Mr.doob's blog

So, what was in the box?

Mar 26th, 2007

Right, as some people asked what was in it, and there is almost no time to spoil the surprise to anyone else. Here it's the answer for you:

Inside the coloured box there was an invitation to a secret London place tomorrow. I would think it's for the release of the CS3 products.

The box itself its like on the video, although its not glowing of course. The box was split so you could open it and you would find a CD and if you opened to the other side you would find the invitation. It took me a while to see that you were able to open the in two ways :P.

Seems that the guys at good technology were behind the campaign, not sure how much they did of it tho. By the way, :gt is recruiting and looks like they have a lot of positions available and I know they are recruiting wisely (go Julian go! o/).

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First collab with rtxcite: Bombardearte

Mar 26th, 2007

Rtxcite is a quite good creative from Spain. He is one of those that does a bit of everything and you wonder where does he get the time to do all... It also has his own style which is something hard to get.

Some weeks ago he released a site or Sacha Sacket that I though was, again, really nice, but the code was maybe a bit slow. So as I had him on MSN I offered him to partner on this field, so he would design the site and I would code/make it move. He was totally up for the idea as coding wasn't really something he wanted to keep doing forever. So here we are, doing a couple of projects together that need to be released soon ;)

The first one was a semi-fast-one for a newschool decoration company. My part on it was optimising the whole site a bit code speed wise and loading times. Now the loading bar isn't really needed :)

Also it's the first site to have implemented my Phodoob on it for the gallery. Hope you like it! :)

Visit bombardearte's site

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[AS] Problems with myXML.load(url) and multiple GET vars.

Mar 21st, 2007

I was developing another little game, and I've been fighting with it for a couple of days, and after trying to locate the problem, seems like in the end it is just a limitation of the myXML.load() function.

A bit of detail about it:

I'm trying to send the scores to my .php at the same time I'm getting the updated list of scores in a XML format, something like:

myXML.load( "scores.php?action=submit_score &name=mr.doob &score=1000 &code=893493" );

So, the php will update the highscores table, and then It will give back the updated table in a XML format. However seems like this doesn't work. For some reason Flash doesn't ever do the call. I've debugged a lot this and this is what I've found:

myXML.load( "scores.php?action=submit_score" );
Works properly, Flash does the call, and it gets the XML back.

myXML.load( "scores.php?action=submit_score &name=mr.doob" );
Works properly, Flash does the call, and it gets the XML back.

myXML.load( "scores.php?action=submit_score &name=mr.doob &score=1000" );
Doesn't work!!

Seems like if you send more than 2 GET variables then flash won't do the call, and I know that it won't do the call because I've a logger on my php code that is saving all the calls that is getting on a .txt file.

Does anyone know if there is any workaround? I'll use a loadvars to send the scores and then get the XML again with a simple call.

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You're one of the top UK creatives hand picked by Adobe

Mar 21st, 2007

Yey!! Mr.doob is one of the top UK creatives!! haha! ;)

Which means that "the box" is on my way. Right, I better start speaking well from Adobe now ;) I'm still shocked tho :O!! and I wonder even more about what is in the box.

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Adobe Apollo!! No thanks...

Mar 20th, 2007

I just don't see the point. Is this another browser? Is this going to be like Internet explorer and its customizable scrollbars feature? If this is something else... then what happens with Macromedia Central?

Sorry, but I'm confused, by now I don't see why should I even take the time to download it. I believe there are too many Adobe fans out there ;)

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Useful? Not really... Fun? Absolutely!

Mar 18th, 2007

Long time ago, actually, 2 years ago I had the idea of developing an API for xplsv.tv, and it took like 1 year until I finally worked on it, I think it was something like 1 day of work and I did this:

It was my first experiment using the ZigoEngine so I didn't know very well what I was doing. This weekend I had a bit of spare time, and (more important) inspiration, so, with a little bit more of knowledge about the ZigoEngine and with some tricks that I learnt while doing phodoob v2 I did a simple mosaic, while improving the API a little bit.

Phodoob v2.0beta

Mar 12th, 2007

Pheeew! It took a while... but looks like I've finally done the base of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about.. phodoob is how I named my photo gallery system. I did the first version 2 years ago more or less, and since then I always wanted to recode it and improve it, so it could run faster, smoother...

While I was on it I also fixed the zoom algorithm (which wasn't working really well on the previous version) and also I added some fancy animations to the rollOver / rollOuts...

I've a lot of plans for this but I can't say too much yet :P By now, you can enjoy the pics from Reykjavik! :)

EDIT: If you feel like you want the pictures in a table, here its a link for you... and no, the keyboardnavigation doesn't work yet :P

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The 1000 websites' man

Mar 6th, 2007

Yey, seems like some of the last websites I was working in Spring are finally live. After that much time I'm not that keen on the designs anymore tho :S

The one that took us more time to do was 40 Savile Row. Something like 1 year for doing it, and this is because it had a section were you are able to customise your own shirt and you even had some fancy pieces of flash to explain from where to where is each measure. I believe the one that did the best work here was david with the dev part.

Another one is Coolthermal, tho for this one I mainly se the style/design doing the homepage. Mike finished it.

Mike was also the designer of Darley Kids, and I think he did one of his best works here. For this one I did the flash games. All about horses, Jockey colours, Quiz and Word search (this one took me a while to figure out the maths for it). I also did the score system and the security of it (which is a bit hopeless when dealing with flash).

And the last one is Cardpoint. Again, one of those longterm projects that never ends :) It ended up a bit too empty maybe...

So, with these one I will probably have done 1000 websites already. Nah, just kidding, but, checking the portfolio I've actually done a lot being at Spring. Here are some:

Rolf Harris, Stargazer, I.T. lab, RS Scan, Wesmon Press, Odyssey Consulting (flash piece), Beaumont Legal, Border Energy, GSL, 4NX (flash piece), Partnerships in Care, Halo Financial, Epico, TechMondial, Best Deal, DBD Media, Isis, Faith Fantastic, Ethical Network, Financial Objects, Corpora Software (flash piece), ICH (build), Olive solutions (logo, flash pieces), CIC (design+dev), Nasda (fancy flash map :D), and many more....

Phewww!

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Becoming a professional photographer with Photoshop

Mar 3rd, 2007

I was checking Hamad Darwish Flickr profile, the guy that did the pictures that now Microsoft is using as Desktop images with Vista, and I noticed a lot of contrasting and retouching on the pictures. And it was funny that in some comments the people was commenting that it was ovbious how professional he was. Don't get me wrong, there are nice bits on these photos but I don't think that getting nice colours makes you a great photographer.

If you don't think the same, then here its a quite basic tutorial so you can be a great photographer too :)

Here is a picture I took one week ago in Iceland. I used a small and handy (and now old) camera and, as you can see, the place was well nice, the picture looks cool, but it doesn't give you a 'professional' impression.

Now, compare it with this, probably as a picture, is not well positioned, but the colours are great now, aren't they?

So, if you're wonder how did I do that... Here is a quick step by step process for doing it. I used Photoshop, but you can use any soft,

Lets duplicate the background layer and get rid of the colours with Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This is not the best way to get proper greyscale of a picture, but that will do by now. Then change the blending mode of that layer to Overlay. What you have now is what a lot of people use for CDs, mainly for Hiphop covers and stuff, it would probably need a bit of sharpen tho. Anyway, the colours are still not cool enough. Lets duplicate the layer again, and then contrast it a bit with Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation... and put the Saturation to +50. Done.

The Layers panel should look something like this:

You can delete the Background layer if you want tho. Some people will may think that using the Brightness/Contrast will get you the same result. Well, it will certainly give you a similar look ,but will kill some colours and info of the pic. This method lets you have more control of the level of contrast that you want, and also the level of blacks and whites.

So, now we are professional photographers!! \o/

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Having fun with jQuery

Mar 2nd, 2007

I was checking some days ago a project from a friend of mine, and apart from the app itself, I was quite impressed with the nice fades and slides of texts. So I obviously had to do research about how did he do that.

The answer was jQuery, and oh man, what an answer! :) As everything, it still have some bugs with the heights of some elements for doing the effects, but the way of selecting elements its too good to don't use it for every project that needs some .js

I've used it a bit of the work log, so the page now looks a bit clean and light, and if you want to read an article you click on the title (which by the way, uses sIFR 3 :D) and then it will expand the body.

I'll probably use innerDiv for the portfolio items soon. What a .js site! wasn't I supposed to be a flash guy? :)

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