Update: since this story ran in the Edmonton Journal it was picked up by sister papers The Calgary Herald and The Cape Breton Post. Separate stories were written and published in the Edmonton Examiner and NAITLine:
I have updated the logo on RUNNINGMAP with a modified design. I replaced the typeface first of all. I was inspired by Gotham Rounded and Bryant but ultimately went with VAG Rounded (Hoefler & Frere-Jones EULA says that the type can only be embedded as a bitmap in Flash, no vectors … that is too restrictive). I also thinned the legs of the “runner” mark partly because it looks like a more lean runner but mostly because Michael Surtees told me to. That was free advice I assume
Also new on RUNNINGMAP are a few new GUI components. The “zoom slider” replaces the plus and minus zoom buttons. I have had several aborted attempts at designing this feature and I am quite happy with the results. It works well and looks very different to the standard google or yahoo! zoom control. Three buttons that controlled the map view were replaced by one combo pull down control, which is skinned to nicely integrate into the control bar.
Below is a screen shot of part of a Flash application I built for teaching “Cash Flow Statements” which is apparently a difficult part of the introductory accounting course at NAIT.
This is one of my best pieces of work to date but those I show it to are underwhelmed. But I think that is ok. They just don’t see a few things.
I was really excited to see Steve Jobs present the new apple phone where he demonstrated the Google Maps application. The possibilities swirled in my mind. Then reality. First, the google map app showed a graphic of maps with push pins, and I have been meaning to introduce a push pin graphic into RUNNINGMAP for a while but just didn’t get to it. Now, if I do it, it will look like I am just copying them. Sigh. The phone has a full blown browser which means it can show RUNNINGMAP! Ah, no Flash Player. (that will come). It does not matter, it runs OSX! We can release a desktop version that runs RUNNINGMAP. Nope, Apple is not allowing 3rd party applications to run on this thing. They are locking it down! Which I’m sure is necessary since it has WiFI and Cingular (their cellular partner) would not want skype clients running on this thing. OKAY so at lease people can collect gps lat/lon while carrying this thing. No GPS (this will be added I predict). And lastly, it is expensive! $499 to $599 USD plus you have to sign up for a 2 year cingular contract and some probably ungodly per month fee. Steve Jobs wants to capture 1% of the market by the end of 2008 (massive market bw) but this will be tough. In the end this phone will have little market penetration so ultimately not an important vehicle for RUNNINGMAP at this time.
For myself, I just want a phone that will sync cleanly with my Mac address book. I pay $10/month for my Telus pay-and-talk plan. I really really liked the Newton when it first came out, but it was a thousand bucks! I eventually bought one used for $150. I suspect I will pass on the iPhone until they come out with iPhone nano that I can use on a pay-and-talk account.
Through the years I have worked with video in Flash in varying ways. As Flash has evolved new tools have been made available that solve old problems. Here is an example:
One would think that running a Flash based multimedia presentation from CDROM would be ideal: fast dedicated bandwidth. But as it was in Flash MX days, if you tried to load a video from CDROM from within Flash, the entire application froze until the entire video was loaded into memory. If your video was over 5mb in size this was a big problem. With Flash MX2004, streaming FLV files made this problem disappear.
Fast forward to today. Flash’s recent codec enables video that is smaller in size and better in quality. And since the web is what really matters, the Flash Player’s ubiquity and cross-platform/cross-browser compatibility has resulted in a coup d’état where Flash reigns king.
YouTube found the holy grail of the internet. Video that just works. You click play and the video plays. For me it has been a near flawless experience. It does not matter what browser I use or what platform I use. Before YouTube there were big time bandwidth and technical problems with trying to host web content.
Yes, the video quality is poor. Yes, the clips are short. Who cares. It works.
Maybe I am just being naive … Today I came across a blog that had a reference to RUNNINGMAP.com in the title of the entry. It was an incoherent blog of sort-of-related text. Scraps of information squished together. And … more than half the page was filled with Google Adsense. AHHHHHH. I get it. Someone created a bot that blogs away and ultimately gets hit because of its keywords. In this case Google’s Blogsearch indexed it. This is an easier way of making money than VLTs!
Stuff like this the dental plaque of the internet. It needs to be flossed and eradicated. And robots are scary.
I like the default skin that comes with the mCom Flash components. Its really well done. After a while though you need to mix it up and put your own stamp on things, and mCom lets you do that. So I made my own skin, which you can see below. If you like it you can have it by downloading the source here . What I learned is that technically mCom makes it easy to make a skin. From a visual design standpoint easy it is not!
The examples below also highlight the lightweight nature of mCom. The mCom example file size is 12kb and the Macromedia V2 example is 40k.
in a Flash application has been an issue that I have not got around to solving until recently. Grant Skinner explained how to preload class based Flash apps in his blog post “Internal Preloading in Flash MX 2004″. The problem with the Yahoo! map component arises when you try to use the PanTool and the compiler claims that this class is unavailable. It seems that the PanTool class is not getting loaded at the right time. Playing around with this I found that instantiating the PantTool object in the map init event handler seems to work. Download the source FLA to see the whole setup.
is a quest I have been on for a while. When in 2000 I created my first flash movie I quickly realized that creating my own GUI elements is not easy. I have been inspired by the work of others and tried many things in the interactive work I have done in Flash since. I use to change my winamp skin weekly and enjoyed looking through the hundreds of user-made skins available. Finally, after much effort and carpal tunnel syndrome, I have designed the perfect button:
This work predated and influenced the current RUNNINGMAP interface. It is very simple and slightly sculptural which gives the buttons a tactile feel and makes them look clickable. I think buttons should look clickable which means that I don’t favour the in-vogue flat one-dimensional look of some ajax based web apps. You should not have to hover over something to see if it is a button.
