awesomeness


1
Mar 10


I don’t feel like it

What’s it?

Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like.

Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.

Of course, your feelings are irrelevant to whether or not the market expects great work. Do the work. Ignore the feelings part and the work will follow.”

From Seth


19
Jan 10

Adding more fruity treats to FogBugz

I’ve been using fogbugz for a while, we put in place at work to handle issue tracking and after using a slew of different bug tracking solutions (ok it’s like 6 or 7 but that’s slew enough for me) I have really become very happy using fogbugz. Plus, fogcreek sounds like an amazing place where the sofas are made out of donuts and the water fountains have perfectly carbonated mexican coke. The thing I really like about it though is the api. Knowing that there’s a way out in case some feature doesn’t work the way you want it to is a very comforting feeling. And having worked with it a little in the past I know it’s a very capable api that’ll allow you to code up quite a bit of functionality.

Having said all that, there are some things in fogbugz that don’t work well for me. Namely, time tracking. At work, we don’t use EBS, we use the time tracking feature to bill clients. Since we do that, we have to track every minute of our day. So, this takes some discipline to always remember to set the “Working on” which apparently I’m the only person in the world who has issues with this because I’m always forgetting and having to go back to fix it. When I was designing a small app to help me with this, I came across a few other features that I’d like and it started to develop into an actual app. So here I am, writing a fogbugz interface. Here are the features I’m throwing in here:

Phase 1:

1. Quickly list,add,edit, and view cases.
2. Case search
3. Case history (keeping a running tab of the cases you have looked at)

Phase 2:

1. Automated time tracking: What ever the current case is that you are looking at, that is the case that gets time tracked to it. Switch case, new time entry.

It’s totally not a fleshed out attempt and it’s something I’m doing in my spare time so I don’t know what this will turn into – but – in the end I’m hoping to have a solution for me (and people like me) to easily track time in fogbugz. It’ll be an Adobe AIR app and will most likely be coded out in Flex. I’m wanting to really focus on the ui to create something a little slicker that what I usually do so having a Flash desktop app is the way to go. And considering I’m booted into Windows during the day and OS X at night, I need something that will work on both platforms. We’ll see what happens, I’ll keep you updated!


13
Nov 09

Droid it is then!

xkcd

from xkcd


5
Nov 09

Boundaries of Space, Boundaries of Time

What an excellent speech by someone who knows a little something about being creative…

These are my favorite quotes…

We don’t know where we get our ideas from, but we don’t get them from our laptops.

If you’re racing around all day just keeping balls in the air, checking off lists, looking at your watch…you are not going to have any creative ideas.


18
Oct 09

Things Every Flash Developer Should Know

So last year after Adobe Max (it’s a big Adobe conference where they get everybody together and give them candy in the flavor of awesome new tools) they put all of the sessions online which I thought was really spectacular but despite having hours of content available, I failed to watch a single one. I found that, well, it’s kinda hard to sit there for an hour and listen to a session. But this year, I certainly didn’t plan to repeat that mistake. So, short of stapling my hands to the table so I wouldn’t get distracted and head over to digg or reddit or some other site peddling delicious but useless time-wasting information I queued up the first video in my library and proceeded to fill my head with actionscript erudition. Over the next few days I’ll be watching sessions so I’ll try to give a brief synopsis of each…

First up – “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know” by Grant Skinner. This was a great session – I was totally interested from start to finish and there were definitely more than a few gems to grab onto here. From new ways to think about OOP and the pragmatic declaration to “love the timeline” -(when was the last time you heard that advice?)- I found a lot to takeaway. One thing I didn’t think about was using custom tweens on simpler things and eschewing using a tweening engine (despite that fact that his company wrote one) for every single animation (like I’ve been doing ever since I found out you could abstract that chore to a separate library.) Grant has all of his talks located on one page and they’re kinda interesting to look at, highly recommended.

All in all, a very illuminating way to spend an hour – here is the video followed by my favorite slides:


17
Oct 09

Playing around with Augmented Reality and the FLARManager…

paul_flar

If you want to see some really well done Augmented Reality (AR) go here – plus – John Mayer explaining AR is probably more interesting than me…

So I’ve seen some AR in the browser for a little while now and have wanted to play around with the FLAR Toolkit for some time but like most things…I just hadn’t gotten around to it. So I finally got some nerve to hop in tonight and thanks to the FLARManager I was able to get stuff going pretty darn quick. I LOVE this community! Right away I was able to get the proverbial earth and moon example going but have a couple of other idea’s I’d love to try out.

Want to see it for yourself? Well, print out the card you find here, make sure you have a webcam hooked up, and then go to here. Flash will ask for your permission to use your webcam and once you do – BLAMMO – hold up your freshly minted card to your camera and start seeing the AR experience for yourself! It’s better than unicorn tears or flowers that taste like cake!

You should be seeing something very much like this…

I’m going to try and do something more interesting but we’ll see how far it goes. It’s incredibly fun to play with…I wonder if I could make a game out of it? Hmmmm……


31
Jul 09

I’m a sucker for this stuff…

Even though it’s in french and even though some of the cgi isn’t quite so polished – this clip really makes we want to see GI joe…


21
May 09

It’s Unbelievable (how awesome this video is…)

unbelievable

This has got to be the awesomest commercial I have seen in a while. I love that you can find something new in there each time you view it.


7
May 09

I totally agree…

Flash Games


5
May 09

Tilt Shift in Lynchburg

tilt_shift_1

I’ve been messing around with awesome Pixlr online photoshop-ish thing and it’s quite impressive – I am so loving the built in tilt shift feature.