If you want to know what people are really searching for online, go and have a play with Google Trends.

You can see how popular a search term is on Google, and it’s updated every 48 hours so you can also get up to the minute data, or view up to 4 years of historical data.
It also has a neat feature which allows you to compare multiple search terms, particularly useful for vanity checks on how often people are searching for your brands (or your competitors).

Here’s an example which should help to illustrate how it works:

clinton

obama

Click here to visit Google trends
Now, keep in mind, the figures are a little rubbery (there isn’t even a precise scale on number of searches) but it really gives a nice overview.

If you want to trace something in flash but you want to load the flash in a browser, you can rework your trace statements to display them with the Firebug extensions.

Instead of using trace() you can use the following:

var flash_variable = ‘testing 123′;
getURL(“javascript: console.log(‘”+ flash_variable +”‘)”,”_self”);

These statements will appear in the Firebug console inside Firefox. For more options, you can view the full capabilities of the console: www.getfirebug.com/console.html

You could create a new function that automatically traces to both sources, but make sure it is not switched on by default, or it could cause problems and expose data to maliscious users. AP

Just a quick shoutout to say thanks to a few gun actionscript coders out there who are generously sharing their top-notch work…

• Shane McCartney / www.flashdynamix.com and specifically this great post on GIS mapping interfaces in actionscript
• blog.pixelbreaker.com – Mac Mousewheel scrolling in AS2 and SWFObject add-on: Size limiting for full window flash (my favourite)
• Mario Klingemann / Quasimondo – the legendary flash bitmapexporter: compress and save images through flash / actionscript
• Abdul Qabix – despite all the confusion, it turns out you can access bitmap data (BitmapData.draw()) on a different domain in Actionscript 2, you just need to manually call System.security.loadPolicyFile(“http://otherdomain.com/crossdomain.xml”) and the domain hosting the image must have a crossdomain file. (Flash loads it automatically for data, but not for images).
• JSON for AS2… we also made an update to the Actionscript 2 JSON class to fix ordering bug of object properties
• More coming soon…

We just made a quick update to the Actionscript 2 JSON class to fix ordering bug of object properties…it’s a small change, but it might save you pulling your hair out at 3am… plus we threw in a fix for crashing out on null properties at no extra charge!

Download the JSON.as class (Actionscript 2)
Download an FLA example implementation (Flash 8, Actionscript 2)

What a wonderful industry we work in… Jon, thanks for clearing this up for us.

Enjoy Jon’s narrative on the web design-development process

Is there light at the end of the browser-hacking tunnel? I just read in SMH that IE8 will adopt open W3C standards by default (with an option to revert back to non-standard compatability modes to keep legacy systems built to support IE6 and IE7 up and running)…

Firstly, I am taking it with a grain of salt because after almost a decade of stupidity, I find it a bit hard to believe they are going to come full circle now. So I’m not throwing out our four-system browser-compatability (hacking) workstation just yet. But if it is true, then hallelujah!!!

These days we are spending (wasting) an absurd amount of time on browser compatability. In fact, for design-focussed clients, it’s such a problem that browser compatability is one of the earliest considerations we need to address in the design process, because there are simply so many pitfalls that a perfectly valid standards-based site concept may be a write-off in a good chunk of browsers.

Now, all we need to do is sort out standardize what’s happening on the javascript side of the equation and we’ll be taking fridays off (and probably half of thursday too)!

Here are a few things to keep in mind when learning CakePHP.

• Learn Cake’s naming conventions. If you don’t understand them, you will not understand cake. Simple. e.g. If you have a field dropdown field in a form, in your view you should use $form->input(‘featured_status’), and in your controller you could use $this->set(‘featuredStatuses’, array(0=>’Not featured’,1=>’Featured’) ); The naming convention automatically converts between then, so your featured_status field will be populated with all the relevant featuredStatuses.
• Lean what “Fat Models, Thin Controllers” means. http://www.littlehart.net/atthekeyboard/2007/04/27/fat-models-skinny-controllers/
• You don’t strictly need a separate controller for every single model. Often, it’s much better to have few er controllers which store all related actions. This often makes it a lot easier to locate relevant code. (e.g. If you had a fruit model, as well as models for oranges, apples, and bananas, it could be good to just have a single fruits_controller, rather than separate controllers for each one.
• Code newsting inside views should generally be based on the HTML structure, rather than PHP structure. e.g. You should indent code based on div’s, rather than php ifs and loops.
• You should NEVER use straight database queries. You should learn how to use model associations (hasMany, belongsTo, etc) to perform your queries. Be sure to learn bindModel and unbindModel to perform special quieries -> they allow you to dynamically change your model behaviours, but conveniently, they only last for one query, so your other code will not be affected.
• Use a small number of standard elements to build most of your site. Add optional parameters for adding headings, links, rows of data etc. The fewer generic elements you can use to build your ENTIRE site the better.
• Beware the dreaded self-closing div tags < div / >. You must always have a separate end tag for divs. Don’t know why, it’s just the rules. e.g. < div>< /div>
• When doing browser compatability, comment out each element in turn to identify which elements are causing problems. Also, use Firebug and Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar to ensure your div nesting is correct => incorrect nesting is a major source of browser bugs, because Firefox is a lot friendler than IE, so if you develop and optimise in Firefox you layout may look right, but it may actually contain structural errors which really need to be fixed, rather than just using unreliable browser hacks to hide the problems.
• IE is particularly picky when using AJAX -> perform W3C Validation frequently on your html/css, because it will often pick these errors up for you! Rather than digging around in your code for an elusive missing tag or incorrect nesting order.
• When using Enum values, use this method to populated your form fields (by adding it to your app_model.php): e.g. Controller code: $this->Event->getEnumValues(‘approval_status’)); http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/baked-enums
• You don’t need to include all tables in your $uses array. If you include one table, you can uses any models that are associated with that first model by accessing the sub-model as a child of the first model. e.g. If your controller users Author, but you want to use a Book model, you could use the format: $this->Author->Book->findById($book_id)

Who cares if it takes trendy urbanites an extra 3 minutes to download their latest iTunes purchase?

Leading up to the Australian Federal election, there is a lot of talk in the media and in politics about the need for faster internet access for Australians.

I agree that this is an issue, but the way it is being phrased does the movement a disservice.

ADSL 2 INTERNET ACCESS IN AUSTRALIA IS QUICK – BLOODY QUICK!

We use ADSL 2 from TPG (www.tpg.com.au). It is cheap as chips (about $69.95 per month for the 30 basic Gig package) and for the record, the speed is BLISTERING. We need to be careful that we don’t accidentally download huge files it threatens to fill up our cap of 30 GIGs per month. (Actually we just upgraded to the 50Gig plan because of this very reason).
Our record so far was 1137.89kb per second (i.e. If you had absolutely no taste and wanted to download the entire Pirates of the Carribean 3 (despite being 3 hours long), it would take us about 30 minutes. (Granted, that was from a server based in Melbourne, but we regularly get over 235kbper second from servers based in the US or elsewhere).

PENETRATION STUPID!
What we should really be saying is that we want better broadband penetration. The more people who have access to broadband in Australia (even just old school broadband downloading at 20kb per second) the more Australians will get be involved in online, and the stronger our audience and industry will be.

WHAT’S ALL THIS TALK ABOUT RURAL BROADBAND?
Furthermore, I can appreciate the social aspect of encouraging broadband penetration into rural and remote Australia. Giving all Australians access to internet is important from an economic and education standpoint. However, I wonder how the actual numbers end up breaking down? How much does it cost (or how much do you need to subsidise) a broadband connection to someone in Remote Western Australia?

I don’t really know the exact numbers involved, but if everyone in the major cities already has ADSL (or ADSL 2, or Cable or something else respectable) then surely we should be focussing back towards the areas without broadband at all?

Here is an overview of the key advergaming genres and their prospects for the future, with respect to their use in online viral marketing and advertising. The ratings assigned to each genre (out of 5) are obviously very rough indicators and vary greatly depending on the quality of the game in question, but may give some perspective to newcommers to the gaming world (especially all those account managers out there who are working on their geek-quotient).

I have included a few examples that demonstrate each genre. They may not be the best exponents so if you have any better examples to add, please send them through – particularly any examples that are more focussed towards marketing & advertising campaign objectives than some of the examples listed.

Read the rest of this entry »

3D Hardware Acceleration will revive Director Shockwave for Online Gaming – I’m putting my balls on the line here people by proclaiming that Director is coming back bigtime! As much as we would deny it, we’re all suckers for sexy 3D graphics, and the only way to do 3D properly online is with Director, because it (unlike Flash) supports hardware acceleration.

That’s not to say that the application in its current form has much of a future (bloated IDE, ~50% browser penetration, dwindling developer base, cross-platform projector issues) because as we all know, it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of love recently. However, it all comes down to giving people what they want. Online audiences are increasingly responding to online / portable / casual games – and the main way they are currently being delivered is with Macromedia Flash (I know it’s official by now, but Adobe Flash just doesn’t sound right for some reason).

But as much as we deny it, we’re all suckers for sexy 3D graphics, and the only way to do 3D properly online is with Director, because it (unlike Flash) supports hardware acceleration.

…so maybe the future of Director is not quite that rosy, but I am betting that the only thing that it really does uniquely (hardware accelerated 3D graphics) is alive and kicking. In the absense of any other promising platforms, I’m going to get stuck into lingo (thank the lord for javascript syntax) and take a one month actionscript-free diet.

And if it doesn’t end up working out that way, I guess I’ll see you at Centerlink!

(On the other hand, they could easily add 3D hardware acceleration to Flash, or Adobe Apollo, but I’m not holding my breath…)

References:

Director coming to Intel Macs, says Adobe