This is just a little thingy I did when playing around with Flash. The rain effect is subtle, so you may not see it right away.

I had a need for a tooltip class that was lightweight and had the features I needed. I had trouble finding anything in ActionScript 2, but I found a good one in ActionScript 1, ported it to ActionScript 2, and added a couple features that I needed. With the permission of the previous author, I am making my modifications available.  Read more...

I have to say that one thing that has always bugged me about Jakob Nielsen’s web site is the complete lack of visual aesthetic. The impression that I get from his site is that good usability means ugly web design. Contrary to that impression, I believe that by applying standard visual design principles such as grouping content, making headlines that are easy to scan, and using white space to guide the user’s eye, usability can be significantly enhanced.  Read more...

If you want to take a look at a really nifty site that really makes good use of Flash, take a look at Eternal Egypt. I am admittedly biased, since I did a bunch of work on one of the Flash components on the site, namely the map explorer, but this site really was a huge undertaking and shows how Flash can be used to visualize large quantities of data in easy to digest ways.

I have been playing with Photoshop CS lately, and have been playing with a number of the features targetted at photographers. One adjustment that has been added is called Shadow/Hilight. It does an amazing job of retrieving detail lost in dark shadows or bright hilights. The example below shows the results with the shadow slider set to 50%:

I am quite impressed with the features added to Photoshop CS for digital photographers. I already knew about the RAW file parsing abilities, but it is a nice treat to see this one.