agitcraft

When I was at AdobeMax on the convention floor, I noticed that MapQuest had a booth touting their API and a new logo. Now honestly, I was more curious about the logo than the API. Does MapQuest do anything better than Google Maps? If so, I’m not aware of it. Anyway, on to the story of the logo redesign.

Maybe you remember MapQuest’s old logo?

Old MapQuest Logo

It’s fun. Quirky maybe? What’s up with that font?

What it really is is dated. That’s not to say that everything should have a reflection under it, be written in helvetica, or look like a fucking sticker peeling off the wall, but this logo clearly comes from the days of a more innocent internet.

Enter the new logo:

New MapQuest Logo

I don’t like this much better. In fact, I specifically don’t care for the superscript thrown on the Q, or the balance of font sizes between the M and the Q. The color choice is okay, if not a bit loud for a company that’s been around for almost as long as I’ve been using the internet.

Hmm…come to think of it, how long has MapQuest been around? I remember using them before Google Maps came out, but how early did that start? Let’s head over to the About page. Maybe there’s some information there.

MapQuest: The Company!

Ok, reading along here…woah! Now just wait a minute! Did you read what I read?

MapQuest has been helping people find places, get maps and directions for over 40 years. As one of the most recognized and trusted brands on the internet, we’ve created mapping solutions that support consumers and businesses alike. Learn how MapQuest mapping solutions can help you get to where you need to go.

40 Years? How could that be? Did they publish printed maps in the past? Then again, this is starting to make sense. Look at this:

MapQuest Classic

This is what MapQuest used to look like. In fact, MapQuest has looked pretty much like this for a long time. If anything has happened to the interface in the past decade, I believe it was that the map down screen got larger and had improved controls added to it.

Have you seen the new MapQuest homepage?

The New MapQuest!

This design is definitely much cleaner. You couldn’t see it in the screenshot of Classic MapQuest, but a lot of garbage content has been stripped from the interface in favor of a design that brings you straight to the point: Maps! There’s even a press release about the redesign.

Something about this redesign doesn’t sit well with me. It gives me a strange sort of “uncanny valley” vibe with regards to some other website…

Google Maps

Oh that’s right! Google Maps! Isn’t it incredible how similar the two now look?

Let’s get to the point and call this exactly what it is: A midlife crisis. MapQuest is 40 years old and has been replaced by a much younger competitor with a better design and better functionality, so they’ve gone the route of the redesign in a very pathetic attempt to outdo their youthful nemesis.

This is no different than an older man buying a motorcycle, or an older woman getting cosmetic surgery. It’s a sad attempt by MapQuest to remain youthful and relevant in a world that is leaving it behind.

So recently, as you may know, I redesigned my personal portfolio. In the time since, I’ve intended not only to actually continue updating said portfolio (as well as modifying certain sections), but I was also hoping to finish up a redesign for the blog to match. As usual, I’ve been highly distracted by other things, including the construction and launch of my first AIR app and other fun and games.

I have a design for the new blog, but it’s going to take me some time to actually slap it together into a usable wordpress theme. In the mean time, I figured the blog needed a makeover. I selected this theme because it’s clean and functional. Hopefully I’ll have something custom some time soon.

Hey readers. I haven’t been updating in the last few weeks for personal reasons. I’m back now.

I’m working on a release version for my first public AIR app, and on a redesign for this blog to match a little better with my new portfolio.

I’m pleased to formally announce the relaunch of my portfolio at www.agitcraft.com. It’s been a long,  winding, mostly poorly organized effort on my part consisting of numerous missteps and restarts. I’ve technically been working on this iteration of the site for about 4 months (from scratch), although I’ve been grinding away at redesign efforts both with this domain and with my previous portfolio at altpixel.net for well over two years now. To give you a vague idea of how long this has been brewing, the svn I’ve been working out of is currently in revision 381 after going through at least 4 branches, and I’m the only person developing this.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due:

• Jack Doyle for the greensock tweening platform (which makes all the animation in the site possible), without which I’m sure I would have gone crazy long ago.
• The entire Papervision3d team for their excellent 3D package, which powers the 3D “solar system” motif that I use to display my interface.
• The team of developers who’ve thus far worked on as3syndicationlib. There were a couple issues I ran into, but they were minor in the long run and they certainly don’t take away from the fact that I was able to parse and consolidate 5 feeds in real time with only a few lines of code. Awesome!
• The developers of PureMVC, for making a framework that has literally changed the way that I work on large projects and made my site possible.
• Matt McInerny at the League of Movable Type for providing the fantastic “Raleway” typeface I’m using both in my logo and for section headers.
• An anonymous sound fx provider at flashkit.com for providing the ominous intro tune that plays when the site loads. I say anonymous because I was inattentive when I grabbed the audio and forgot to take note of the name/location of the file I snagged. I dug around today but could not, for the life of me, find the file on there. If anybody recognizes it let me know and I’ll give a proper shout out.

The wealth of libraries and tools freely available is part of what makes Flash such an exciting platform to develop for. I certainly could not have completed a project of this scale without them.

Anyway, if you like the site let other people see it. If you have problems with it let me know. I’m hoping this remains a growing work rather than a one-off showpiece.

I just had to bring attention to a packaging redesign I saw the other day that really impressed me. The product is 8th Continent Soymilk. Here’s a photo of the old packaging…

This is all quite standard. A nicely lit shot illustrating what you might use 8th Continent’s rich, luscious soymilk for. Perhaps in cereal? Perhaps even with berries? Why not just drink it straight? This just screams “Me Too!”

BOOOOOOORRRRRRIIIINNNNNGGGGGGG!

Here’s the new packaging:

Dig that retro style! I love the simplicity of the illustrations and color schemes. The typography has also been improved. How will I, in the supermarket, figure out what this product is? The way I see it, the attractive design is going to grab my attention and compel me to step closer and read the label. Nice. These designs are both more competent and more confident.

I spent the last week or so developing a kiosk application for a client that had to prevent users from exiting the application using ctrl+alt+delete, alt+f4, or any other such method.

Because I had worked with it in the past for a similar project, I advised the client that we could use Northcode’s SWFStudio to lock the application down and to record registration data without requiring an internet connection. This should have all been very simple. Create the application, load up SWFStudio, and convert my final SWF to an EXE with all the parameters configured.

In practice things weren’t so simple. You wouldn’t know this unless you dug around, but SWFStudio 3.7 doesn’t play nicely with Windows 7, and for the $300 licensing fee you’d hope they would take the trouble to make this point more prominent. To give you an idea of this problem, I’d like to demonstrate the sequence of steps you need to complete to figure out why your perfectly functional kiosk craps out after you push it through SWFStudio.

First, you have to go to Northcode’s website. When you get there, click on the “swf studio” link at the top of the page. Don’t click “blog” and whatever you do, don’t click “support.”

Once you get to the “swf studio” page, click to continue reading the article on making your applications work with Windows 7. Don’t bother with the “Known Problems” link in the side bar, as even though they thought to post an article about the issue (separate from their blog and their support page no less), it’s not a problem they’re aware of.

You’re almost done! You’ve found the document explaining how to fix your problems in Windows 7. Of course, there’s no patch or software update. You have to copy the grayed out text above into a panel in SWF Studio to get everything functioning properly.

What makes me even angrier about this is the text of the article. The summary, shown in step 2, contains the following text:

Windows 7 adds support for a new section in your application manifests called Compatibility and if you want your SWF Studio applications to behave properly on Windows 7 then you’d better pay attention!

They even use an exclamation mark! I’d better pay attention if I expect their $300 application to function correctly. That might even be ok if they displayed the information prominently on their homepage, or in any of the sections you’d expect it to be in. To give you an idea of how poorly placed this content is, as I was sitting down to write this post it took me 15 minutes digging around their site to find the document in question again.

For my own satisfaction, and for the sake of anybody else who runs into problems with this software, I’ve taken the following liberties:

1. I’m offering this code to you below so there’s a second place to find it if anybody ever needs it.
2. I’m offering this code for download so you can keep your own copy if need be.
3. I’m recommending a slight redesign to Northcode’s home page.

The code looks like this.

<br><br>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?&gt;<br><br>&lt;assembly  xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0"&gt;<br><br> &lt;assemblyIdentity  version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="X86" name="stub.exe"  type="win32" /&gt;<br><br> &lt;description&gt;stub&lt;/description&gt;<br><br> &lt;dependency&gt;<br> &lt;dependentAssembly&gt;<br> &lt;assemblyIdentity<br> type="win32"<br> name="Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls"<br> version="6.0.0.0"<br> processorArchitecture="X86"<br> publicKeyToken="6595b64144ccf1df"<br> language="*" /&gt;<br> &lt;/dependentAssembly&gt;<br> &lt;/dependency&gt;<br><br> &lt;trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2"&gt;<br> &lt;security&gt;<br> &lt;requestedPrivileges&gt;<br> &lt;requestedExecutionLevel  level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/&gt;<br> &lt;/requestedPrivileges&gt;<br> &lt;/security&gt;<br> &lt;/trustInfo&gt;<br><br> &lt;compatibility  xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1"&gt;<br> &lt;application&gt;<br> &lt;!-- the ID below indicates the application supports Windows 7  --&gt;<br> &lt;supportedOS  Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}"/&gt;<br> &lt;/application&gt;<br> &lt;/compatibility&gt;<br><br>&lt;/assembly&gt;<br><br>

You can download a file with this information here: SWF Studio Manifest for Windows 7 Projects

And my suggestion for a redesign of Northcode’s homepage is below.

Recently I spent some time setting up Red5 on my web server. If you’re familiar with the project, and if you’ve attempted to set it up yourself, you’re probably aware that this is no easy feat. The team behind Red5 is notorious, in my mind, for not maintaining their project page very well (at all), so many of the links that should direct you to helpful content don’t actually go anywhere.

Anyway, to make a long story short I did eventually get the bloody thing installed. How do I celebrate? With a demo for you to sink your teeth into?

Not yet.

Instead I spent a few minutes today customizing my Red5 welcome screen and the demos page associated with it. Allow me to present you with a before and after.

Before:

Original Welcome Screen

Original Samples Screen

After:

Welcome to Agitcraft Media Server

Check out the Sample Apps!

For the most part these are just simple modifications of the pages that are included in Red5 by default. In practice, they’ll only really be seen by me, but the little things count.

For well over a year now, I’ve been engaged in the process of moving and redesigning my professional portfolio. The current (a term I use loosely…) version is over 3 years old, and it’s sitting at a domain I don’t really use anymore. I initially began work on a relaunch almost immediately after my portfolio landed me a permanent job, but over the years I’ve been indecisive, full of excuses, and just generally unable to commit to any planned redesign.

I’m sure you know the cycle: You come up with a great design concept, plan about 80% of it, and jump excitedly into development. You make rapid progress initially, but as you delve deeper into the project you come across roadblocks and development stalls. After hammering away for weeks at a time on bugs that seem to multiply faster than you can fix them, you eventually come to consider the project too flawed to complete and scrap it.

Where do these flaws come from? In my case the culprits are poor planning, over-ambitious development goals, and lack of a consistent process for developing large scale applications.

What I once considered the “Redesign Cycle,” I will now be calling the “No-Design Cycle,” as the use of the prefix “re-” vaguely implies that eventually some new design is produced and launched.

This post, however, is not just about my failure to produce a new portfolio in several years, or about my enthusiasm for the current draft I’m working on. It’s about what, thus far, is proving an effective solution to this terrible problem. It’s called PureMVC. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

The claim made by proponents of PureMVC is that it allows you to program “at the speed of thought.” Outrageous, right? After picking the framework up several weeks ago and developing with it in the time since, I can mostly agree.

If you’d like to start working in PureMVC, you can download the AS3 port, check out the full API documentation, and follow the tutorial I used to get started learning the framework, courtesy of Ahmed Nuaman.