wheresrhys

I can make a ball bounce up and down in flash, and that’s about it. And my javascript is rapidly improving, but still leaves a lot to be desired, but simple animation effects using flash or javascript can really enhance a design.

For example, one of my favourite site-designs, http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ (I love the classy, formal look, aimed at senior teachers, but also with splashes of colour and animation to suggest innovation and fun), uses flash to create a subtle bouncing navigation effect.

So what’s a boy to do?

A week or so ago Sitepoint published a cute little tutorial on how to make surprising animations react to browser resizing… and the magic of it was that it only used a gif and a jpeg to achieve this. Inspired by this, I decided to make the futurelab navigation using just animated gifs, and the results are pretty good I reckon. And it only needs a couple of 1 pixel wide gifs per navigation item – less than 1kb in total. (I also only learned how to make animated gifs in photoshop this afternoon, using this tutorial).

A note of caution: my navigation items are all the same colour, so you’d think I could use the same gifs for each item… but not so. Something to do with how firefox renders animated gifs means it doesn’t animate the hover-off image if it’s used on another navigation item too. The solution is simple: make a few copies of the hover-off gif with different names.

Hello

I’m back after a brief sojourn into not being on the internet.

A short post to start: It seems to have gone unnoticed by the blogosphere, and main stream media too for that matter, that a major event has happened on the internet recently.

I could be talking about the site I’ve been working on at work being launched… but I’m not. Far more significant than that is that Youtube now make it easy to subscribe to a person’s videos with an RSS reader. Previously subscribing to a video channel using anything other than youtube’s in-site subscription function meant a trawl through the faq’s to find the correct syntax for RSS feeds, and then typing the URL manually. Most annoying that they didn’t make it more publicly accessible.

Well, that has now changed. Visit any youtube person’s page and you will find a little orange RSS icon in the address bar. And for that I am grateful.

As for the blogosphere not noticing this major internet event, I meant that slightly tongue in cheek, as the end result of youtube’s RSS-ification is that it makes it easier to keep tabs on ephemera. But it does surprise me somewhat that no-one else picked up on it; I subscribe to a few blogs about the internet, and the trivia they publish, republish, pore over and comment on beggars belief sometimes e.g. The Twitter website was down for a couple of hours or so, and droves of technology writers went positively apopleptic!

Anyway… rant over. Now that you can subscribe to youtube at your leisure, i recommend you check these out:

• Mike L Mayfield – slightly surreal and nostalgic hand-drawn animation
• David Firth – disturbing, surreal and immensely funny animation. Think 2D Blue Jam
• Sheep films – mostly silent short films involving a man getting himself into unlikely recursive situations
• Me – I don’t make films, but will occasionally favourite ones I deem worthy