alien109.com is the Portfolio site for Matthew Sweet, a User Experience Engineer, Front End Developer and Designer. Projects can be searched by category (Web Applications, Software Applications, Web Design, etc.), or by technical keyword (XHTML, Javascript, PHP, CSS, XSL, Flash, etc.)
I was on a panel at OSBC with Dave Mcallister of Adobe and Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft. I wanted to talk to Brian about canvas in IE9 but held off until later where I even offered the community up to write the IE code ;) Someone off the record told me last week “it is coming… [...]
Michael Hanson and a team at Mozilla Labs have been doing some really interesting work with Identity in the browser (and taking ownership back from services). They just released an alpha add-on for Firefox that begins to integrate contacts from services (right now: “Gmail, Twitter, and, on MacOS-based machines, the local Address Book” but growing). Imagine getting [...]
The Jetpack project over at Mozilla Labs has been rethinking what it is to extend the browser (as has Chrome Extensions). They both move us to using Web technologies and skills rather than having to digg into XUL or C++. The project has gone through a reboot, and shed the original experiment as Jetpack Prototype. We [...]
It was St. Patricks Day last night, and I have a funny feeling that some green beer and Guiness lead to Brian LeRoux and Rob Ellis creating Crockford Facts. It isn’t Friday yet…. well it is in Australia right? Silliness. Oh, and John Resig has some competition for Doug too. We demand a dance off?
A certain someone was talking to me about how they find it interesting that node.js, the JavaScript server framework du jour which loves all things async, starts life with a bunch of synchronous require() calls. Now, this is actually quite fine since the startup of the server is not the issue at hand. However, if you [...]
David Desandro has developed a newtypeface family named Curtis and done so in an interesting way.... using CSS: Each character is wrapped in a <span> and then depending on the complexity of that character, more empty <span> elements are added to the markup to render each shape. Here's the markup for R: PLAIN TEXT HTML: <span class="css_char r"> [...]
Disclaimer: Ben and I work for Palm and created this program. I wanted to make sure that you were aware of it over here, since Web developers have a great chance of getting some $ :) At Palm we wanted to reward the mobile Web developers who build great applications that our users can enjoy. We [...]
Update: Here is a full set of release notes on the platform preview (called that as it is more of a shell than a browser. Rey Bango (Ajaxian and now Microsoft employee) will do a post that rounds up the news from MIX today where the IE9 team shared a first preview release of IE9 that [...]
The Chromium folk have posted about JavaScript conformance as they release a test runner for Sputnik, that allows you to easily run the complete test suite from within your browser: Sputnik touches all aspects of the JavaScript language defined in the 3rd edition of the ECMA-262 spec. In many ways it can be seen as a [...]
Cedric Dugas feels so passionate about fixed positioning in WebKit that he created A Better Mobile Web to talk about it: The Problem It is impossible to have an element fixed in CSS on the page in the mobile Webkit browser. When you are surfing the web on your phone, webkit opens the page completely and acts [...]
Ben Cherry has a really nice detailed analysis of the module pattern. He starts with the simple pattern that Crock-y documented back in the day..... and then goes on to discuss augmentation (loose and strict) and then deeper into some cool patterns: Cloning and Inheritance PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var MODULE_TWO = (function (old) { var my = {}, [...]
Sergey Chikuyonok gets his Philips Ambilight foo on as he created a HTML5 video + canvas sample that mimics the TV effect. As the video runs, a snapshot is sent over to JavaScript land where colors are worked out: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: function getMidColors(side) { var w = buffer.width, [...]
I just finished doing some talks on geo hacking (slides are available here) and how to use some of the Geo technologies Yahoo and Google provide as part of a University gig in Atlanta. As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting [...]
Erik Dahlström and Vincent Hardy have put together a cool website, called SVG Wow!, that showcases SVG doing things you didn't expect SVG can do: There are alot of unique demos on there. One of my favorites uses SVG, HTML5 Audio, Web Fonts, and YUI to play music accompanied by flying animated lyrics (Chrome and Safari only): There [...]
The Ext JS team have announced the 3.2 beta which includes new components and goodness. Take the animated DataView transitions for example: On top of that, the release includes: Multiple sorting and filtering on Ext.data.Store Composite Fields Slider improvements Toolbar plugins: ToolbarReorderer and ToolbarDroppable New Accessibility Theme: compliant with Section 508 of the Disabilities Act. Quality Assurance: Unit Testing: over 180 bug [...]
Paul Irish and Jonathan Neal have created a fun example of various CSS tweaks that you can make, and see the results instantly. CSS3, Please! lets you play with fancy new rules such as: border-radius box shadow gradients rgba support in backgrounds transforms font-face Really nice way to make tweaks inline in the page..... nicely done. Hope to see some other examples out [...]
Good old Kangax has been playing with HTML minification and has shared his new tool in an early stage. What does it do? Kangax has forked John Resig's HTML parser which parses the HTML and sends that into the Minifier. This has rules that do things like whitespace optimization, comment removal, and collapsing boolean attributes (e.g. disabled="true" [...]
Harmony is a new drawing tool, a HTML5/Canvas experiment with great potential. It provides some unique brush styles, and can produce some great-looking charcoal pencil style sketches, among other things. Better to try it out than explain it in words. Creator Mr. Doob (Richard Cabello) explains how he used Canvas to make it darker the [...]
The HTML5 specification introduces the and media elements, and with them the opportunity to dramatically change the way we integrate media on the web. The current HTML5 media API provides ways to play and get limited information about audio and video, but gives no way to programatically access or create such media. We [...]
modulr is a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScript Ruby? what does that have anything to do with it? Ah, its from one of those Prototype guys isn't it.... Yup, Tobie is at it again, this time with modulr: modulr accepts a singular file as input (the program) on which is does static analysis to [...]
Content courtesy of: ajaxian
Oh man. I was super excited to see that there’s a Tron 2 in the works. I was a huge fan of the original movie. I hope they don’t disappoint. Official Site trailers: http://www.flynnlives.com/media/video/0xendgame.aspx
Facebook recently decided that it was going to start using your photos in select advertisements. You can opt out, but by default – you are opted in. This is what Facebook has to say: “Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting [...]
So I just got this shiny new MacBook Pro. Absolutely love the thing. I’ve been away from the Macintosh platform for far too long… Anyway – I’m sitting in my office listening to music and realized that the speakers, while okay for what they are, suck by most standards. So I pop over to my PC [...]
Most browsers these days (with the exception of Safari, I think?) will accept gzip encoded content. This means you can drastically reduce the size of all those bloated javascript libraries you might be using on your web site. So how do you serve gzipped js files? There a few methods out there. I chose the one [...]
After working on a small AJAX library, I decided to test it in IE. Everything worked great, except when requesting XML. The responseXML property of the XHR was null. I’ve had this issue in the past where the server isn’t returning the appropriate Content-Type (text/xml). But that wasn’t the issue this time. I checked my [...]
Here’s an example of the force directed node interface that I’ve been talking about. It’s not complete. It’s just a working prototype. You still cannot load project details, but I’m waiting to add that if I decide I want to take this any further. Since the dimensions of the interface have been reduced to fit in [...]
I’ve been working on the experimental Flash front-end I spoke about in the last post. The idea is to use a force directed or force based system for displaying categories, keywords, projects and their relationships. I was curious about what kind of user experience that would create. Here’s a video of the force directed layout interface [...]
I’ve decided to play around with an experimental front end for viewing projects in Flash. Since I OOPified (yes, that’s a technical term) the site and modeled the data, all of my objects can be easily serialized into JSON strings and passed back to the front end. Then using the as3corelib’s JSON classes, I can [...]
XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity > Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to parse RSS file. (Reserved XML Name at > line 3, column 38) in [...] > > Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [...] Yesterday it was called to my attention that the RSS parser that was pulling the feed from my blog [...]
Aviary has recently released another web-based application. Raven, which is still in beta (all of their applications are. that’s so web 2.0!), is a web-based vector editor. Their product suite consists of four applications at the moment: Peacock – a visual laboratory Raven – vector editor Phoenix – image editor Toucan – colors watches Peacock is kinda cool. Image generation [...]
Content courtesy of: /dev/null
resume
I am a seasoned Front-end Developer and Web Designer with over ten years of experience. I have a proven track record of delivering small to large scale projects on time. I have a broad set of skills encompassing both the technical and the creative sides of development. I am dedicated, detail oriented, self motivated and a great team player.
Languages/Technologies: (X)HTML, XML, XSL, CSS, JavaScript, JavaScript Frameworks (JQuery, MooTools, Prototype), DOM scripting, Ajax, PHP, JSP, ASP, Velocity, Flash ActionScript 1-3, Object oriented programming; working knowledge of .NET, C#, Apache, Linux, Java, Spring MVC, and MySQL
Software: Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Premiere, After Effects, Image Ready and Director; Microsoft's Office Suite and Visual Studio 2005; Eclipse and IntelliJ
iovation, Inc.
User Experience Engineer
Designed and developed front-end for customer facing admin application. Developed advanced data visualization tools in Flash to help identify fraud. Established standards and processes for UI development to increase quality and reduce development time of new features. Guided and managed front-end development by offshore team.
Centennial Software
Webmaster
Maintained Corporate web site and web servers. Developed and launched new customer portal site which provided improved support and increased sales opportunities. Produced linear Flash presentations for product demos. Integrated sales and support efforts on company web portals.
Transim Technology Corporation
Designer/Developer
Designed and developed small-large scale web applications. Ported existing Java based applications to Flash, resulting in increased features, reduced debugging time and better user experiences. Increased brand awareness through redesign of existing web site and marketing materials.
Freelance
Designer/Developer
Designed and developed e-commerce and marketing web sites. Developed basic templating and navigation engine as well as administration tools for client web sites, resulting in reduced delivery time, easier maintenance and reduced effort for minor content updates.
EyeVelocity, Inc.
Sr. Graphic Designer
Responsible for product interface design/development and usability testing. Developed corporate identity and designed/produced marketing materials including videos, linear presentations and interactive demos. Developed in house applications for product support resulting in quicker turn around and increased customer satisfaction.
MediaMania, Inc.
Graphic Designer
Designed interfaces and content for CD-ROM, desktop applications and web sites.
B.F.A. Advertising/Graphic Design
Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design
Awards:
Presidents Award For Creativity
Gold Medal for Multimedia/Animation
David W. Bozeman Memorial Scholarship
Deans List