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.

Ok, so I'm lusting after this Q. I've got a V710 (a phone most crippled by Verizon) but I've always chased the geek phones. I've liked the v710 because it has removable storage in the form of a TransFlash card. A phone that looks like an ordinary phone, but I can store an entire movie on it and watch it.. and loads of room for hacking.. that's geek. Unfortunately the phone is far from perfect and as noted, quite crippled. But that's about the phone, not the site.

So the Q looks fine, and I was admiring the all Flash site.. noted that they used FlashObject to embed the SWF.. checked out the noFlash version of the page.. nice menu and details, but I struggled a little if I switched between selections too quickly... and then it hit me.. there's no sound at all. It's nothing new, but it kind of creeps me out. I'm all for sites not interrupting my groove and respecting my audio space. So I guess it's that a lot of the new sites are so blurring the line between traditional TV ads (with video), and loads of motion and animation, and have so broken from the mold of plain old HTML sites that it seems unnatural to have silence.

budweiser has music.. which is annoying if you're listening to music already.. (btw.. somebody tell them about SWFObject). Acura is silent..
Dodge Charger is over the top..

Anyway, the phone looks tempting, and the site/page is good, but there's something otherwordly about rolling my mouse over a menu that is in nearly constant motion,seeing the phone twirling around, and hearing no sound.

Just noticed this.. Buy.com just launched a new cough*infomercial*cough video site that uses Flash video to showcase products. The segments are pretty good if you like infomercials, and even if you don't they have some decent info on new products. I watched the little piece about the Sony Ericsson W600 Walkman phone and the one on the Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N router. I want that router.. and only $129.. time to replace my old one and get some more speed and range.

Anyway, they did a nice job on the video.. it's nice to see infomercials making it to the web with this kind of quality. This is why I have a 5mb broadband connection. My only complaint is...... could you make the play/pause button just a little bigger please? I mean come on... heheh..
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