Sjeiti

I guess I could say I’ve crossed over to the dark-side because Twittering is something I said I’d never do. But I didn’t want a mobile phone either (ten years ago). I also said I’d never move to Amsterdam. But never say never. My new phone is exactly the reason I changed my mind and give Twitter a go. The old Nokia I had was only good for calling or bashing somebody’s head in, so I traded it in for something new and Android. Which caused me to make more use of cloud computing and social networks. And now I’m here.

I ‘slightly’ restyled my ronvalstar.nl site. Partly because I was not completely satisfied with it but mainly to prove a point: in a lot of cases a HTML site is a better solution than Flash. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash, especially the new features in the new version 10 (although they still didn’t bother to fix the ancient TextField/Stylesheet stuff). It’s just that I see way too many Flash sites out there that could easily have been done in HTML. And when you look at the (mostly invalid) source you will often find hardly anything that will allow search engines to index it correctly (although some can index a certain amount of the outgoing links). Plus deep linking and history is not possible in a Flash site (unless you do it yourself in conjunction with js).

So my motto mostly is: don’t if you don’t have too. And if it’s absolutely necessary (ie if the client insists) there are ways to overcome these obvious obstacles.

Anyway… I coded ronvalstar.nl semanticly and in valid XHTML strict. Hardcore use of jQuery made it very easy to create something nice and dynamic. I checked it in XP/Vista-FF/Chrome/IE6-8/Safari and on Mac-FF/Safari. The IE6 DOM sucks so that’s just a plain page and IE7 runs a bit slow, but that says more about IE than about my ability to program :-p

For a year now I’ve been freelancing. Sometimes on location, but mostly at the studio I share with two other freelancers. One of them has now decided to leave because she rarely used the studio.
So, if you are, or you know, someone who needs a place to work right in the middle of Amsterdam, drop me a line here.

For the last year Ultrafris (a friend of mine) has been working very hard on the Hyves redesign. It has gone live for goldmemenbers now. If you are not a goldmember you can get a previeuw over here.

Keeping myself very busy rewriting cubejunky to a Flash (=papervision3d) equivalent I got a bit stuck on wanting to implement amfphp in as3.

I did find some good examples here and here that got me going again. I never quite understood why amfphp generates as2 classes that can have more than one instance. A singleton would be more suitable in my humble opinion.

So I rewrote the t8 Flex download (I don’t do Flex) to something I could use. I also put in some trace code you might find usefull. I usually extend this class and override the handles (and put a gatewayUrl switch in the constructor) so amfphp can easily overwrite the original when you change the php service.

Anyway… here’s the stuff, dump it in your amfphp/browser/templates folder (except for the as file of course).

Filter Forge is released. Big up to the entire Filter Forge team for a job well done. Let’s hope it takes of like a rocket (the kind that doesn’t blow up).

Even though I earned a copy I still want a second license for my machine at work, besides $299,- is a bargain.

We’re really busy at Shapers these days but I found some spare time (weekend) to make a christmas/newyears card. Niels found it a bit cruel to send to clients … but hey clients are cruel to us to!