electronicsuitcase.net

I’m very proud to announce the release of my first wordpress theme, pl00. Don’t let pl00’s plain wrapper fool you - it’s meant to be a development theme that quickly gets a themer from A to B. I use it on every wordpress project I work on. One of pl00’s best features is that the homepage has 5 widget areas. It’s been tested in Firefox, Safari and IE7 and is W3C validated.

Tags: fixed width, three columns, valid CSS, valid XHTML, white, simple, widgets, widget ready, 3columns, right sidebars, SEO friendly, gravatars, h:over effects, text-only

Download pl00

OTOY Rendering Engine

This video looks amazing, it’s a new 3d environment that is top secret. Apparently the video was not meant to be released for the public but it’s so god-awful awesome it needs to be shared. The concept: this virtual world is rendered in the cloud and streamed to your browser.

As raytracing becomes more and more common I’m starting to get a lot of ideas for including 3d worlds in my interactive work - not to mention the possibilities of integrating data from the web into virtual environments.

I spent a bit of time this morning working with SWFObject this morning and tried to splice it into a regular page template to produce a sIFR like effect. And it worked. Seamlessly. All in all it took me about 20 minutes.

If you’re looking for other kinds of flash objects (like mp3, movies, etc) try out swftools or for a full-on API for SWFObject, SWFObject API.

Lately a few opportunities have arisen for me to spend time working with code at various levels. Normally I’m a straight up css/xhtml kind of designer but onwards and outwards right? If you’re not swimming you’re sinking.

jQuery - javascript
jQuery is a compact java library that does all sorts of wonderful things. It is simple enough for the average monkey and powerful enough to really transform a static page into an interactive space for new kinds of user experiences. You can dynamically sort tables, animate text and much more using existing jQuery plugins.

phpFlickr - PHP
I quite like my flickr account and I especially like their photo organizer. It’s a handy tool for a designer especially since it not only stores your photos but exposes your work to whole audiences that you might otherwise miss. phpFlickr allows you to have all that Flickr goodiness on your own site. I get the impression that a lot of phpFlickr’s users are making their own applications but it works just as well for any type of job where you need to organize images. I’ve used flickr on my new .mobi as well as on the new openspace.ca website.

FSC - Flash Source Code
I hate flash tutorials. I like it much better when I can just download someones .fla file and cannibalize it for whatever I happen to need that day. Ryan Lee has opened up his code for everyone at flashsourcecode.com. If you don’t mind tutorials I have found Lee Brimelow’s video tutorials pretty digestible.

snipplr
This is a newish code swapping site. Lots of good nuggets for newbies.

Lastly… if you haven’t seen this youtube clip from a Siggraph lecture about dynamic imaging resizing you must be living in a cave.

I just uploaded my first model into Sketchup. I’m trying to get it to place properly in Google Earth though… might need to read a manual or something.