alien109 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.)
The Yahoo! YUI is an incredibly feature-rich JavaScript library with a LOT of functionality but getting your head around all of those features can be tough. The YUI team wants to help developers get up and running more quickly and announced yesterday the release of SimpleYUI; a basic and more streamlined version of the YUI [...]
Josh Duck has put together a fun and useful list of the 104 elements currently in the HTML5 working draft but organized like a periodic table of elements: When you click on one of the tags more information appears: Who says chemistry can't be fun? [via Jackson Harper]
By Dion Almaer webOS 2.0 SDK has just launched, and it has node.js built in (and more). The following is taken from my personal blog At our last Palm Developer Day, Ben and I discussed future APIs for webOS including "JavaScript services" as a way to write code that runs on the other side of the device [...]
I stumbled on the Mozilla Foundation's Drumbeat project recently: Drumbeat gathers smart, creative people like you around big ideas, practical projects and local events that improve the open web. It's very well done combination of projects + community. There's a whole slew of cool projects already one here. A small sample:
Google Rich Snippet Oli Studholme has an excellent new article on HTML5 Doctor on the different ways HTML5 can be extended with things like microformats, the link tag, and more. Why would you want to do this? While HTML5 has a bunch of semantic elements, including new ones like <article> and <nav>, sometimes there just isn?t an element with the [...]
Dmitry Baranovskiy and team have released another version of Raphaël, an excellent drawing and animation library backed by SVG (VML on Internet Explorer). New features in Raphaël 1.5 include custom attributes and keyframes. Keyframes can be defined similar to CSS3 Animations: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: el.animate({ "20%": {cy: 200, easing: ">"}, "40%": {cy: 100}, "60%": {cy: [...]
The SVG Web team has announced a new release. SVG Web is a drop in JavaScript library that makes it easy to display SVG graphics on Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 using Flash. The new SVG Web release, like all of their releases, is named after especially silly D&D monsters. The new release is code [...]
Perfect for a Monday is a cool 3D model editor built using the Canvas tag and created by Jayesh Salvi:
I stumbled across http://webkit.org/specs recently, which is basically a nifty listing of all custom extensions Apple/Webkit has made to web specs, written up as specs themselves so that other browsers can implement them: Squirrelfish Bytecode Timed Media Elements CSS Effects Extensions to CSS 3 Media Queries The 'pointer-events' property There were some on here that I had never even heard of. [...]
TechCrunch reports on a Googler, Paul Truong, who created an HTML5-based game for Gmail called Galactic Inbox using his 20% time: When you start it up, a little Gmail logo envelope guy pops out of a ?20% Projects Lab? and starts flying. Essentially, he?s a spaceship and can shoot objects coming his way. It?s simple, but [...]
Ryan Seddon, aka the CSS Ninja, has a nice blog post up where he reverse engineers the new feature in Gmail where you can drag attachments from an email on to your desktop. Note that the feature only currently works in Chrome. Ryan begins with the following code: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: var file = document.getElementById("dragout"); file.addEventListener("dragstart",function(evt){ evt.dataTransfer.setData("DownloadURL",fileDetails); },false); Describing the code Ryan says: From [...]
(Various Shivs) Via JD Bartlett comes HTML5 innerShiv for IE. Before innerShiv, the following would not work in IE: PLAIN TEXT HTML: var s = document.createElement('div'); s.innerHTML = "<section>Hi!</section>"; document.body.appendChild(s); For example, let's imagine we have some CSS that defines the following for the HTML5 elements footer, header, and section: PLAIN TEXT CSS: footer, header, section { border:1px solid #ccc; display:block; padding:10px; } Unfortunately, even if [...]
Last week Adobe announced they are jumping into the Web Fonts game in a partnership with Typekit: For this debut of Adobe Web Fonts, I think we?ve made some great choices. Everyone knows Myriad and Minion ? pervasive workhorse sans serif and serif typefaces, respectively, which will prove to be as useful on the web as they have been [...]
From Hakim El Hattab (who has some very nifty HTML5 experiments up) comes some nice tips on using the Canvas tag: Cross browser implementation There are no real discrepancies between the canvas outputs of different browsers so long as the JavaScript code is written correctly (if not, browsers tend to try and fix things for you, [...]
I don't usually post acquisition news on here, but I just wanted to congratulate 280 North, who we've covered on here many times and are fellow members of the Ajax community. 280 North produces the awesome Cappuccino language/framework, including the 280 Slides presentation web application. Techcrunch is reporting that Motorola has bought 280 North. From [...]
The last month has seen an interesting back and forth over CSS Media Queries. In a nutshell, CSS Media Queries make it possible to apply style sheets only if certain properties are available on the display device. For example, you could have a stylesheet only display for screen devices with a maximum screen width of [...]
Jonas Wagner has ported the Flash 2D physics engine Box2DFlash to JavaScript: In his demo Jonas uses the Canvas tag to map the physics simulations on. Click on it to create explosions: Jonas talks about the approach he used to convert the original library from ActionScript to JavaScript: At first I thought this conversion would be trivial as [...]
Don't be bummed it's Monday, 'cuse the CSS3 Song is here to cheer you up: How can you go wrong with lyrics like this: CSS3 Web animation done properly CSS3 Degrading gracefully I had a dream, an awesome dream People surfing in the park On Windows, Linux and Mac And their page load speeds were oh-so-high No big JavaScript library Just to show some eye-candy CSS3 Web animation [...]
Via Zachary Johnson (aka the Zachstronaut) comes a cool experiment using pure CSS to generate pulsing rings/map markers. He's put together a nice video explaining the concept: He has a cool demo (Chrome or Safari + Snow Leopard only) of the effect: The pulsing effect, for example, is generated by a CSS3 Animation: PLAIN TEXT CSS: @-webkit-keyframes ringpulser [...]
Content courtesy of: ajaxian
Testing multipart emails can be a pain when you can’t choose whether you want to see the plain text vs the html version of the email. If you use Apple’s mail client however, you can set a preference on which version you’d like to see by default. Just open up a terminal window and enter the [...]
Recently I was attempting to create some cron jobs to run PHP scripts on a DV server or at MediaTemple, with PHP installed as an Apache module (rather than CGI). I was able to execute the php file, however all of my include and require statements were totally failing. My first idea was to set the [...]
What’s better than a monkey taking a grumpy? A monkey taking a grumpy while reading a book and banging his head to heavy metal. This fantastic little gem is solar powered too. This is way better than a lame-ass bobble head. I just received this gift from a friend upon his return from a trip to [...]
I did it. After hearing all the horror stories and thinking it would never be me, I managed to dump a very full cup of coffee on my 17″ MacBook Pro. While attempting to squeeze in a few minutes of work this morning before I left for the office, I accidentally bumped my coffee cup. [...]
I think that if you looked up the word awesome in the dictionary, it would reference this video.
Adobe responded to Apple’s attacks on flash with a new ad campaign: http://www.adobe.com/choice/ A colleague of mine just forwarded this hilarious (and fake) response from Apple. Personally I think both Apple and Adobe can suck it.
I believe I’ve got my templating working the way I want. It needs to be refactored, but it works. FYI – my terminology can be confusing, but when I say decorate the page, I essentially mean apply the template to the requested content. I guess was originally thinking I was going to model templating after [...]
In thinking about how I want to implement a templating system in my homegrown php framework, I guess it would be good to start with some basic requirements. The goal is a simple and easy to use templating system. Base requirements: Content pages are simple and only contain necessary markup for the content Ability to target content areas [...]
I’m not a huge fan of tons of repetitive code and mark-up. I find it inefficient, sloppy and difficult to maintain. So, I’ve never been a fan of using includes on every page of a site for the headers, footers, blah blah blah in PHP. It’s also very difficult (to me) to implement good templating [...]
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
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