Author: Patrick

MMM… Bacon

Because the standard “lorem ipsum” is so played out.

baconipsum.com

A sample:

Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet shankle meatloaf biltong beef ribs, pork chop salami bresaola short loin turkey tenderloin shank rump ham hock. Cow swine salami bacon corned beef jerky. Salami tongue shankle, strip steak fatback jowl flank beef pork loin pastrami shoulder jerky. Pancetta pork loin sirloin shank, meatloaf ground round strip steak sausage. Venison turkey meatball drumstick pork shankle strip steak jowl short ribs meatloaf short loin. Sirloin meatball pastrami, bacon flank chuck tongue pork chop swine sausage meatloaf. Biltong rump strip steak chicken, shoulder pig venison ball tip corned beef spare ribs.

 

Dibs

I saw this on the dog walk this morning and it’s the best “dibs” I’ve seen yet. The city will probably give them a ticket though for parking too far from the curb.

Toy car in a snowed in parking spot

Nate Berkus Associates

I recently picked up Nate Berkus Associates and Entertainment as a great client and am proud to announce the release of our first project together, nateberkusdesign.com. This is a new site presenting the work of the interior design firm based here in Chicago.

I used the Gaia Flash Framework for the first time with this site, and it won’t be the last. It knocks a couple days off of development time because of its navigation flow, baked in SWFAddress, and asset loading. With it’s event hijacking, you aren’t limited to a strict event flow and can still get your site to do what you want.

This project may have ruined “The Summer of Patrick,” but it was worth it. Keep an eye out for Nate’s new show premiering next month!

Diffusion Curves: These would be Pretty Cool in Flash

This isn’t the latest news, but if you haven’t heard of diffusion curves, watch the video. A diffusion curve is defined as “a bezier spline that stores colors on each side of the space it divides.” Neat.

Adobe was part of the paper, so I’m not sure if they own the technology or not. Here’s hoping they get the rights to it and include it in Flash in the future. Animating individual curves would lead to some great effects.

Check out their images (pepper, lady bug, woman) that you can rollover to see the how simple the underlying curves information is.

Dropbox is About to Have a Price Cut

Dropbox is great. I’ve been using their basic/free plan for a little while now. And I’ve been very close to upgrading to a paid version for more storage, but thanks to Google, I’ll be waiting a bit longer to make that jump.

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.

Tweening to a Relative Position using a Variable in TweenMax

This isn’t too complicated, but it’s something I hadn’t come across until a few days ago. If you want to tween an object relatively, but the new value changes and needs to be a variable, just cast it as a string.

// 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.