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What Would Jesus Buy? A Nintendo Wii for His apostles' down time, me thinks. ›
$25,000 dessert? I bet it tastes like crap. ›
Coal miner. I'm speechless. And he's smoking. ›
Broken camera. Would you get yours fixed? ›
GlassBooth. Sorting through candidate positions broken down by category. Very cool tool. ›
Black-OPs bunny. This is just wrong. Gotta love the Internet. ›
Montecito residence. Beautiful lines, spacious interior, slightly Mad Max'ish (which can be a good thing). ›
An (obviously) old Iraqi banknote. Saddam seems to happy. ›
I know some people that swear by Olive Garden's superb food. I'm not one of them. They're okay, not great. But at least we can now all agree, their food is fattening as hell. ›
The ghosts are here, at least in Thailand. Worth watching just for the weird factor alone. ›
"Do Not Call" violators seriously violated. Muahaha. ›
Qi Zhong Stadium in Shangai, hosting the Tennis Masters, opens up like a flower. Amazing! ›
Breaking down the history of Pentagram. Thank you Curtis. ›
"Why do so many companies risk destroying their design heritage - one of their most valuable assets?" Fear of risking being, oh, how do you say, unique? [do] ›
Decca. A lovely vinyl sleeve. ›
Said elsewhere:
By month:
February 27, 2007
And then there was Swifr. (Is Web 2.0 the end for the letter “e”?) Thanks to the labors of Daniel Mall, Mark Huot, and Jon Aldinger, us lucky designers have a quick, easy, and Standards’ way about adding flare to imagery.
Why does this new tool strike me as important?
It is a natural progression in utilizing Flash and its bastard-but-loved brother Javascript in intelligent and useful ways while not breaking the golden rule of Standards. As Dan points out in his thoughtfully-related article, Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet, “While all approaches have limitations and drawbacks, Flash has been scorned to the point that many refuse to acknowledge its benefits.” Ain’t that the truth.
When I followed Jeffrey’s Cult of the Standards, I hated Flash. I gnashed my teeth and waved my torch violently at the beast. My personal dilemma? A Standards guy that loved what Flash could do. If only it could become Standards-happy like its brethren. We’ve taken baby-steps in that direction. From all-Flash web sites came hybrids, which reminded me more of horrific-yet-needed genetic splicing and dicing. Sloppy, nasty, but ultimately important step. Then came thoughtful Flash in the form of Text Replacement. Suddenly Flash had gone from Old Testament warrior/killer, to New Testament redeemed. (Sorry to get Biblical, I liked the analogy) To sum up, this feels like the right and necessary step. Some out-of-the-box thinking was required, but doesn’t it always?
Furthermore, it’s simply cool. Really cool. Designers suddenly have the ability to add flourishes to their imagery. It’s all in the details. We’re no longer held back by a box. Now don’t get me wrong: I’ve seen many really cool ways to add shadows and rounded corners to an image via the almighty savior CSS. However, and I hate to admit this, I’ve always felt a sting of annoyance in adding that much more beef to my CSS pages for a simple shadow. I’ve yet to design a web site that need a drop shadow that badly.
This tool makes our options readily available and less painful to implement. Ease of use is a good thing in web development. Yes, I admit it. While going the extra ten miles to accomplish a visual goal is always a must, adding more useful and less time consuming options is always a plus in my book.
The only drawback I see doesn’t come in the tool itself, but our desire as web designers to implement anything new and cool, whether needed or not. Hopefully we’ll use Swifr when the design calls for it, not the other way around. The moment a design suddenly changes to accomodate the next new thing, we’re screwed. The design is king.
Good on ya, guys. Thanks for all the hard work. Much appreciated.
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