Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category
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Kill Your Television?
In 1991 for about 2 months 27 days 9 hours and 11 minutes Ned’s Atomic Dustbin were the biggest band in my world. I just loved the sound of how their dual basses played off each other and they had the whole moshing and crowd surfing scene nailed which was exactly what I was looking for.
But that’s not what this post is really about.
I sometimes listen to their albums to reminisce, mostly it’s not that good, I mean it was great for a 13 year old pop kid, but these days I mainly skip through to their anthems… -
Safari Popup Blocker And Flash AS3
On a recent project we came across an issue where user initiated popups get blocked in Safari when being called by an AS3 Flash app. The issue doesn’t happen in AS2 and I’d not come across it before, but when I did and I researched it I found it was a well documented issue with no solution. Most popup blockers are able to distinguish between a user initiated popup and an automatic one, and this is the case with all browsers with AS2 or all browsers except Safari with AS3. But what do you do if a popup is an…
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The Definitive Modal Layer
For the last couple of years we’ve been using modal layers where it made sense, basically most places where we would’ve used pop-ups in the old days, i.e. modal layer is to Web 2.0 what the pop-up was previously. But all the while I never felt like I was able able to lock down any solid way of doing this. Every time the issue came up I’d re-visit the functionality, never overjoyed with my latest implementation, so I never came up with a final solution. Depending on the website I was working with and the libraries they were already using…
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CCS Taubman Center Microsite
We just recently launched a microsite for the College of Creative Studies to introduce their new Taubman Center. Renamed from the old historic Argonaut building… and renovated in 2009 this new addition to the college campus not only provides an amazing new facility for the students, but also offers great promise to extend the renaissance that Detroit is currently undergoing.
The site is pretty bare as of now, though the gallery documenting the construction process over the past year is pretty interesting, this is just a phase one and we will be adding videos and other more interesting content -
Running jQuery alongside MooTools
For my latest project I was given the fun task of having to build a microsite modal layer for a third party website that I had no access to, not even to a dev environment. I figured the best way to do it would be to do everything in a JS file that would inject all the html and such, so there’d no need for the mess of sending over instructions to add multiple chunks of html/css/js into various spots on the page, just the one JS call. And jQuery was perfect for this, so I set on my merry…
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Yellow Bird Camera – Video Unbound
Today I came across a tweet linking to a demo of what the Yellow Bird camera has to offer. I was blown away but I had work to get on with so I put it to the back of my mind and moved on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then later at lunch I was explaining it to some colleagues, it was the first free moment I’d had to reflect on the technology after a busy morning, and I started to get overloaded with ideas of how this technology can be implemented. And more than that I never…
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More Augmented Reality
Our team recently had the agency’s first stab at the Augmented Reality craze that’s going down lately. We launched this a few weeks back. We didn’t have much of a budget at all so it’s no great masterpiece and we’re relying on our target audience (8-18 years) not having been previously exposed to the technology, so hopefully they’ll find it fresh and fun. Basically the packaging and magazine ads have the image needed for the experience, we’re not promoting it in any way, it’s just a
viral…seeded campaign. Here’s a neat example of how it works:For the most
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Video Slideshows With Animoto
Researching for a client recently I came across a neat little service called Animoto. The problem we had was needing a photo gallery that lives on a single page. Not a huge problem in itself and any of these… would work, or numerous others I’ve worked with or built over the years. But the issue here is the CMS we have to work with doesn’t have the ability to upload media, this has to be done separately via FTP, so it’s a messy process and not ideal to leave in the hands of the account team. So I figured
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Comic Effect using PHP GD
For some reason I decided I wanted to create a comic-ized image of myself from a photo. I think initially I wanted it to create myself some sort of digital avatar, but in the end it was out of pure obsession. See I figured it was a really normal thing to want to do and I’d find a bunch of free websites out there where I could upload a photo of myself and it would convert it. Not so (admittedly I was searching from ‘comicize’ when I think the correct term is more like ‘posterize’), there are some sites out…