This was an art project to experiment with reanimating classic paintings to give them new life and see what emotion they could evoke. I utilized the Google location API and the Yahoo Weather API to provide me with crucial data merely based on a location string. You can change your location simply by selecting the current location, replacing it, and pressing the enter key.

Here’s an interesting interview with Will Wright. Game Designer of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore. He talks about how games may evolve in the future, and how social networks could overlap to make game interaction more personal to the player.

http://blog.web2expo.com/2009/04/w2e-sf-keynote-will-wright

Here’s the game I’ve been working on for the past term, with Thien and David in my DAC 300 course. Please try it out and let me know what you think of it in the comments.
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Hey, just to promote the club I’m leading this term. The UWWD club is held 4:30-6:00pm on Thursdays in DP 329 (Flex Lab). It’s my first leading the UW Web-Designers club and I thought I’d make some slight changes to the way the club is run. Instead of getting straight into web-design as before I tought I’d design a tutorial series for web-design.

So here are our 30min Tutorial Sessions for the weeks to come. They’re going to be held at the beginning of the meeting. After that we’ll continue to work on Websites requested by clubs.

Intro to Web-design Series
Photoshop CS:  Jan. 05th, 2009
HTML and CSS: Jan. 12th, 2009
PHP + MySQL:  Jan. 26th, 2009

Additional Tutorials
Creating a Wordpress Theme: March 05th, 2009
Hello Flash Actionscript:         March 12th, 2009
20min Pong in Flash:               March 19th, 2009

So I hope to see you at the meetings.

Flash is awesome for a lot of things. The important thing though, is that many Internet users have it installed already, and to view Flash content requires no further installation. Without Flash, YouTube wouldn’t exist. Here is my first tutorial on getting into Flash Actionscript. Like with any programming language, I’ll start with a simple ‘Hello World’ tutorial.

Open Adobe Flash, and create a new file. Choose the Text tool and draw a textbox in the middle of the screen. Make sure the Properties window is showing. If not select ‘Window’, ‘Properties’ from the menu. For the textbox type (drop-down) make sure ‘dynamic text’ is selected. Dynamic text can be changed via Actionscript but cannot be changed by user-input. In the <instance name> field type greeting

Now, create a new layer by selecting ‘Insert’, ‘Timeline’, ‘Layer’ from the menu. Rename the layer to actions and drag it to the top of the layer list. In the actions panel, input the code below. To open the actions panel select ‘Window’, ‘Actions’ from the menu.

// useful for debugging purposes
trace("Hello World");
// sets the textbox with the instance name of greeting to the specified string.
// _root references the stage
// .text accesses the text property of the textbox.
_root.greeting.text = "Hello World!";

To run your first Actionscript Program, select ‘File’, ‘Publish Preview’, ‘Flash’ from the menu.
Thats it.

What do I mean? Well if you buy a domain name out of impulse, then you might be addicted. Buying 10 domain names in less than a year is another sign that you might be addicted. If you bought a domain like takeasniff.com, just so that you could reference it, in fine print, within your arts project, then you truely are addicted. Hi, my name is Ivan and I’m a domain-buy-a-holic. Well, what’s so addicting about it? Buying Domains is like buying property in some ways; but in other ways it is worse. With each domain name bought, the quality of the remaining names deteriates due to the fact that shorter names are now taken. It is a huge market as can be seen on eBay. The owner of pizza.com was paid $2,000,000 for the name alone. That is ridiculus because all it is, is a substitute for an IP address and only one variable needs to be changed to link the name server to the web server. My addiction sprung up due to fact that I lost a good domain name to someone else. That name was aditin.com planned for an in-game ad network.

You may think that you know all the ins and outs of Photoshop, but what you probably don’t know is that there are the right ways and there are the RIGHT ways of creating a web-page design in Photoshop CS2.0/3.0/4.0.

In this Photoshop Web-Design series, I will show you some techniques I’ve learned to keep the quality of a web-page design at its best, all the time. If you keep these things in mind you will be-able to scale up your design and preserve quality all the time.

So your website will have an awesome logo somewhere at the top. If it’s just basic text it’d be easy to scale it up if you don’t plan on converting it to pixel (rasterized) form.

On the other hand if you do convert it to pixel form this is the method for you.

1. Make the logo way bigger than you think it’s ever going to be. You never know what size you’ll end up using. Note: You can also use Illustrator to create a vector form of your logo and export it at any resolution.

2. Ok, once you’ve created this sick looking logo; select all the layers which are part of the logo, right click and convert it to a Smart Object. This will group all the layers into one layer object.

3. You can double click the layer thumbnail to bring up the logo and edit it at any time. But once you’re done, make sure to save the logo and it’ll be automatically updated in your Web-Design.

4. Now you can scale down the logo while preserving the full resolution. So if you ever decide to scale up, no problem.

Stay tuned for the next part where we’ll explore the use of layer styles to manipulate color in real-time. Because when it comes to Web-Design, layer styles are our friends.

I took part in the Yahoo! HackU event which occurred for the first time at UW. It was a 24 h contest, where contestants needed to write a Website utilizing any of the tools at their disposal. Mainly APIs from Yahoo! but not necessarily so. Congrats to Addy who won first place overall and to the other winners. My hack didn’t make the cut but you can see it here: http://www.mygamespad.com in action. The idea was to enable the use to bookmark games and see what other games are being bookmarked. But it only drew from my pre-existing database of games and didn’t connect to other websites.

The new design is up. Utilizing Wordpress as the back-end it will hopefully allow me to focus on adding content. I hope this is the last re-design. I’ve learned a lot though since then in terms of design. One main thing is that you have to keep it simple.