Labs

With voting closing at the end of this week, we’re hoping to share some of our thoughts at SXSW Interactive next year. Help us out by voting for our panels and talks!

As was previously announced, our class library is available on GitHub. Our first installment explaining how we use some of these classes deals with one of the most recent additions to the library - OAuthBridge.

A big thanks to everyone who came out to see my talk at Flashbelt. As promised here are the slides and a little bit of code to help get you on your way. Also a huge thanks to Dave for putting on such a terrific conference. It was run so buttery-smooth and even had functioning wifi the whole time. Unbelievable. It was fantastic to see all the inspiring sessions and if you're anything like me, you couldn't wait to get back and try out all the new things you learned.

Developed over years, matured through a long process of adding, removing rewriting, refining, curating, forgetting, re-adding, improving, collecting, enhancing, rewriting … hours of hard work by an amazing team. The Big Spaceship package is a collection of useful classes that help us to do our basic daily tasks faster so that we have more time to concentrate on the fun stuff.

Here it is, the public Big Spaceship AS3 Repository on github:
http://github.com/bigspaceship/as3

Back in February, my friend Linzi, a designer at Odopod, was talking about how much she loves sending and receiving things by snail mail. She said it was "like a hug from far away - existing in a tangible object that (she) can't click a button to accidentally delete." Laura, another designer from Crispin Porter & Bogusky, thought this was an interesting concept, one that found its way into a perfect personal project: The Craft Swap.

Tactility in design seems to be all the rage these days. More and more designers are daring to play with their physical environment in lieu of sitting glued behind glowing screens. Hand drawn typography, in particular, has permeated into nearly every medium; whether it be advertising, packaging, interactive, or motion picture title design. The following is a series of captivating motion picture title sequences which leverage the use of hand drawn typography to develop a tactile feel.

Adobe Flash is a plugin. A lot of websites don't require it, but there are many that do. The ones that use it have a worthwhile payoff: exceptional user experience. It's not outdated. It has a wide range of capabilities. And it can do more than you think. This article is not in defense of Flash or promoting any particular technology. I'm writing this to clear up the blatant misconceptions that make up the "reasoning" behind some of these arguments against it. If Flash were to "fade away," as some say it will, it has nothing to do with HTML5, Apple, or the iPad.

As the number of typefaces grows exponentially, it’s getting increasingly more difficult to know how to choose type. While there are countless resources for learning about typography and how to use type, one of the most useful ways to polish the skill is the ability to identify and distinguish the nuances among and between typefaces.

Although many typefaces look similar—especially as trends come and go—learning to recognize different characters helps to hone your type chops. One of the most unique characters across all typefaces is the “R.”

And now for part three of Design Candy, our weekly selections of the sauciest inspiration on the web. Be sure to check out Part I and Part II.

On a recent PHP project, I was having trouble with the somewhat ridiculous PHP error handling and Alec, a developer here, pointed me to the terminal "tail" command.  This command keeps a persistent connection open to a file and reads the contents into a terminal window.  Using it I was able to tail the php_error_log file, which gave me a full readout of errors regardless of 17 different ways to set PHP error levels. This technique can also be used for debugging Flash content.