You believe this is all CG? Amazing. Make sure you watch it in fullscreen.
Google vs. iCal
The little football icon is cool, but otherwise I think the title offers too much information, cluttering things up and chopping off text. I already know the Buckeyes are playing in the game as that’s the point of the calendar. All I need to know is who they are playing, where, and when. What TV network I can watch it on would be nice too though.
// Your everyday absolute tween that moves movieclip_mc
// to 100 on the x axis, taking one second to do so
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:100});
// A relative tween that moves movieclip_mc to a
// position on the x axis 100 units/pixels greater
// than movieclip_mc's current position
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:"100"});
// An absolute tween like the first, but passing in
// the new value with a variable
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:newX});
// A tween that casts the variable as a string,
// thus making it a relative tween
TweenMax.to(movieclip_mc, 1, {x:String(newX)});
If you’re not using TweenMax/TweenLite, do yourself a favor and give it a try.
Can you use it in a sentence? Could I have the language of origin?
There are so many things here that I disagree with. With spelling and layout alone:
The meaning is just as bad as the layout and spelling. Calling yourself unique doesn’t make it true. Nor does applying any of the cliches above (actually, 4 misspellings might be original). Nothing in the name links to a memory or feeling you might have. It doesn’t create a new space in your mind. There’s nothing memorable about it except for how bad it is.
And they’re using the ® symbol? I seriously doubt they paid to register this mark. Look out uniquegraphics.com.
Last Thursday, tech giants Microsoft and Google each had a big announcement. The former officially announced its new search engine Bing, an announcement that the tech world knew was coming, as its latest attempt to reverse the tide of Google’s search dominance. The latter surprised its audience of developers with a deluge of information in its preview of Google Wave, an amalgam of email, IM, wiki/document editing, photo sharing, etc., all done in real-time, that according to its creators “is what email would look like if it were invented today.”
Google’s tsunami of an announcement drowned out Microsoft’s news for the day and as the swell grows its easy to forecast that the storm isn’t over. As developers join the flow and create their own applications, we will all feel the ripples for a long time. Never content to ride out a current success, Google seems ever capable of looking over the current crest for the next opportunity to catch more momentum. Bing’s release though, instead of being the watershed moment hoped for by Microsoft, may only turn out to be a drop in the bucket.
Ok, enough of that. In case you missed the point, I crammed a boat load (another one!) of metaphor into the preceding paragraphs to illustrate the branding effectiveness of Google Wave. which I think is a great name especially when compared to Bing. A great name attaches itself like a barnacle (again!) to thoughts and feelings you already have thus making it more memorable. Wave does this fluidly (I can’t stop). Bing does not.
Take note of how a product is launched and you’ll see how confident a company is in it’s branding. Google Wave is introduced and the developers are wearing some cheap tshirts; Bing is annouced with an $80 million advertising budget. A good name “has legs.” It’s easy to talk about. A bad name has an advertising plan while a good name IS the advertising plan.
Branding aside, both products look nice. I did a few searches on Bing and the results look fine. But I’m so tied into Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc. that I don’t think I’ll be spending much more time getting used to it. I also watched the video of the Wave presentation, and it looks like another home run for Google.
So what gives? Well, the staging environment was serving SWFs with gzip compression and this was messing up the bytesLoaded and bytesTotal properties that my preloader SWF was trying to read from the main SWF. Different browsers reacted differently too. Some saw bytesTotal as 0 (IE), which is what gave me the infinity percentage (dividing bytesLoaded / 0 will give you Infinity), while others reported bytesTotal as the same as bytesLoaded (Firefox). Hard coding a fake bytesTotal was my temporary fix.
To check to see how your server is sending your files, you can use Charles to inspect your web traffic. Here’s the one that was breaking because of gzip compression:
A SWF served with gzip compression will cause preloading errors.
And here’s what it should look like:
A SWF correctly served without gzip compression.
I originally thought the issue was with the SWF being served with the wrong MIME type of “text/plain” but changing that didn’t fix my problems. The moral of the story is to check these server settings before wasting a Saturday (Gasp? Working on a weekend?) trying different versions of a Flash preloader and waiting for staging to build the site after each try.
Dropbox is About to Have a Price Cut
Google is offering storage at $0.25 per GB per year; that’s $25 with Google vs. $240 with Dropbox for 100 GB. Now, Dropbox has more features with auto syncing and version history, but there are already 3rd party apps working with Google Docs so we’ll probably see similar features down the road.
My guess is Dropbox and ZumoDrive are about to get cheaper.