dezza’s blog

Having spent the majority of my working life building Flash sites, my CSS skills are pretty limited.

Flash’s ability to render identically on different browsers and operating systems really does shield you from the hacking and the work-arounds that html/css developers face daily.

This was reinforced to me recently when I spent an hour or so trying to get the vertical alignment of some images (the bullets) in a bulleted list to look the same on FF and Safari (let alone IE,Opera etc). Alas, without success. In the end I decided to split the difference in pixels and accept that level of precision wasn’t really that important to me.

Today I discovered something called Wrapper on the OS Flash site - it’s kind of like sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) on steroids. Maybe this is the future of cross-platform css:

“Wrapper is a cross-browser compliant HTML/CSS rendering engine written in ActionScript that sits on top of your standards compliant HTML page. Wrapper eliminates cross-browser issues and makes integrating ActionScript and HTML/CSS projects possible without needing to compile.”

I’m pretty impressed that it’s creator Tyler Larson has gone to the trouble to do this. Not sure what, if any limitations of using this approach are, but it looks interesting to say the least.

Here’s a screen shot of the provided example and respective code:

The Unlimited website mentioned in this post is up for FWA Site of the Year. If you’ve got a sec please throw a vote it’s way.

Just finished work on the Jenny Packham site, lots of Flash wizziness which once again benefited from the Pixlib framework. I sort of inherited this project after the original build went a bit haywire. I’m starting to see how a project’s complexity increases exponentially when many interactions are possible from anywhere in the application.

Credits:

Project Management: Simon R | Art Direction / Site Design: Buzz, Al | Flash Programming/Build: Dezza, Russ| Back End: Nilesh, Igor

This is a project that we just finished at Poke for Orange’s ‘Good things should never end campaign’. It’s an unlimited web page! That’s as in unlimited not *unlimited. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out in the end, as the concept of unlimited made me pretty nervous to begin with. This is the second project I’ve completed using Francis Bourre’s open source Pixlib framework for Flash and I must I am loving it. Thanks Francis!

Credits:

Project Management: Alex, Karen | Art Direction / Site Design: Julie, Nik, Nicky | Illustration/Animation: Rex | Flash Programming/Build: Dezza, Dee, Stinky, Matt, Marius | Back End: Knotty, Marc | Sound: Nick

Hello world!

I’ll be honest, I am a bit nervous about starting a blog. I spent many months making a content management system for my existing site, and when it was finished, never seemed to find the time to update it. Hopefully I’ll fare a bit better with this.

I’ll be posting random rants and some work related stuff. But that’s going to have to be another day as it’s a beautiful sunny day in London which happens for only a week or so each year. Later!