Nomadtoons.com Blog

A blog all about the horrible misadventures of a town full of marauding tigerzombies!

Thursday, April 19, 2007

nomadtoons.mobi all mine!


As usual, I jumped the gun last year when I went all crazy over flashlite and the ability to produce animated films, sites, and UI stuff for cell phones.I figured that the world was about to go crazy. Everyone will have web sites... ON THEIR PHONES! HOLY CRAP! So far that has not been the case.

But... Last week there was a story on NPR about a bed and breakfast in North Carolina that launched a .mobi site for their business. It has been pretty successful. Something told me that it was time to jump on registering nomadtoons.mobi. For those of you unaware of what I'm talking about, .mobi is the designation address for sites that are made for phones. The layout, UI, and design will be especially for cell phones.

The good news is that I already know how to whip out cell phone sites pretty easily. So all I need to do is sit down and do it. So for anyone trying to make a quick buck by purchasing a .mobi for my site... too bad! I beat ya!

Anyhow, another good thing I noticed is that ALL of Verizons top-selling phones now have flashlite capability. My advice for anyone in my line of work is to JUMP ON IT now. I plan on making nomadtoons.mobi into a true-to-the original companion but it WILL have a number of actual flashlite generated cartoons! hooray! The one thing that really gets me going is new technology and perhaps that's what got me off my ass to actually make some new cartoons.

Oh.. and another flash related thing: It would seem that flash muct now be searchable by browsers. I am actually pretty bad at marketing my site. I'm perhaps one of the worst Shmoozers out there which is kind of the way I prefer things. But having a flash site like mine be totally searchable will probably be pretty helpful.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Lawm Mower Racing mania!



As Some of you might know, before I became a graphic designer, I had a number of weird unrelated jobs. One was repairing lawn mowers. About 6 months ago, I stumbled upon a sport that really sounded appealing: Lawn Mower Racing! The basic principal is to get a stock riding mower, reinforce the frame, steering, and install beefy brakes, and then swap out the stock engine and transmision pulleys to alter the drive ratio. Result: some of these can go up to 80 MPH. I spent roughly 5 months modifying an old vintage Sears riding mower into a racerific' Mowchine.

This has been a great thing for me personally. I get along with everybody, but as someone who grew up in the South and now living in California, I miss not having friends who truly appreciate the same things as I do: lawn mowers, engines, beer, Tom-T-Hall, tailgates, and BBQ. Try explaining any of those things to the average San Franciscan. Needless to say, I have to get away from all the metropolitan stuff from time to time. This sport has been a great outlet.Anyhow, I've met a whole ton of people who have become great friends. In this sport, it doesn't matter who wins, but rather if you are having fun and meeting new people.

We will be having events all summer along with participating in parades, get togethers, and so on. Our first race is April 28th. email me for more info!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Big ole' ships and a site about them


Since I was a little boy, I've had a love affair with cruise ships. I've actually never taken a cruise, but dream of the day that I can. Living in the Bay Area near San Francisco, I see these massive ships come and go on my way to work. They look like floating cities pulling up. A few months ago, I actually got to see the Queen Mary 2, which was so massive that all I really saw was a huge mass of black painted metal rising from the sea. When I was really little, I made models of the Titanic out of aluminum foil and floated them down our creek.

Well... I thought I was crazy about them- too much to admit to anyone until I saw this site called maritime matters. The site itself is kind of rough and a mess as far as design and UI goes, but there is an ENORMOUS amount of stories, blogs, photos, histories, and travels on board mainly vintage 1950's and 60's cruise ships. It is saddening to see that a majority of these are actually on their way to being scrapped in India due to new compliance regulations and a recent spike in steel prices. But the people on this site make good on efforts to carefully document their trips on these vessels as well as create ship biographies for ones that have since gone on to cruise ship heaven. There is so much info on this site that any ship lover could spend months reading it. Check it out!

www.maritimematters.com

PS: the ship photo came from their site, so I am giving credit where credit is due.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Flash CS3. It's almost here!

The new Flash is almost here. After reviewing some of the new features, I have luke-warm feelings about it. I am excited over a number of key features that I feel will make development for mobile devices easier as well as fixing a major problem flash 8 had with exporting quicktimes.

Here's my negative thoughts first. I am not 100% positive that the drawing tools that were in flash 8 will stay the same. New pen tools that function in the same way as Illustrator have been added which will be a great benefit for designers. But for people like me who've been using flash since version 3, I practically learned how to draw with these tools and therfore I would hope they will remain untouched. These 'old' tools include the paintbrush and pencil tools. As seen in the first snapshot, you can actually see the pencil tool, so I assume that this tool will be the same.

Now for the good: Flashlite 2.0 came out just last year. It's implementation for mobile devices was clumsy at best, but this was perfectly acceptable to me simply because there were not many devices that were actually available to accept flash. Now there are many and the new version of flashlite will make development easier for these devices. All I can say is: get yourselves a .mobi site today!

Also of great interest to me was how new improvements have been made to flash's new export features for video and Quicktime. Flash video has for the most part replaced standalone players. I'm not going to go into the politics of things, but I will say that I find it highly suspect that the latest versions of Quicktime come with the " allow flash tracks" feature turned OFF, deep within the settings. Translation: exporting flash as quicktime has meant that MOST people would not be able to see it. With the clear understanding of the fact that FLV is far superior to a plain Quicktime, and one has to wonder if there were motives behind Apple's decision to conveniently turn flash options off in their players. What I saw in the Adobe demo looked promising. It appears that exporting as a Quicktime has been addressed. It also appears that exporting in general might be easier. As with the drawing tools, I will have to see firsthand.

Overall, a very enticing product indeed. I personally cannot wait to try it out!


PS: to all the spammers putting crap on my blog. please stop.