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.)
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 [...]
I just came across this wonderful Gist on gitHub: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var $; YUI().use('*', function(Y){ $ = Y.get; for(var p in Y) { $[p] = Y[p]; } }); // test $('body').append("boo!"); In case you want to use YUI3 but really really like jQuery syntax :) OK, it breaks the whole sandboxing idea of YUI3, but that's a small price to [...]
Bass Schouten is a cool name, and the Mozillan has presented Direct2D hardware acceleration. You have to grab Firefox nightly, do the about:config / gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled game, but then you get to see it in action. IE9 showed off how they will support hardware rendering, and I am sure we will see more at MIX, but it is [...]
Works even in IE6 Love that quote from the color picker over at RaphaelJS land. This plugin by Dmitry Baranovskiy gives you an easy color picker in short order: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var icon = Raphael("picker", 23, 23).colorPickerIcon(11, 11, 10); icon.attr({cursor: "pointer"}).node.onclick = function () { document.getElementById("benefits").style.visibility = "visible"; var out = document.getElementById("output"); out.style.visibility = "visible"; [...]
Andrew Hoyer shows his canvas Fu with Cloth, a great experiment using nice physics. What makes this simulation special is the speed at which everything is computed. Javascript (the language this is written in) is not exactly the most efficient language for this type of computation. This being said, much time was spent squeezing out every [...]
Marcus Westin has created a new templating language called fin. It is an interesting beast, and he gave us a run down: Since this past November I've been working on a realtime templating system I call "fin". I'd love to get some eyes on it, and hope that you'll find it exciting. There is no demo, [...]
Would we all like Steve to sit down with us on our project and do a performance case study? Well, we may not get that, but we are getting to at least sit in on others. Steve has kicked off his long awaited series that runs performance case studies on third party content. I have been [...]
David Anderson: "TraceMonkey has rocket boosters, so it runs really fast when the boosters are on, but the boosters can?t always be turned on." Opera's new JIT compiler Carakan is doing well as we just posted. What is Mozilla doing with TraceMonkey? A lot. Mozilla JägerMonkey adds method based JIT (of V8 and Nitro fame) to keep [...]
The Opera team has released 10.50 for Mac and along with it some impressive performance numbers: Stabilization Improvements: You will find that this build is much more stable than the pre-alpha build. More polished user interface: The whole UI is more polished now. We're still not done yet, and expect more polishes and improvements in [...]
Bastian Allgeier has developed a beautiful, native looking web application called ZooTool. Zootool is a visual bookmark tool for images, videos, documents and links. It is completely based on Mootools, even though it looks more like a Cappuccino app! Play with it. Enjoy it.
EnhanceJS is a new library from the Filament Group, who are serious about progressive enhancement and accessibility. What is EnhanceJS? EnhanceJS is a new JavaScript framework (a single 2.5kb JavaScript file once minified/gzipped) that that automates a series of browser tests to ensure that advanced CSS and JavaScript features will render properly before they?re loaded to the [...]
Reposted from my personal blog where I tinker with the Web. I tweet about this stuff here. As you move to a new platform, it is interesting to watch your brain morph over time. I remember switching from Windows to Mac. At first the fonts looked blurry and weird. The mouse pointer didn't weight right. The [...]
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 [...]
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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