Archive for March, 2008
March 24, 2008 at 9:06 am · Filed under Flash, Mobile
This was an interesting weekend for time and temperature in London. We had rain, sleet, driving hail, blustery wind, and light snow – all on the same day! Perhaps Mother Nature knew I would be in testing mode, as all the changes sent a larger spectrum of temperature and conditions data.
The weather data comes from an RSS feed courtesy of Yahoo! Weather. Although you can access a set of weather icons from within the feed itself, I wanted to create my own. Making 50 icons takes time, so I completed the basic setup shown above and will further develop the application when I get back from holiday. (I’ll be in Florida for a week – making sure the sunny, partly cloudy, and clear icons are working properly 
March 12, 2008 at 4:41 am · Filed under Air, Events, Flash, Learning
Are you signed up for the Air Developer Day in London? If not, I highly recommend you check it out. This is an excellent learning opportunity.
One of the biggest draws for me is that Lee Brimelow will be there. I don’t know if you’ve seen his flash tutorials, but he is my hero! Getting some of his time will be very special indeed.
So, if you haven’t signed up for this FREE event — hop over to the site right now. You’ll be glad you did.
See you there
March 11, 2008 at 5:27 am · Filed under Design, Devices, Flash, Photoshop
If you’re like me, you use Photoshop to create nice visuals for your application. Recently, I was working with gradients and found the subtle color transitions on my desktop caused banding on my Nokia N73. The problem is that the majority of handsets can’t display as many colors as desktop computers (thousands vs. millions).
The antidote for color banding is called Filter 5_6_5 which you can find at http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/. Post-processing your bitmaps with this filter will reduce the color depth and dither the image.
Don’t worry if you don’t notice the difference immediately. In fact, expect your images to look worse on your desktop (you’re now viewing graphics with much less color information within a millions-of-colors environment). However, when you beam the image to your handset, you should see marked improvement.
