I’ve been busy hardening and improving my video player lately and had so many updates for it I decided to upload it to activeden as a new file altogether. After some final bug fixes and testing it’s been approved for sale. I think it’s a huge improvement over the last video player. The video playing [...]
To get the url of the html page that contains the flash/swf file we need a little help from the browser. I’ve written about the following methods before, but they were in as2 with “Get current url to Flash swf using an External Interface call” and “Get Current URL and Query String Parameters to Flash [...]
Often we need to have different parts of a website talk to each other. This can get tricky when we are using multiple technologies and need the communication in real-time. Going from flash to html is done through javascript on the browser side and in actionscript we use something called ExternalInterface. The ExternalInterface class is [...]
So what’s the difference between design and style? I’ve had to explain that to quite a few clients that think all they need is a good looking website and they will make millions. It has to work and the design has to (subconsciously) show users how it works and it’s a perk if it looks [...]
The simple trick here is to make the browser think that the image file is new. Most web professionals know that browsers will cache and image and remember it’s url and then if you try to access that url again it will show you the image you already downloaded rather than getting a new copy [...]
Not just a redesign but a whole new site and location! After having built loads of sites for clients/friends I kept learning things I wanted to employ on my own site, but the cobblers kids are always barefoot right? I kept implementing new things and knew that they were making my clients lives easier and [...]
Pears is an open source WordPress theme by Dan Cederholm (simplebits), enabling people like us to get your own pattern library up and running quickly. Collect, test, and experiment with interface pattern pairings of CSS & HTML. I’ve customized pears. I’ve forked it, adding support for coding in LESS as well as code highlighting! The [...]
Here is my collection of notes from attending An Event Apart Atlanta 2012. As I took notes, I had the thought that I’d be sharing them with co-workers and that it’d be easiest to just publish them here. I hope they are useful to someone else out there who didn’t take notes on something or [...]
Basecamp announces that it’s new version will not support old browsers! They will of course continue to support them in their “classic” version. But this is good news and as more implement this type of policy the internet will be happy. It used to be one of the biggest pains of web development. Juggling different [...]
What are “standards” coming to? Who’s guilty? Apple and Chrome: They’re supporting vendor prefixed properties like they’re a standard part of development. Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer: They should have been on the ball more. Need to push their evangelism further. Teach developers that it’s not exclusively -webkit to style elements. All the browsers: experimental [...]
Ethan Marcotte has become the father of Responsive Web Design and spent this whole day focused on principles, techniques, gotchas, examples, … all about building and how to build responsive sites. With a sprinkle of mobile first. For Ethan, it all started with this article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dao/ Think of architecture, the whole design phase is established [...]
Senseless waste of asterisks… Avis used an asterisk to denote optional fields. This means that there is a lot of baggage that comes with an asterixk. Somewhere this symbol got meaning, it’s not in the bible! We can control when something goes from unintuitive to intuitive. A design is intuitive (although technically and grammatically speaking [...]
The iPhone changed our industry in 2007: first mobile to have a desktop class web browser and it made people start using their mobile phones as computers! All apps other than apple provided ones were web browser apps. Most of the first apps were branded web browsers. No real difference between using mobile site or [...]
MASS MEDIA (in waves) Print, Recordings, Cinema, Radio, Television, Internet, Mobile Mobile is the new Mass Media It certainly is mass and massive. More mobile devices (by far) every day than babies born on the planet. Mobile devices are eating into our personal computing shares. New waves of mobile media eat all previous media waves. [...]
Mobile and touch should be revolutionizing design and user experience. We don’t want to touch a tiny link or button. Back button is just stupid. Fitz’s Law, make things fat proximal targets for easy touching. People are lazy, let’s as designers LET people be lazy! Maybe even use the whole screen as your control. Eliminate [...]
Grep to for analyze css. CSS duplication is a web-wide problem. Started helping facebook optimize thier site and they had 1.9MB of css loading. The same color showing up hundreds of times. Many many color statements and declarations. !important declarations get dangerous. Sites found to have over 500 !important declarations! float is a serious problem [...]
I'm Evan Mullins. I'm a web designer and am very interested in the intersection of art & technology, user experience, and interactive design. I like contributing to make the web incrementally a better place. I love simultaneously solving problems & making things aesthetically brilliant. circlecube is my interactive design site chock full of tutorials, critiques, techniques, technologies, ramblings and a playground of experiments. Welcome to it!
!!!! thank you
Evan Mullins