I know that not everyone likes tech books. My wife and family being some of them. Anyway… I do. I have a huge arsenal of text for the last decade or so that I read, lend to friends and students and then keep around for further reference. In reality there are actually more than ten books in my collection worth sharing, but these ten in this list are especially of use to Flash designers. Of course this is just a list, and my opinion, but, it is based on research through judging my own, my students, friends and colleagues benefit after reading and using these books. Some may be a tad long in the tooth when it comes to coding chops, or specifics etc, but in the end they have still sound principles or extol virtues of best practices or standards. Read on… (more…)

If you take a look at the sidebar of the site now, you’ll notice I ditched the big ole’ Google Ads. This is because I have joined Pistach.io’s Flash Pack and now will be running only that banner in the place of the larger, slower, more annoying Google Ads banners that were in the sidebar before. This will speed up the pages load times throughout the site and reduce the long scrolling sidebar to a more manageable level.

Aral Balkan and Dave Stone from Built By Dave, this network of sites operates under a simple premise similar to the The Deck, run by Coudal Partners. Smaller numbers of ads through a smaller network, placed on good sites that reach people that might actually be interested in the products and services running in that placement. Rates for the ads are really quite reasonable, and the backend is very very solid. It’s built on Amazon’s EC2, S3, and SimpleDB systems. If you are interested in placing an ad on the network please visit Pistach.io.

I’m proud and very happy to be in the Flash Pack with such an esteemed list of bloggers. I’ll let Aral publish that list at his site, but it’s a virtual who’s who in Flash platform blogs. This new ad placement will not change my focus which is and has been my experiments, thoughts and opinions in and around web design/development and creating content in the Flash ecosystem. I welcome your comments and suggestions about this move.

Sidenote… Just to let you know, I have a list of topics lined up in the coming weeks that I think will be valuable content to my readers. A couple book reviews, some more source code, a couple little gotchas and more of the regular commentary on current developments. As always thanks for visiting and continuing to prompt me to write.

It’s often difficult to know what to looking for when hiring a developer. Especially if you aren’t a developer… This blog post explores a list of telling signs that the person on the other side of the desk from you actually knows what they are talking about. A few of the recommendations seem to be common sense (Pasion, Self-teaching and love of learning), but some are pretty insightful (Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar). Overall a pretty good post from Inter-Sections. Some of the comments on the post get a little derisive about the authors thoughts. Not sure why, but then again, I’m not the kind of person to go to someone’s blog and try to start a flamewar, either.

read more | digg story

Ron Paul on Larry King 1-3-08 (UNAIRED) - So, this blog really isn’t political… It’s a geek design/development blog, but on the night before the caucases, Larry King interviewed Ron Paul… and didn’t air it. He played an hour of Suze Ormon instead. Hmm.
The GOP is clueless and pushing another hick into the nomination and we have an educated and rational candidate that can’t get any air time on traditional media. Sure, he has the Digg crowd and a healthy web following, but no one that watches TV knows about him at all.

I don’t get it. Please, someone, fil me in.

read more | digg story

I’m a designer at heart, and that may be why I fell in love with Flash. It was easy to make fantastic designs come to life. I eventually tired of the difficult development path and ceaseless sessions of painful debugging. Things changed with Flex and I saw the potential to not leave the Flash platform for AJAX or some other technology from the darkside. Anyway… I have been working on an intranet/extranet app for our project managers and clients to use to share files and I have run into to some CSS styling issues that make me want to punch Flex. Now the frustration is on the visual end of things, not the functional… What was easy in Flash is not so much so in FLex and vice-versa. Take a look at these screenshots…

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How do you get the TabBar’s selected item to not have a seam between the tab and a canvas or other item? I want an effect like the TabNavigator, but I don’t want the associated canvases. I’m using the tabs to filter 1 datagrid. You would think you could target the active tab’s bottom border. Don’t seem like it from livedocs.And here is another one… once you round the corners of a datagrid, it seems to blow out or hide the actual corners… Weird. Check this out. Look at that top left corner… hrrrrmmm . Not cool.

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Photoshop Express lives!

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More Photoshop Express

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Thermo is truly amazing.

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Ooooooooooo

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Max is go!

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