http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog 'Dis, 'dat, and the other thing Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:21:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Adobe today introduced a new tool called Thermo. I recommend that you take a look at their demo. From what I see, Thermo is a tool that helps to integrate the visual design process in more tightly with creating Flash/Flex-based Rich Internet Applications. If you take a look at the demo, ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2007/10/03/adobe-previews-thermo-for-creating-rias/ I just ran across a couple of interesting articles about keyboard vs mouse input: http://hci-matters.com/blog/?p=8 and the followup: http://hci-matters.com/blog/?p=9 The idea is that we should really be using more of the keyboard to be productive, but only for tasks which can be qualified as discrete, such as managing documents, launching applications, and working ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2007/07/09/the-keyboard-and-mouse-as-input-devices/ I have finally gotten around to playing with AS3, and I decided to pick the Sound object as one to play with. In the end, I ended up creating a simple music playback "component" that uses a whole number of AS3 features. I am including the example here along with ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/07/25/playing-with-as3-an-example-mp3-player-component/ I was recently working on a search algorithm for a Flash piece I am working on, and the way the algorithm worked involved doing separate searches for each keyword from an index that I had created, recording the number of occurrences for each keyword, then finding out which elements were ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/07/12/an-algorithm-for-finding-common-elements-across-data-sets/ There are a number of solutions out there for the limitation that Microsoft just put into place to deal with the Microsoft-Eolas plug-in patent dispute. The ones that I have seen (e.g: Flashobject) are nice but involve changing how you publish your Flash files and embed them into the ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/04/19/a-potential-solution-to-the-eolas-flash-woes-the-object-replacement-method/ Just a little bit of shameless self-promotion: my book is just about to hit store shelves! I'm the dude on the left, and my co-author on the right is Jeff Berg. Man, that is a long process (probably about 1 year total from contract to publication). Prepurchase now! Buy them as Christmas ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/04/06/its-official-im-an-author/ I have come across a couple of really useful Firefox extensions aside from the excellent web developer extension which I wanted to share with the community. The first is called View Rendered Source Chart, which renders the HTML source in a way that is very easy to visually see the nesting. The ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/04/04/a-couple-of-useful-firefox-extensions/ Disclaimer: this piece (as well as this blog in general) is personal opinion and not endorsed by or representative of my employer. I just came back from a conference where I was presenting on Web 2.0. A related discussion around Microsoft's foray into the Rich Internet Application space ensued, and as ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/04/04/a-divergence-of-web-applications-from-the-browser/ I was recently at FlashForward, and was inspired by some of Grant Skinner's experiments using the Bitmap class. This example takes my previous plotter exercise and uses off-screen rendering instead. I also added the use of Perlin noise to feed the motion randomization routine. The result is definitely faster from ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2006/03/08/plotter-exercise-with-bitmap-class/ I did a bunch of work on a nice little Flash piece for an IBM - National Geographic collaboration. It is a really cool project where the goal is to provide research on the geographic origins of the world's different ethnic groups. Through this project, you can purchase a participation ... http://www.nathanderksen.com/blog/2005/12/07/genographic-project-online/