Animator vs. Animation

This is an interesting use of Adobe Flash and also very creative.

Adobe Flash, of course, is the program that we use to create animations.  Most home users have Adobe Flash Player installed, which allows them to view these animations (but not create them).  Many companies like this feel they can give away the viewer, and if people actually want to design things with the program, charge for that.

The animation below is pretty cool because in my CIS 273 class, I teach Adobe Flash, and it's cool to look at an animation and just understand how it is done.  My Web Graphics students, past and present, should understand how much work went in to this person's animation.  Cool stuff!

Link to animation

Painting online

One of my biggest weaknesses is that I am not a very good artist. I've got a very logical mind, and the creative process just never really worked with the way my brain works.

For those of you who have been in my class, you know my famed drawing of someone using a computer and communicating with their friends in chat as they also use Microsoft Word...which has also been called "stick figure touching a box".

Ok, so my art skills aren't that great. Even if they aren't, I've had fun at times messing around in programs like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop.

Paint is of course free, but the issue is that you have to save your art and then either upload the or email to someone else. There is a Web program on art.com that allows you to do basically the same things you do in Paint, with a few more options added in. In addition to all those, you also have the opportunity to share the drawing, and your friends can watch your creative process in action - it stores the exact keystrokes you used to create the painting, all for free.

For example, the quarterback on my fantasy football team got injured, and I created a visually stunning representation of how this injury happened:
http://artpad.art.com/gallery/?k6usn815mt0s

Amazing to see the creative process in action, is it not?

Web Site Link:
http://artpad.art.com/gallery/

Google "Chrome" Web Browser

After years of quiet on the Web browser front, there is a new entry in to the battle. Google has introduced a new browser in to the realm...

Google Chrome

Being the computer person I am, I of course downloaded it immediately. We'll see what happens with this (it's still in Beta - or testing), but bringing Google in to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox will probably help things. Competition is good for the consumer.

Anyway, I installed it, and I figured I would take it for a little test drive. First impression - it allows me to import settings from other browsers - this is something Firefox also does, so that's good. After going through that, it brought me to a default page that says "most visited pages". The pages are displayed in little boxes, so you can see little previews of your frequently visited pages.

This seems like a clever idea to me. First impressions, good!

I then went to ESPN.com to give it a test. Why ESPN? Well, sports aside, this is a very media intensive page. It managed to block a popup automatically, good...Adobe Flash player was automatically setup and it managed to play a sports highlight...good...and then BOOM. Unable to fully display the page, would you like to reload?

Not a good sign!

It gave me the option to reload, so I did, and it worked just fine the second time.

So, how does it stack up? Here are my thoughts, simply from a usability interface.

Pluses:

• Features you are used to are there - it has tabbed browsing, as Firefox and Internet Explorer do, built in phishing and malware detection, easy clearing of your browsing history, bookmarks....
  
• The interface is less cluttered than the interfaces you see in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• It has an "incognito" mode - wow. Pages you view in the incognito window claim to not show up in your browsing history or search history, and will protect you if you visit Web sites that you aren't sure are trustworthy. I didn't test this fully, but a spectacular idea!
• It has it's own "task manager". If you've ever visited a Web page that locked up in Internet Explorer or Firefox, you've likely had to kill the entire browser program and restart. This allows you to kill certain bits of the browser, so let's say a Flash program is slowing me down, I can just shut that off without affecting the other things I am doing.
• Downloads show up along the bottom of the screen by the status bar - rather than disappearing immediately (Internet Explorer) or having a pop up window with downloads (Firefox)
  

Minuses:

• It doesn't seem to have the page setup options you have in Internet Explorer and Firefox (for example, print headers and footers or not)
• They didn't fix the problem I would love to see someone fix - block ads on a certain site - this can be done in another way, but it would be great to see this actually easy for the average user to do
• It has its own set of hotkeys different than the other browsers. Just a minor annoyance.
• If you close the only tab that exists in a window, it exits the entire program. This is not intuitive - one wrong click and you're going to have to restart the program. It should warn the user or give a blank tab.

Worth a download...use the link above to give it a shot, why not, for free? Since it's a Google product, I am willing to bet it will be around for a while. It seems like everything they touch turns to gold.

Besides, for those of us who have Web design background, it gives you yet ANOTHER Web browser to test your site in. FUN!

Flash searches through Google

One of the problems with designing a full Web site in the program Adobe Flash is that, since it is an animation, Google and other search engines do not pick it up as text. Therefore, if you designed a well done Web site in Flash, Google would not find your Web site. If you are a business, you especially want people to visit your site, so this is a bad thing.

Adobe is teaming up with the search engines to help them to find this information now, much like information can be found in files such as PDF (also by Adobe), Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, etc.

Another side effect of this is that law enforcement may now be able to more easily find information in Flash files, which have long been a way people "hide" links on Web sites. Criminals beware!

Link to article

Thanks to Sue for the heads up!
PS: Sue - did you share this with Joe? I am sure he'd be interested.