TOKI WOKI. 

While redesign­ing this blog I wanted to keep the “one color per post” con­cept I had in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion by chang­ing (tween­ing) the logo’s color accord­ingly to the arti­cle being viewed (or scrolled to). I rapidly real­ized I couldn’t achieve this with just HTML+CS+JS and I didn’t want to use Flash (mainly because of iOS devices but also to avoid load­ing a SWF file on every page).

I remem­bered hear­ing — a few months ear­lier — about Raphaël (a JS lib to ren­der vec­tor graph­ics). At that time I found the con­cept really inter­est­ing but couldn’t see where to use it.

OK, so I know what I want to do, I know the tools I’ll use, but how do we do that? Raphaël is cool, but its syn­tax looks a bit cryp­tic at first. It says it han­dles SVG, and — guess what — Illus­tra­tor can export to SVG. We’re get­ting closer…

SVG is XML, but Raphaël doesn’t eat XML, it eats a spe­cific syn­tax meant to be com­pat­i­ble with SVG and VML. Hum… This is when I fire Flash Builder and start writ­ing code. The goal: accept an SVG XML file as input and spit some “Raphaël-compatible script” out.

Boom (plus a lit­tle demo of an output).

I then sim­ply had to export my Ai logo to SVG, open it in SVG2RaphaelJS, copy paste the out­put, and wire all that to the scroll/color tween­ing logic. Pretty easy.

Every­thing worked and looked nice on all browsers and OS’s but I real­ized the sole idea of hav­ing a logo chang­ing col­ors didn’t work that well. For purely visual rea­sons. So I dropped it from my theme and rolled back to the black PNG ver­sion you can see right now.

The good thing is, the tool works pretty well (at least with Illus­tra­tor SVGs) and is Open­Source. Either use it or mod­ify it, and tell me what you think. I did this in a hasty fash­ion and I prob­a­bly won’t use it a lot, so don’t expect updates or bug fixes… But if you feel like improv­ing it, please do so!

Guess what? AIR app! This one’s for edu­Me­dia.

An intro

We cre­ate and dis­trib­ute ped­a­gog­i­cal sim­u­la­tions and videos, and our school users can down­load them to pre­pare and illus­trate their lessons. Until now we offered server-side gen­er­ated ZIP files with an HTML, some CSS and the SWF, but users (who often are not com­puter geeks) wanted some­thing sim­pler and more pow­er­ful… So we designed the eBox!

The eBox

Basi­cally the eBox is an empty media library wait­ing to be filled. The first time you launch it, it installs itself (and the AIR run­time, if not already there) and then fills itself with the medias you chose. This hap­pens thanks to AIR’s Browser­In­voke logic and removes the “Save As” and “Uncom­press” steps.

You can also fill it with “local medias” (of any type) but drag­ging and drop­ping files on it, or by brows­ing and select­ing them. If these medias are SWFs they’ll be opened within the app, if not the OS will open them with their default app. Handy.

You also have the abil­ity to cre­ate direc­to­ries to orga­nize your library, and to reorder medias (via drag and drop). Pretty com­mon, but cool.

Let’s talk tech

Flex 4.1, local­ized with Lupo (now free and Open­Source!) and designed with Illus­tra­tor. Server-side com­mu­ni­ca­tion is made through AMFPHP. I used some tiny tech­niques that helped deploy two dif­fer­ent ver­sions with only one project (we have a school and an indi­vid­ual ver­sion), I might detail that in a next post.

This is my first real-life project with Robot­legs, it helped me learn how to use it and how to write really clean code; with view, medi­a­tors and all. I loved it and think I will con­tinue build­ing big projects with RLs, makes you feel pretty.

So?

I’m pretty happy with the final result (not that final, expect updates!), both on visual and tech­ni­cal points of view. Go grab a free media and tell me what you think! We also set up a spe­cial page with a nice pre­sen­ta­tion of how it works, in case you’re lost.

I talked about the logo here and there and now, here are the EPs! Grab them dig­i­tally or phys­i­cally.

I’ve had this blog for 2 and a half years now, and it never really evolved visu­ally. So I decided to update it a bit, from scratch.

So that means a new theme?

Yay! Since the blog has been redesigned and you’re prob­a­bly read­ing this from your RSS reader you should defin­i­tively come by and see how it looks. And share some feed­back, if you feel like it.

Can’t remem­ber what it looked like before? I’ve archived screens over at Flickr.

A con­sis­tent look

Updat­ing the blog’s look is good, but a com­plete rewrite is bet­ter; for con­sis­tency, fool! I used to have a dif­fer­ent look for every sin­gle page: home, projects, blog and so on. No more.

Long story short:

“Before: all dif­fer­ent. Now: all good.”

I’ve been into grids since the day I learned about Blue­pint CSS and Josef Müller-Brockmann, this is why I wrote Boks. And this is why this site now heav­ily relies on a grid struc­ture. For grid freaks out there, click here to tog­gle the columns and see what I mean. Of course if you’re on a small device (such as a phone) the UI is a bit dif­fer­ent, but we’ll get into that later.

Got a key­board? Like short­cuts? Press that key!

I imple­mented a few key­board short­cuts, from use­ful to use­less. For exam­ple, if you liked the grid tog­gle, just press G (for grid) or W (for InDe­sign users) and you’ll get the same effect. OK, that one is pretty useless.

But what about scrolling to the next arti­cle by press­ing N (or the Down key)? And you guessed it already, P (or Up) will jump to the pre­vi­ous (inspired by AisleOne). You can also time-travel by press­ing Shift+P (for Past) or Shift+F (Future). Handy? Yep.

Feel like you’re stuck in the blog? Just press 1 to go to the Home page, or 2 for Projects. 3 is for the Blog and 4 is the About page.

My screen is smaller than yours

I dis­cov­ered that tech­nique on Hicks­de­sign and imme­di­ately thought I had to imple­ment that: CSS Media Queries! The thing is pretty easy, you define your base CSS styles and then over­write some dec­la­ra­tions if the screen size matches some rules… I imple­mented 3 dif­fer­ent lay­outs so the site should look good on about any device. Just resize your browser win­dow and see things move. How cool is that?

My brother (and his iPhone 4) helped me test the retina-display-ready logo, too. Optional but cool.

More awe­some

• I’ve always wanted to use Web­fonts but never really knew where. Here it is, you’ll find a nice OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT on the home page. Thanks Google.
• Another tiny thing is the “Sub­tle Prompt”. It hap­pens when you use a key­board short­cut or when you click the Con­tact link…
• If you’re on a WebKit browser (Safari or Chrome) you should see cus­tom scroll­bars, styled with CSS. Yeah.
• I kind of don’t sup­port Inter­net Explorer. Yes, this IS an awe­some feature!
• Track­backs are now sep­a­rated from reg­u­lar comments.
• A blog post’s author (my) com­ments appear dif­fer­ently, so you know who’s the boss out there.

Open­Source

I always try my best to share the use­ful and reusable bits. Here are some JavaScript (MooTools required) goodies:

• LazyScroller: turns your key­board keys into a nav­i­ga­tion dashboard.
• Sub­tlePrompt: nice and gen­tle prompt for your sen­si­tive users.
• Lblr: form input in-context labeler.
• ta-bg: allows a textarea’s back­ground image to scroll with its content.

I’ll try to post docs/demos soon, I know this is prob­a­bly a lit­tle bit rough right now…

What now?

Well, you tell me! I’m pretty happy with it, but things can evolve—just share feedback!

You know you want that.