Nicole Gagliardi: Multimedia Developer

Last week I started taking a digital photography class for work with the ultimate goal of taking better portraits of our clients, which we often use in our projects. I’m not really photographically inclined. The only photos I’ve taken in years were of items I was trying to sell on Craiglist. Needless to say I have a lot of ground to cover in this 8 week class but I’m excited.

The pictures I took for our first assignment and are already a million times better than anything I’ve ever taken before. The assignment was to take the camera off automatic, and in manual mode try different exposure, f-stop and shutter speeds. On my quest for some outdoor pictures where I could use a 400 ISO I went on an exploratory run during my lunch break one day and photographed all the interesting things I saw. Some of the photos are below.

Cintas truck on a coal barge.

Island Boat Club on the Northside. Want to hang out there sometime?

Telephone pole by the river.

Only in Pittsburgh would you see a Wonder Hostess Bakery Thriftshop and yes it is open daily offering bakery items at discount prices.

If you need a good recipe for Ahi Tuna Pizza, or just want to check out the most recent site I finished, visit Alchemy Foods. Alchemy Foods is a catering company owned by chef Tzveti Gintcheva, her dishes are focus on using the best, freshest ingredients in interesting ways to offer unique culinary experiences. You will find the recipe as the first post in the blog, and keep checking back for new recipes regularly.

For all you Pittsburgh people looking for Tamara mayo you should look in the Greek store in the strip because that’s the only place Tzveti knows it’s sold, or use gerular mayo with some spice.

Design and photography credits for the web site go to Rob Larson, you can see more pictures from the food photo shoot on his blog.

I’m a big supporter of surveys that focus on our industry. In light of that, please take the Web Directions survey, State of the Web 2008.  I’ll be sure to post a link to the results once they are released.

In the meantime… check out the results for A List Apart’s 2007 Web Deisgn Survey. This was the first survey ever conducted asking web professionals about the industry in the U.S. and worldwide. 37 questions were answered by 33,000 web professionals and the results are eye opening to say the least. The survey was conducted again in 2008 but the results are not out yet.

I was cleaning up my computer and found a screenshot I took of an alert I got when I installed Microsoft Expressions last year. When I saw this I thought I should even install the program, seeing it crashes, hangs and causes system failures because there can be “major issues with Web installation”.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Good luck Microsoft Expressions. Don’t fall off the bandwagon!

Nathan Swartz and Olivia Meiring are two Pittsburgh web designers that hit the road in their RV to travel the country while they freelance. Check out their interview on Web Monkey.

On Friday October 10th Pittsburgh had it’s first Flash conference, Flashpitt 08. Congrats to Val Head and Joe Kromer for pulling it off!

Overall I thought the conference went well, especially for it’s first year, but it started out a little rough. Lee Brimelow from Adobe was introduced with very little energy by Kromer. Brimelow’s speech was not to memorable and he didn’t have much energy either. Flashpitt needs to take a cue from Carsonified on how to start a conference.

Before the break we found out a speaker was delayed (and would eventually cancel), so the schedule was shuffled. Originally a technical speech was paired with a creative speech throughout the day, so if you were strictly creative or technical you were going to waste any time. With the shuffling technical and creative speeches were paired with each other and I felt that was a poor decision.

The first speech I when to was AS2 to AS3 Migration because I’m currently migrating a code base at work. I won an awesome book, The ActionScript 3.0 Migration Guide by Kris Hadlock, for answering a question. The book is short, easy to skim and a great thing for me because often times learning as I go means I miss some nuances of the language. It’s good to sit and read sometimes.

The next speech I went to was the best of the day. Craig Swann gave a speech titled Re:Discovery that was meant to inspire us to look at the world around us and how we interact with it. Craig plays with different ways people can interact with computers and technology, intergrating his love for music and obsession with time. He will wire chimes to play sounds from a computer and use color sensors to create interactive videos. It was cool too see someone just play with their computer and see what they could come up with.

Following Swann’s speech I attended For Placement Only by Zander Brimijoin. This was a tiring speech. Bimijoin talked to specifically and indepth about projects so the speech dragged.

After lunch was Stacey Mulcahy, who spoke about creating user experiences. She had more energy than most the other speakers combined. I enjoyed her speech, and she clearly ascribes to the 37 Signals of “Half, not half-assed”.

Next was Dan Mall from Happy Cog, one of my favorite companies. Dan discussed using, not abusing, Flash to enhance the users experience. I was exposed to some new ideas on ways to handle Flash content on the web, and handle the absence of the Flash Player on a users computer. So it was a worthwhile speech for me.

The speeches ended with a general session by Golan Levin. He does art installations similar to those of Craig Swann, but he does not use Flash. So the topic was similar but the content less applicable, and I thought it was a poor choice for a general session.

We wrapped up the day with a great assortment of prizes raffled off and a nice after party.

With Flashpitt the good was great and the bad was ugly. There were no mediocre speeches in my opinion, just the two extremes. I would recommend going next year if your a local. I would travel far for this one until it matures a little, and if the dedication is the same as it was this year by the team that won’t take long.

On September 2, 2008 Google Chrome was released. Many were instantly excited and a few of us were instantly annoyed because our first thought was “one more browser to check our web sites sites in”.

I downloaded it immediately to check it out. I expect much tighter and flashier design elements from the browser named “Chrome”, but instead it looks plain and boring. I don’t mind the minimalism, but I would like a little personality. Beyond the design though I am pleased with the features. I love how there is URL bar can also be used to enter a search and I definitely noticed that is very really fast. It opens in an instant and I haven’t noticed any delays when using the browser where I have to wait while it stops to “thinks” about what to do.

I’ve been developing a fairly complicated web site over the past three weeks and think it’s a good test for how Chrome interprets CSS. The bottom line is that the release of Chrome did not complicate the development at all. The only wierd thing I rand into was that the very first line of the stylesheet needed to be:

@charset “utf-8″;

If you had anything else in line 1, even a comment, the font-family you defined in the body tag for the web site would be ignored and your text would default to Times New Roman.

Download Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome

See the list of features for Chrome: http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-US/features.html

I have no idea who this is, but I like what they say in their profile.

Read the second line: “Willing to work in Actionscript 3.0, C#/ASP.Net on RIA development.”

The keywords being “Willing to work in”. I love that because I can’t tell you how often I used to apply for contracting jobs and leave skills off the resume because I didn’t want people to know I had them, lest they might try to give me a whole project for that program. I hated doing it because if needed I am able to work in certain programs, but on a daily basis I don’t WANT to or I’m just not interested in getting good enough to do a whole project.

Being required to do what you aren’t good at is a huge problem in the technology field where many employees want to to do everything from designing and developing the web site to playing printer/copier/fax machine repair guy to powperpoint template maker… and by the way, if you could take out the office trash on Thursdays that means we can fire the janitor. Why? At best they can’t see the difference in the quality of the work when they hire the right person for a job versus when they have you do it, and at worst they are just plain cheap.

In case your wondering what skills often didn’t make the cut… Authorware because it is so outdated and Photoshop if I thought they would actually try to make me design something.

Next time I need to send a resume, or especially if I am posting on Monster, I’m putting everything in the skills bucket and using my “Willing to work in” phrase just like this guy. It’s no gaurantee the recruiters won’t call you for jobs you don’t want, but it might help.

If your on Adobe’s e-mail list you’ve been getting reminders about this for awhile… but like me you might keep forgetting to sign-up to view the announcement and need a little prodding.

Adobe will be showing off Creative Suite 4 during a special web broadcast Sept 23, 2008. Sign yourself up to attend at http://adobe.istreamplanet.com/.

POKE! POKE! It’s only 6 days away so do it now!

Both a friend and I started having the exact same problem a few weeks ago, IE7 would crash, restart, crash, restart and…. guess what…. wait for it…. wait for it…. yup it would crash again! How did you know that?

I don’t use IE frequently so I decided to ignore it for a few weeks. Unfortunately I did need to use IE this weekend to test some things, so I looked into fixing the problem which occurs because IE becomes “unstable” (maybe it forgot to take it’s meds). The solutions I found are annoying, you can uninstall and reinstall OR return IE7 back to its default settings.

I immediately reset the browser to it’s default settings and the problem was solved. Since I never use IE7, and haven’t even changed a single setting since I got the browser I had no problem doing a reset. I feel bad, however, for people who actually use this as their main browser and lose pop-up blocking setting, security setting, accessibility settings etc. At least you don’t loose you bookmarks if you are able to just reset the browser though. So try the directions below first if you experience the same problem.

1. Go to Tools > Internet Options.
2. Click the Advanced tab. (If IE7 won’t even open without crashing, right-click on your IE7 desktop icon and select Properties. Then click the Advanced tab.)
3. Click the Reset… button.
4. Click Reset.
5. Close and reopen your browser when prompted.

If these don’t work and you are still having a problem uninstall the browser and either reinstall it, or consider getting Firefox.