"flash" in Weblog

I had a slightly drunken conversation with a really really good Flash chap a few months back,who told me that Flash could be made extremely accessible… If you get right down into the bowels of the application. He discovered all sorts of things buried down there to help you to hook up your app to Microsoft speech assistants and all that, but none of it is documented. Well, apparently JK Rowling has spent a bit of her considerable fortune making her Flash site accessible to all. And an impressive feat it is! Sounds like it took an awful lot of work though. And maybe a little magic.

I meant to post about this when Holler launched their new site but I completely forgot… The site’s super-slick but more importantly, it’s the first attempt I’ve seen to make Flash liquid. Resize your browser longer and shorter and you’ll see the nav bar scoot up and down and the content reshuffle. Well done Elmer! I’d like to see that done for width as well… There was some talk of making it bookmarkable too.

Holler were responsible for the concepts behind SlashMusic, a new Channel 4 venture that makes available all music scoring for all shows for the last 2 years, among other things. This means that you can look up any show and find out what music they used - bloody brilliant.

Back to other Holler work, go check out their Eurostar Ski site. It’s not the most usable interface I’ve come across, but the whole thing looks gorgeous and the default chalet photo is one of mine so I wanted to mention it anyway!

It’s been a while since I last posted a graf link but I’m back with a good one. ni9e. It’s not exactly graffiti-based but there’s plenty in there, and it’s damned clever too. Highlights for me include printing “USPS does not acknowledge the authority of the Bush administration” on USPS cards and putting them back in the post office, and the graf taxonomy images - close-up comparisons of single letters from multiple tags. I’d seen the typographic illustration Flash stuff before but it just doesn’t get boring so go check that out too.

I picked up Zoomquilt from Jon Hicks’ Sidenotes and had to share it. Hit the Flash version and hold on tight to something fixed solidly to the ground… It’s genius!

I’ve not played this properly yet but ICS’ UA-Chess game looks like it could be pretty interesting. It’s been designed to work with Microsoft’s IE Speech Add-on along with a host of other accessibility-related input devices. Accessbile Flash has been around for a while but this is the first time I’ve really seen it used…

I’ve just been shown Preloaded’s video for Evil Nine’s track “Crooked” and thought it’d be worth sharing. It’s done in Flash - no big deal - but check the hand movements. They’re actually animated properly, no tweening. Good job!

I hadn’t realised how prolific Craig Kroeger was on the fonts front! He appears to have designed dozens of pixel fonts while I wasn’t looking. It’s amazing how much variation you can squeeze out of 10 pixels! I used to be a regular at miniml back when it had that lovely Flash interface but I’ve lapsed of late…

Mike Davidson was the original daddy of the Flash Image Replacement technique, having invented and employed his own version in the ESPN redesign a couple of years back. More recently the technique was polished and relaunched by Shaun Inman. Now Mike has taken back FIR, now dubbed sFIR, improved it (with help from Tomas Jogin amongst others) and taken on board the advances to the method by Tom Werner and Rob Cameron… And the results sound a bit special.

The latest incarnation allows sFIR to replace html blocks as well as headings… Text can be scaled (although not without a page reload)… It’s printable… Text is selectable…

I really really like the look of this one!

Flash, DHTML Menus and Accessibility explains the use of the much-neglected wmode property of Flash movies. Turns out that it can be used to hide decorative movies from readers as well as allow the use of normal CSS positioning and z-index stacking. Could be handy…

Vodaphone have created an incredibly slick, high-bandwidth site to promote their R&D department’s work. They’ve used streaming Flash video (Comm Server), slick transitions, heavy media, large pictures… Everything! With broadband spreading, is this what we can expect from the internet in the future?