Design

It was announced late last year that Flash can run on the iPhone. This was of course, as an application using a special iPhone conversion plugin for your Flash application, and still isn’t as optimal as creating an app directly in Cocoa or local iPhone OS platform.

A developer named Tobey Schneider ( @tobeytailor ) has release an early version of Gordon, an open source Flash runtime written purely in JavaScript.

This means you can run a SWF in the browser (Safari).

Check demos here:
http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/
(Yes, the swf’s demo’ed run on the iPhone via Safari)

You can view details and the source here:
http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon

This is just an early version of Gordon which has some limitations, I’m not sure on its capabilities to run Action Script, so complex flash apps/sites may experience issues. It appears that it will play a SWF or simple animation based on the demos, but I haven’t seen anything really complex yet. This does however, open up a big door not only for Flash on iPhones, but other ways to run Flash on various devices that support Javascript and not Flash… or is that only an iPhone?

I think we’re all familiar with the yellow bordered magazines, be it in your current subscription lists, parent’s collection, library exposure, or the scrap book collection in art class. I am referring to the iconic National Geographic Magazine.

National Geographic has brought their entire collection, from 1888 to 2008 into the digital world with the recent version of the Complete National Geographic Software experience which includes the past 120 years of National Geographic accessible through your desktop computer!

The company I work for, Effective UI, was the UX agency behind creating this year’s version o the collection. Our team did an excellent job bringing this unique software experience to life and making it an enjoyable and exciting adventure throughout the past 120 years of magnificent National Geographic content, including the intriguing articles from around the world and of course, I must mention the visual thrill ride of their amazing photography. The other cool aspect is that this presents the issues an volumes exactly how they were originally published including the advertisements dating back to their first volumes in the late 19th century (1888).

Not only can you go through the volumes in a digital page by page metaphor, but the application also offers other features such as trivia and Geobrowse which allows you to search, correspond and relate articles geographically with an interactive global map.

The software was built with Adobe Flex (AS3.0) and wrapped in Adobe AIR, and is a cross-platform compatible software package with the Adobe Air Install.

For more info visit:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/completeng/

Purchase from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Complete-National-Geographic-Every-Issue/dp/1426296355/ref=dp_cp_ob_sw_title_0

As Flash matured into CS4 and soon to be CS5, AS3 and Object Oriented Programming is becoming a standard. Great if you’re a developer with that type of background, but what if you’re a designer or a newbie with minimal development knowledge and you want to start getting creative? You can still deal with the timeline if you want, but that is very restrictive and limiting. That’s where HYPE comes in!

What is Hype?
“HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.”

Learn more about Hype here:
http://hype.joshuadavis.com/

This comes from the talented artist, designer, and technologist Joshua Davis.

My friend Juan Sanchez, has already been playing around with it along with Degrafa, a Declarative Graphics Framework that he is a part of. Originally, it was used primarily with Flex, but now they are getting it more AS3 based and allowing to be used with Flash as well.

You can check some of his experiments at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mostlyalso/4073728461/

The Photobucket Visual Search application we (EffectiveUI) designed and developed won the Web Marketing Association Outstanding Achievement in Web Development award for 2009!

This is a great acknowledgment as we faced several challenges working on this application and also developed it in a fairly young technology, Microsoft’s Silverlight! I was the lead UX Designer on the application working with a very talented team. It was a great experience to get into Microsoft Expression Blend & Design to implement the styling of the application and being exposed to XAML and how scalable it is to work with, especially when collaborating with development.

I have written a post previously about this application, you can catch up on it here:
My Visual Search Post

Here is WMA’s post about it:
http://www.webaward.org/winner.asp?eid=13855

Visit Photobucket’s Visual Search Application:
http://photobucket.com/visualsearch/

Several coworkers and industry friends have been tweeting about the new JQuerey Sparkline plugin.

This looks like a great resource to add some very dynamic and robust sparkline charting elements to your website with very minimal implementation efforts and code.

For more info, visit:
http://www.omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/

What is a sparkline?
I first heard of this term while attending one of Tufte’s conferences in Colorado a couple years ago. If you are familiar with Tufte’s work, you know his skills with data visualization and charting. He referred to the graph types that have vertical and horizontal units of measurement which create a line that resembles a “spark” as it represents the specified data types across the graph.