over the last 10 years) and a "Milestones" timeline.

www.academynetspace.com

The networking academy has always been a heavy user of Flash, and this site (at least the high bandwidth version of it..) is in Flash.

Way back when (maybe 6 years ago?) I remember seeing Praystation.com and beginning to follow what Joshua Davis was doing with Flash. I had a friend in art school who was also working in Flash and we'd get together and look at what was smoking hot in Flash animation and design at the time. Stuff from Praystation was always in the mix. Anyway, so I'm looking for a cell phone and went to the Motorola site and I see this cool kaleidescope maker that he put together. That's nice and all, but here's what got me.. They give him major credit: "Motorola has partnered with world-renowned interactive designer, Joshua Davis, to bring you..."
Wonder what the coders and designers who created the actual phone think about that? I mean a Flash guy getting top billing. whoa.

Now if that kaleidescope would just help me understand the price difference between the standard RZR V3m and the MOTOKRZR, which is about $200. hmm. The KRZR is new.