I have been working to understand more aspects of the Flash platform and how we are implementing it in our Full Sail curriculum and this XML basics article I just found was really helpful in explaining E4X syntax and how to traverse the XML node tree.

The article does mention implementing the Flash IDE for their code, but Flex Builder is a much nicer environment for building ActionScript projects. Plus, you can install a copy of the XML Buddy Eclipse plugin in FB and it just happens to be one of the few XML editors that auto-completes custom nodes (the only other one I've found is Espresso).

Along with Norm, I have been on this kick lately to drink more water... whether it's of the tap, iced or vitamin variety. For the most part it has been great ... you feel less thirsty, gives you something to put in your "I Heart Jim Halpert" coffee mug ... all that good stuff. Sadly, though, it also has the side-effect of forcing me need to visit the restroom like every 1/2 hour. And sometimes, the bathroom isn't always available and I make funny faces like these ... just less cartoony ... or maybe the same cartoony. Hmm ... not sure which it is, but I do know that more water intake definitely equals more bathroom breaks.

Oh and I hope you like the style on this one ... I was going to for really simple and quick ... which it kinda is, though it did take three tries getting it like that on paper.

After a yummy Thanksgiving lunch and hanging with the co-workers, I spent some time updating a few graphics for the DFP course's Project 3 example.

Despite the fact that these pieces will end up in Flash as part of an AIR deployment, I still created the vectors in Illustrator and did a copy-import. Not because I am lazy, but because I still prefer working with AI's interface and color selectors over the Flash IDE.

And, of course, I had some Battlestar Galactica : Season 1 playing in the background. Just another day at the office ...

The lovely geometric type icon I made during the DFP Lecture today. Simple and customizable, but after continually seeing all of the pretty things that James White keeps putting out, I really just wanted to make something colorful. The icon is entirely vector, which was really difficult to achieve with the color blending of the radial shape and the necessary drop shadow ... had to delve into that cumbersome Illustrator Transparency panel masking interface, which is not typically any fun.

As usual, the icon should be available for purchase from GraphicRiver later on this week ... once it gets approved, of course. Feel free to head over to GR and pick up a couple of my other icons too . My new XBOX 360 will thank you for the spending money. :)

With the currently progressing update to the Dra Studio and some recent client projects, I have been trying to find a decent WordPress theme or framework that I could start from and build each future project on. After trying out quite a few nice and fully-featured ones, including Thematic, Hybrid, Starkers, The Buffet Framework, and Emptiness, I found myself more encumbered than enabled ... having to match up with their structure and layouts, working within their rigid (or at least overly-complex) CSS style frameworks, etc.

I ended up utilizing the clean and simple 1024px theme as a staring point and building out my own parent theme. I'll probably continue to tweak it as I move forward with projects (e.g. just this weekend I added some baseline CSS typography styles, using insight from the Blueprint framework), but it has already aided me immensely in my WordPress deployments. So has MAMP ... which, if you haven't already switched to locally developing WP installs, you should.

The last few days have been full of a lot o' work ... creating code and pre-pro examples for students, updating curriculum in the classroom, then keeping busy through the wee hours of the night and morning creating for some Illustrative clients.

Thanks to Norm reminding me about how easy it is to setup local databases with MAMP or XAMPP, I have been having an easier time working with WordPress:http://wordpress.org lately. I will eventually need to figure out how to create local MySQL DBs with Snow Leopard's built-in capabilities, but for now, this was plenty simple.

And thanks in part to all of the talk and hub-bub going around lately about the benefits of Fireworks and my missing its subtleties, tonight I came back around to putting some designs through it. While it still lacks a seamless integration into the CS4 UI, it really is a much stronger screen n' pixel editing environment than Photoshop at times.

Most of the Illustrative projects are still in progress, but I'll be sure to post some up on Flickr or the Portfolio when I get the chance.

There is an easy way have 10.6 load the 32-bit version of Perl, but unfortunately, even after doing so, it looks like Validator is still having some other issues.

There is no contact information on Robert Crews' website, so I went searching for some viable replacements. Apple has a Developer Connection article installing a local W3C HTML Validator and you can download nifty Stand-Alone HTML/XHTML Validator for the Mac (which Veerle made some nice icons for), but neither will validate against a custom DTD.

Enter XMLMate ... the open-source, robust TextMate plugin for "Checking XML and XHTML documents for Well-Formedness and Validity while editing them in TextMate with support for DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron, XInclude, XML Catalog, and XPath 2.0 Visualizer". Yeah. Wow, indeed.

I still don't own a copy of the pricey TextMate (despite how much I like it), but this add-on is nice enough for me to click thru the license screen every launch. Enjoy.

While creating an example AS3 file for our Deployment of Flash Projects class just now in Flex Builder, I almost found myself in an absurd "the-files-are-missing" predicament that we hear about every now and then from our students. Turns out some of it may not be so absurd ...

While Flex Builder allows for multiple Undos in several areas of its interface, it also has a subtle way of not indicating where those Undos are taking place. Example? At the start of my project, I created a new folder to store some assets (FLA, SWC, etc.). While progressing through the project, writing code and undo-ing in a few class files, I happen to accidentally click into the "Flex Navigator" pane. The next time I hit undo, FB undoes the creating of my "assets" folder. I don't notice and continue working and the next time I compile or head to the Flash IDE to update the graphics, I get reference errors because of the missing files. Dandy, ain't it?

This could possibly be a workflow/UX issue that stems from the underlying Eclipse environment, but maybe Adobe will read this and realize they need to work harder to improve their "go to" Flash/Flex development environment.

Tonight's DFP icon experiment resulted in a pretty 2 for 1 tag special. It is not much of an easter egg, but I thought my name choice on the Christmas tag was a fun one. :) As always, these should be available for purchase soon on GraphicRiver and as always, I'll update this with the link when they are.

Thanks to the built-in screen capturing feature of Snow Leopard's new Quicktime X, I actually managed to record the entire creation of these two. Once I get a chance to mangle the before and after dinner pieces together (and probably speed up the footage), I'll be sure to post it.

I happend to be testing one of the current Illustrative projects locally and notice the following PHP error on my date('y') function:

The error wasn't occurring online, since the live server's php.ini file or the server itself was setting a timezone. Turns out that the newest version of PHP (5.1.0) that ships with Snow Leopard now requires that a default timezone be set.

You can read through the quick fix on the Mac OSX Hints site to resolve the issue on your machine.