Culture Pilot cranked out a fantastic design for the new Integrated Alchemy website and I handled all the coding (CSS, JavaScript, ColdFusion, and Flash). Both firms are so freaking cool and do such amazing work that it was a total pleasure to work with them both. Click on over.

The City of Pearland produced an excellent new map book of the booming city. They wanted to create an online version that gave the feeling of flipping through a book. Naturally, I used the famous Page Flipping technique. I also added a street drop-down menu to jump to a specific page quickly and a magnification of each page. Take a look.

Believe it or not, I was introduced to a great new client, Liquid Design by way of World of Warcraft!  I’m in a guild of freelance developers led by Dave Seah, who referred Liquid Design to me for Flash Development.

The project was a USB application that required easy replication, simplified updates and be available in English or French.  The purpose of the application is to create, save and print presentations from a base deck of dynamic slides.   The best way I can think to describe it is as a proprietary version of PowerPoint if you could only make slides from a controlled repository.

Unfortunately, because the project is intended for offline use, a web version is not available; but I'll post a few screenshots.

Today the National Geographic Channel begins the "Behind the Science" series on the human body and with the premiere of the show comes the launch of the Flash based, XML and Remoting driven quiz. Go take a look and test your knowledge (after watching the show, of course).

The shiny new look and updated code of NexBank has gone live. Take a look.

I had no idea what to do other than blame the whole Steve Jobs wants you to buy an iPod once a year thing. I mean, seriously, shouldn’t the iPod be waterproof?

I figured the only possible things I could do were:

• open it up and try to see what was wrong
• send it to Apple and pay to have it fixed
• sell it on eBay/craigslist; as a broken item, of course, because even broken they still fetch a pretty penny.

Naturally, I decided to open it up.

A quick search on del.icio.us led me to iFixIt.com Repair Guides for iPods, which is a pretty rad site that is dedicated to helping you repair your iPods and other Apple stuff. It was by using their site that I was able to resurrect my iPod.

DISCLAIMER: First, you need to understand that opening up your iPod will most definitely void the warranty. So, if you don’t want to void your warranty do not do any of this. Instead, just ship your damaged item to Apple for repairs.

The first thing I tried to do was open up the iPod and let it dry out for a few days.

How to open up an iPod.

To open the iPod, I used two “tools.” An exacto knife and one of those fake Credit Cards that are delivered almost weekly via unsolicited junk mail. You can probably use a regular credit/atm card, but I opted for the fake one because I had it handy. I also read about people using guitar picks.

Before you start prying apart the iPod, be sure to put the player on “Hold” because you will inevitably be tapping the wheel along the way.

To start the opening, I put the exacto knife blade between the top of the iPod and the back casing and pried it open just enough to slide the credit card in between the front and back casing. Once you get the credit card snugly in place, slide the card around the iPod, loosening the edges.

With the edges separated you can now slowly (and I do want to stress SLOWLY) take the two main pieces apart. Take your time in doing this because there is a ribbon that you’ll need to disconnect and you don’t want to run the risk of tearing it. (more...)

This was a cool project to work on because the Flash content had to be optimized and developed so that it could be used interchangeably between the various countries in which Kaspersky operates.

Go ahead, take a gander.

The first phase of the CabinetsQuick! Custom Cabinet Builder has been put online and is ready for stress testing. The next phase will boost it with even more functionality, including project retrieval and significantly improved user management.

The greatest part of the application is something that happens entirely on the back end and is (unfortunately) never seen by the end user. But to give you an idea of what takes place: an .ini type file is generated and then sent to a 3D application that then renders the cabinets and draws up cutting specs. Pretty sweet!

In fact, it just recently happened to a buddy a mine. He sent me an email essentially asking "How can I view an FLV file?" The quick answer is: you need to create a Flash file that uses the FLVPlayback component and that component should point to the FLV that you want to load.

After a quick googling, I found several articles that explained ways to build a viewer and a few open source options that required a download. But, I was unable to find a simple solution where you could just point to the FLV (on a web server) and view it. The solution: build one.

The result: I whipped up a very simple FLV Viewer that allows you to paste a URL to a FLV file, click "Load and Play," and watch.

So go ahead and check out the simple FLV Viewer. Hopefully this helps someone out!

Quick note, if you're having issues running FLVs from your server, be sure that you've set the MIME type on the server accordingly. You can read about configuring your server for FLVs from Adobe.

Aflac Racing's new video player uses Flash and XML to dynamically load and display video and photos. The entire piece is customized via the external XML file.

This was a really fun project to work on! If you have any questions on how it works, just post them in the comments!