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Blogs ยป Archive for September, 2004
Photo Flasher Effect Panel for Flash MX 2004 Professional
Another panel has been released today, this time taking advantage of further built in (but hidden) features of Flash MX 2004 Professional to produce a simulated ‘flash snapshot’ for your Movie Clips.
As before, multiple event handlers, duration, direction and easing are available within the interface to make adding the effect to your Movie Clips as easy as falling off a bike.
In this example, there is a preview screen where you can see a representation of the effect. The preview screen is updated whenever you change the duration, direction, or easing type; it can also be updated by clicking on the ‘preview’ button next to the preview image
Creating a series of virtual snapshots using the panel is a breeze, as can be seen in the example below
Download Photo Flash Effect Panel for Flash MX 2004 >>
View Photo Flash Effect Panel for Flash MX 2004 Example>>
Getting back a lost client — a case study in "try, try, and try again"
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=176295
This is a follow up to a blog way back in June, called “You are always selling the engagement — even after you have sold it.” In that blog, I told the story of losing a client AFTER we had agreed on a deal.
Here is an update:
I successfully re-sold the engagement.
Here is how:
1. I played the “righteous indignation” card and let the CEO know that it was not appropriate or professional to terminate an engagement that we had agreed upon. I offered to shift the focus if their needs had changed, but still expected the company to move forward with their agreement.
2. I went around a mid-level employee who had been creating a rift. This employee did not like my being hired, because to her I was a threat to her job description. So I went to an ally of mine in the company, someone much more respected than her, and influenced him to be an advocate for me with the CEO. This was easy, as it turns out the mid-level employee had a reputation for being politically (instead of results) oriented.
3. I tactfully made the case that the company continued to NOT make any progress on what had …
CSS tricks in both dimensions
Cameron Adams and Dave Shea both came through recently with some smart new CSS techniques.
Cameron’s trick, entitled Resolution dependent layout, provides a welcome new angle to the long running debate over liquid vs. fixed width designs. The standard dilemma is that fixed width designs waste browser real estate, but liquid designs can lead to unreadably long lines of text. The CSS specification provides a solution in the form of the max-width property, but this is unsupported by Internet Explorer (barring clever but invalid expression hacks) and can still leave liquid designs looking less than optimal in uncommonly wide or narrow browser windows.
Cameron’s solution is ingenious: use JavaScript to detect the size of the window and swap in different stylesheets depending on how much space is available. In his example, a three column layout element is dynamically switched to use a single column when the browser window is resized to below a certain width.
Using JavaScript to modify a page based on its width is not a new idea: I’ve seen it used to serve larger advertisements in a page gutter before - but altering the actual page layout seamlessly is definitely an interesting twist on things. Best of …
Lies! Darn Lies!
Been talking to Marcus Boerger, via email, about the PHP 5 Standard Library article and need to confess ;)
Marcus makes a very good point about the DirectoryReader example I used;
Your DirectoryReader is wrong. It does the non file skipping in valid, but it should be done in next().
But after the necessary changes it still has a major design flaw. It uses recursion. And Iterators are about unfolding.
So what you should do is preventing that recursion and if you look at the result and how much it took you to complete it correctly you see why using FilterIterator would have been better. That one can be used to filter out the non files easily and it makes clear why iterators can be used for functional programming - in this scenario the filter algorithm provided by FilterIterator doesn’t know anything about your data.
Here’s the problem class plus code using it;
class DirectoryReader extends DirectoryIterator {
function __construct($path) {
parent::__construct($path);
}
function current() {
return parent::getFileName();
}
function valid() {
…
DB Slowdown after migrating from CF5 to CFMX?
If you’ve noticed a significant drop in your Database calls AND you migrated from CF5 to CFMX then you might want to read this TechNote released today.
Basically it has to do with a flag being set improperly. A simple check and uncheck fixes the issue for now.
Extremely Exclusive Exclusion Mode
This is one mode that I have never, ever used. I’m probably not the best person to post something on it, but since I’m covering all the other blend modes I couldn’t exactly skip it. So I went to Photoshop help, as it was extremely descriptive with Difference mode, and found…
Exclusion Mode: Creates an effect similar to but lower in contrast than the Difference mode. Blending with white inverts the base color values. Blending with black produces no change.
“Similar to but lower in contrast.” Yep, that’s the best it gets with the explanation for how it works.
I came up with an example graphic to show just how “similar” these two modes are. I have two blue rectangles, overlaid with two additional layers of white/purple/black gradients. One gradient is set to Exclusion mode while the other is set to Difference mode. The overlapping part is the “result” of the blends.
Stunning similarities, aren’t there? Sorry, did I just drip some sarcasm on your keyboard? From what I can tell, blending with pure white and black in Difference Mode or Exclusion Mode produces the same result — but the middle values are quite different.
Just to confuse us even more, I created …
New Article! Installing CFMX
Woot! Got a new article published which walks you step by step on setting up CFMX 6.1 (pre updater) with Apache 2.x on your Windows computer / server.
SciTE properties
SciTE is like the Firefox of text editors - fast, cross platform, configurable, free / Open Source etc. with the bonus of giving a familiar environment on Linux and Windows, particularily where shortcuts are concerned.
If you’re used to editors like EditPlus or Ultra Edit on Windows, SciTE is at least as configurable (end of line chars, tabs / spaces etc.) and provides a source “tree view” allowing you to “collapse” functions / classes etc. plus has excellent code completion.
On Windows there are a number of pre-packaged installers - I tend to use this one (.exe) which is based on the latest SciTE CVS. On Linux, usually use a package geared for the distro, although compiling your own is no problem if GTK is available.
There’s also a companion Filerx (Windows only) which I don’t use but adds “project” related features.
Anyway - thought I’d dump my SciTEGlobal.properties file here, to make my life and anyone else’s easier. Configuration can be applied in a number of files, allowing a base configuration to be inherited while individual users can modify their own settings further. The easiest way to to edit your own is from menu “Options” > “Open …
PEAR::Services_Ebay ready
Was grumbling about the Ebay user interface a while back. The good news is Stephan and what he’s done with PEAR::Services_Ebay (well worth a read) looks very much like it’s going to be accepted.
What’s more the design looks excellent - check this out for example - the names of the classes already pretty much tell you everything this package does. The only “bad news” is you’ll need PHP5 to use it.
Precision
I’m working with a client today about strengthening his pipeline. He has a proprietary technology that will supposedly change the world, has some supposedly incredibly well-connected salespeople, and yet he hasn’t closed any business.
As we went through his pipeline, it became obvious why: His thinking, speech, and actions are not precise. Every opportunity he described was vague, hopeful, and long-winded, but not crisp or compelling. “This one might start soon, but we have no idea what the pilot will be or what will happen next. But we are really excited about it.”
To succeed in selling, you need to be precise. Every mention of a business opportunity should be focused on these questions:
1. How does the prospect define value?
2. How do we connect what we do to the prospect’s definition of value?
3. What do we have to do to move this opportunity forward, and by when?
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