Transparency
Years ago, when I was doing more web design, and was employed doing it as well, the internet was stagnated. IE6 was the norm, and so things were very non-standard, and hackish as everyone had to deal with a browser that was not standards-compliant. Firefox was just beginning to get market share, and IE7 was under development, and finally the growth of the internet continued as a new browser war began and pushed forward standards and features.
At the time, one particular thing I didn't like was the fact that I couldn't use transparency in PNGs. As such, I couln't easily make flexible layouts using PNGs with only partial areas, because IE6 would render the transparent areas as white. Which would mean you would have to use GIFs for anything you would need transparent areas, which then meant you had to deal with the 255 color pallette limit, which wasn't a really feasable idea either. All in all, it meant for a lot of pain in site development.
I haven't really done much since then as far as web development. I knew in IE7 they fixed transparency settings for PNGs, however, up until today, I didn't know that that fix also allowed use of an even greater feature: translucency, or partial transparency. In fact I only discovered it by accident, because I found it on an example page of a different method for having an image fill the whole browser window and automatically resizing.
Having that feature in all the major browsers opens up so much more possibilities.
Tags: software website_design
Polishing Work
So at this point I guess PivotX is actually basically stable, but its not a final release yet just because the developers haven't finished up the new site or documentation for it. So I'll be working on moving over to that soon, after I finish up some testing. For now, since the template format is finalized, I have finished the work on my templates, and have everything matching up now. Next work will be to port the templates to the page/chapter system so I can add those sort of static pages and have everything still uniform, I will look at that tomorrow maybe.
Date posted: 11 February, 2009Tags: regularspelling website_design
Sanity Check
The word of the day is logorrhoea, a perfectly hilarious and fitting word to describe such an annoying behavior.
Date posted: 06 February, 2009Tags: psychology words
Starting Capital
One of the things I don't really like the idea of is the high cost of development tools. I mean, that's fine and all when purchasing it as a business, but as an individual, purchasing it for myself for personal and contract work, the high cost is a lot harder to swallow as a low-income indvidual.
A various number of things fit in here: Photoshop, 3D Studio Max/Lightwave (my personal choice), Flash, Visual Studio, Office, and so on and so forth. Tools that simply aren't that feasable for individuals, but for most the individual doesn't need things so powerful so there are lighter alternatives. For most things, there are also good Open-source alternatives, too. For Photoshop, there's the Open Source software Gimp (for serious editing), as well as Paint.NET (for simpler things). For somet time I used Paint Shop Pro, but I didn't like the changes made to it after 8 and so I had to switch for my day to day tools. For 3D there's the open source Blender, which, while hard to figure out at first glance, is designed to get things done fast so once you get the hang of how to use the interface things can be done very well. For Visual Studio, there's a myriad of tools, the actual Platform SDK has the compilers included in it, and Microsoft nowadays offer the feature-limited Express Editions of the individual IDE's. For Office, there's of course the open-source OpenOffice.org, and Corel is still around with WordPerfect, which is also my personal preference.
However there isn't really anything for Flash. There have been a few various cheaper tools over the years, but rather feature limited. As far as anything is concerned, basically the only option is to use Flash. The problem when it comes to us with low budgets is the cost, as of right now a new copy of Adobe Flash CS4 is around $700, with the upgrade version costing $200. It's simply not something feasable on my budget, without taking out a business loan which I would want to avoid. The problem, however, is that the last choice, open source software, will be somewhat diffucult to work with. I have found several libraries, but they would all be generating things from code only, and not any sort of visual IDE to work with. Not a problem, in my case, being a programmer that works that way in the first place, but from what I read it seemed quite difficult to actually compile into SWF's. So I'm going to have to look into those further.
Tags: personal software
Time off of Work to Work
So, as I mentioned last time, I took two days off to get some work done, with some specific goals. I managed to get an update to Skewed out finally, after almost 2 months since I last posted. I should be able to get another one out fairly soon, as I wrote half of the immediately next one as the first thing I was working on when I was trying to blitz during December, but never got to doing.
I also wanted to get a sprite for Amy Carter done for Spiral Island, and for Xedre Kopta as well if I had time. However, it became clear to me, as I drew out a rough sketch to use as a template for spriting, that it has been way too long since I have done anything artwise, and I am terribly out of skill, so I will have to put that on the back burner and do a lot more practice before I get to any art, which would effectively put that as the very last thing I will do for Spiral Island. I know exactly how everything should look visually, getting it out of my head and into some form that can be used will be another story. Anyone have an Animus handy?
In the mean time, I got some actual structural work to Spiral Island done, making some key changes to allow me to now expand it past just the tile engine I had in place already. But by far the most interesting thing that came out of this vacation was something completely unplanned. I was contacted on YouTube concerning my map editor project on SourceForge, and out of that has now come a new group project for a whole RPG Kit suite which I am part of the team on. I will have to look into some of the rest of the RPG template for the XNA project, as I'm not using anything else from it aside from the tile engine since my needs for Spiral Island are significantly different.
So that's that, that's what is up right now. A rather productive set of days, I'm pleased, and am now wishing I was working more for myself. In time, I guess.
Tags: programming skewed spiral_island writing