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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

October 14th, 2009

Selling SEO

I have been catching up on some SEO articles in the past few weeks and I have really started to detest the whole marketing and sales of SEO. SEO is not something that should be forced, but should be natural, if a site is well built with clear naming conventions then it should be easy for the user to navigate as it should be for a spider to crawl. If a site is usable and accessible to a human then it is only natural that a robot will have a similar experience with your site.

It takes far more skill and knowledge to build good, useable websites than it does to make sure that keywords/links are forced into places where they are not comfortable.

Forcing SEO can also be a distraction for a designer, when SEO is sold it can result in the designer being forced to add elements to a page that that suddenly become out of context, this could result in an unhappy designer who’s time could be better spent making the site user friendly.

There is also an argument to suggest that fully optimising a site for search can affect the user’s experience due to additional content that could possibly deemed as confusing to the user, and also taking up space on the page that would have been better holding a more functional feature such as a search box itself.

For me it is simple, if you want to pay for SEO then pay for sponsored links, otherwise spend extra money on a well thought out site, built and designed by a team who build and design sites properly.

Posted by Gary // No Comments // Tagged in : , // Posted in: Design, Development //

July 13th, 2009

FP10 drawTriangles demo

Experimentation using Flash Player 10’s new Drawing API drawTriangles method.

Here perlin noise is used as the source for moving vertices of a mesh according to colour values.

screen.jpg

source

Posted by Mark // No Comments // Tagged in : , , // Posted in: Development //

July 13th, 2009

Embedding asset classes with AS3.

For many projects these days I find that just about everything is created in code except for a handful of elements that need to be created in the Flash IDE. In these cases on small projects I recently discovered this method of embedding each asset class within a swf file very handy.

You can define any stage instances within the asset as public variables in the defining class. This will mean everything is strongly typed and nice and tidy. Just make sure “Automatically declare stage instances” is turned off in your ActionScript 3 settings. It’s probably easiest if I show you what I mean.

package com.publicreative.assets 
{
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.text.TextField;
 
       // In the assets.fla library you set the linkage class to the symbol definition here
	[Embed(source="/assets.swf", symbol="DemoTextField")]
	public class DemoTextField extends MovieClip
	{
               // there is a textfield on the stage with this instance name
		public var field_txt:TextField;
		public function DemoTextField() 
		{
		}
	}
}

So now when you want a new DemoTextField… you just need to go.

import com.publicreative.assets.DemoTextField;
var _demoTF:DemoTextField = new DemoTextField();
_demoTF.field_txt.text = “some text”;

You can have as many asset classes as you need all published from the same .fla file. Clearly this will get out of hand on a larger project and when assets need to be loaded dynamically. But on smaller projects I think this is an excellent tool to use.

Posted by Mark // No Comments // Tagged in : // Posted in: Development //

May 13th, 2009

PureMVC Twitter Feed Demo

I’ve looked at many frameworks over the years including Cairngorm, Mate, Hive and Gaia to name a few.

None of them have ever really caught my attention enough to feel like I should invest time mastering it.

Enter testing out PureMVC. Obviously this is one of the heavyweights of open source frameworks. I’ve had passing looks at it in the past but never really got into it so thought I’d put together a basic twitter app to give it a go.

The following application simply searches Twitter for the terms “creative”,”inspired”,”amazing” and “bored”,”frustrated”,”stressed” then compares the two sets of positive and negative emotions in a graph to see how inspired the world is feeling at any point in time.

twitterScreen.jpg

(more…)

Posted by Mark // 6 Comments // Tagged in : , , , // Posted in: Development //

April 30th, 2009

Inside the Classic

It’s been a while between posts for me. Mainly because I have been heavily involved in creating the Remaster the Classic project for the last month or so.

The site was made for K-Swiss and MTV to promote the K-Swiss Classic Remastered trainer. Users have the opportunity to customise their Classic by expressing their creativity using paint, graphics and uploading images not to mention adding chains, diamonds and/or studs to their shoe.

Designs are applied to the shoe (a Collada model rendered with Papervision, created in Maya) in real time. Users can continue to edit the shoe until they are happy with it and then submit the shoe to the competition and gallery when both the texture and a thumbnail of the designed shoe are saved.

There were many challenges and many (very) late nights but well worth it as the end result has proven to be extremely popular. Below is a high level overview of the site in relation to the functionality of the Shoe.

(more…)

Posted by Mark // 2 Comments // Tagged in : , , , // Posted in: Development //

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