And now is free!! \o/ I don't know if that one was the first widget thing, but at least was one of the first I've seen. I'm these days testing it and seeing how useful it is.. You can have the same like on mac, that pressing f8 appears all those widgets, or you can change the preferences of each one and have them floating the desktop.

By now, looks like a clean, cute way to have your todo list in the screen. I'll look for rss stuff now.. :)

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Everyone was blabling about the power of the bloggers, but.. all those people writing in those phpscripts with those basic design templates around the world.. What's the point of it? Do you have to subscribe to 1000 different RSS?, do you have to browse all of them eveyday?.. Doesn't makes sense..

Some days ago, sole show me technorati. Technorati is just THE IDEA, there is no a lot of work behind, but the value of it is mainly the idea.

Technorati depends of all the bloggers, but as they were (if not the first) the cleverer/commercial of the firsts they got the power now. They got the power of all the blogger community. Nice movement!!

To make it short, when somebody, using blogger or so, updates his blog, it probably will send a fast notifiction to technorati about it. And technorati will update in realtime. So, for example, if the day of the bombs in London, there was no enough info on the newspapers yet, you could search on technorati and you would find a lot of bloggers writing about it, and if there are a lot of bloggers, perhaps you could find a guy that was inside one of those trains. Can the newspapers/TV compete with that?

Now the fight will be probably about that, Google, and MSN doing their own technologies for that. But that would be interesting.. Looking forward to see how all that moves.

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This week Macromedia released the beta of flash8 player for browsers. It will have a lot of great new features. ClearType rendering, dynamic loading of png and gif with alpha channels, dynamic shadows, blur, rendering blendings.. And as I was able to experiment very early, it is really faster.

So, looks like finally the people of the player is not doing just bad fixes to the player anymore, they are improving it a lot. And here is the funny thing. The people is hacking somehow the new features of the player, coding in flashmx and modifying the .swf to make it work with flash8 player.

Check out the early experiments the people are doing with the new features.

No idea of when they are going to release the editor tho.

Enjoy!!

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Probably everyone that is reading that post is aware that Microsoft just released a beta version of his new program Acrylic. This is just a vector program, something like Illustrator. So why are they moving to that sector now? As far as I know this is just to get rid of flash as a resource to do rich applications for Windows (not for the website). But looks like that is going to be the tool to design the next applications layouts for Longhorn.

What really piss me off is that you have to fill a lot of forms to download the beta. Anyway.. better than Paint :)

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After the speech done at offf and being the user with more reviews and movement in xplsv.tv. Perhaps some people is wondering who is mr.doob? ;)

At some point I started to use in MSN names like "do_ob", "dò_ób", "dõ_õb", "dō_Ôb".. Mainly because I was always with headphones at work. So, later on, a friend of mine just called me, "hey! mister doob!", I thought that the name was quite nice and with a nice background, and changed the name on msn to "mr.doob".. days later, the people at work, was calling me "doob" instead of "ricardo" (mainly because is easier to pronounce I guess).

Some months later, I decided to buy the domain mrdoob.com but I didn't know exactly what to put on there. I had an holding image on there for months. But then, after being some months thinking how to improve this website, and very unhappy with the photo section, I had the idea to do an special photo report on there. An also some experiments that I have in mind, but the main thing will be the photo report I think.

So, after some spare time working on it, here is the first usable version:

http://www.mrdoob.com/

Hope you like it :)

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Here I go with a trechy one. That's something that is not very easy to find on Internet, so if anyone needs that in the future here is the explanation.

If you work on the web sector probably you had the problem at some point of flash on the top of the page. I mean, probably you wanted to have another layer (menu navigations for example) on the top of flash but that wasn't working.

After some workarounds on the design I decided to do a bit of research. And this time I found a way to do it.

<div>
  <div id="flash" style="position:absolute; z-index:0;">
     <embed width="400" height="300" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="movie.swf" wmode="transparent" />
  </div>
  <div id="layerOnTop" style="position:absolute; display:block; z-index:1;">
    TEXT ON TOP OF FLASH
  </div>
</div>

So as you can see you need to have the layers with position:absolute and then sort the layers with the z-index property.

TADAAAA!!

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Today I was browsing and checking some design related news and in one of the the link wasn't properly written. Was something like:

http//www.example.com

As you can see the link doesn't have the ":" character, however if you put that address on the URL in any browser that uses google to resolve the wrong address (like firefox, safari, ..) you will be redirected to:

http://www.microsoft.com !!!

wtf?! So if you put wrong the address, you will be moved to microsoft.. also happens with:

http//www.google.com

:S! Looks like microsoft spent some money or did some weird trick to hack that google thing..

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Some minutes ago, sole sent me that website: tadalist.

tadalist is another project done by the same guys that did basecamp. We were using since some months ago basecamp at work.. and it really works very fine, the whole project is well done and everything is very easy to do.

tadalist is a very small part of basecamp that actually i usually don't use, but as feature is very cool. You can manage all your to do list very easily with it. I still missing groups and some features on it, but the idea is very cool, argh! ;) And have a great google feelling.

Kudos to 37 signals

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Probably you are aware that lately there were some "new" browsers on the streets, well, actually one, Firefox. But, be clever and don't use them. Let's see why:

1. Nobody uses Firefox as it don't come with the OS. Only some geeks are using it.
2. A lot of pages doesn't work well with Firefox as they are optimized for Internet Explorer (as it's the most used browser).
3. With Firefox you can't change the colour of the scrollbars.
4. You can install the Avantbrowser to add the tabbing system to Internet Explorer as well (something not really useful).
5. With Firefox you can't use the windowsupdate web service.
6. Internet Explorer adds some great break lines to make the page clearer.
7. Internet Explorer does have great support with Macromedia Flash, only have some small problems at Mac version of Internet Explorer.
8. Internet Explorer does have the best image viewer ever, with a very well optimized resize tool. 9. Internet Explorer doesn't have RSS integrated reader, but who cares? nobody uses that technology!
10. Within Internet Explorer you can use internet based applications to add icons on your desktop, change your default page and add new tabs on your explorer with special search engines. If you need, you can format your hard disk with it as well.

So, use Internet Explorer!

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version 7 and they still with the same old silly bug!!

grrr! when you import an image to the stage (and basicaly when you exports the flash) the first vertical and horizontal line is duplicated, and the last vertical and horizontal line is elimitade.

I am always fighting with that fix since flash4 adding a transparent pixel on the first vertical and horizonal lines (in the case is a gif).

fix that bug for flash supadupahmxp2005pro please!

3 comments