tripleaxis.com

Have used wordpress for years now and have always been more than happy with it – and the few quirks it may have had (like not supporting flash out of the box) I have found workarounds for. However, after upgrading to 2.8 I’ve found that I can’t submit posts that are over a certain character length and this is really crippling when it comes to writing posts.

I find I’m trimming and re-wording like trying to get a text/twitter message below the character limit – not really the ideal scenario for really expressing one’s thoughts to the fullest

I have trawled both the wordpress site and the web at large for answers, but to no avail.. surely I can’t be the only one experiencing this issue??

Had a couple of days of recently – have forgotten how great it is to have time off on weekdays. You can just chill out and get stuff done at your own pace – no huge weekend crowds or that whole rushing about business

Anyway – it’s time I caught up on some project posts. Realised it’s been over a bloody year since I posted on this site – I’m paying for hosting, so may as well use it!!

Finally dragged myself into gear and updated to the latest version of wordpress. Have also changed the url to a subdomain, but i’m kinda figuring that’ll go under the radar for the most part Left a nice 404 message, so that should help the 2 people who’ll be looking for my blog over the next year or so

Lots of news and lots to ramble on about – just lacking the motivation… but trying to do something about that…

Photos: flickr/tripleaxis/sets/kilimanjaro

There has always been one thing that has been right at the top of my to-do list. Kilimanjaro. I think the first time I heard about climbing Kili was in around 1998. I was working as a temporary office assistant for Philips, based in West Croydon. I remember that one of the office managers commented on my watch – a soft-strap Animal watch – and said he’d owned a similar, chunky-type watch when he was younger and had climbed Kilimanjaro whilst traveling.
I forget what had grabbed me about it – maybe I saw a documentary or read something further on the subject, but every since, when pressed for my all-time top ten life experiences, Kili was always there at #1.

With that in mind, I’ve always mentioned it to people whenever I attain the requisite amount of alcohol in my system – floating the idea out there in the hope that the idea will be shared and I’d find a Kili buddy. As luck would have it, I mentioned it to a co-worker, Steve and that’s just about where the fun bit of this story starts

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Reebok Classics - Mixer

The second phase of this site was to add a new homepage and an audio/video sequencer, complete with gallery. As the homepage and other updates were just amendments to the existing site, I concentrated on the sequencer and ended up really enjoying designing the core class architecture.
At the core of the application is a Metronome class. Writing it this way left things open for the possibility of future re-factoring since the whole mechanic ran off the timing pulses that the Metronome class dispatched. As it happens, I did actually re-visit the Metronome class, updating it to try to tighten up the timing.
Next, the view elements and model objects were divided into logical structures; Views: Timeline,Bar,Beat and Model: Track,TrackLayer,TrackItem. This structure made it a whole load easier to work with the code and string elements together. A Track has a collecion of TrackLayers, which are displayed in the Timeline. A TrackLayer has a collection of TrackItems that are displayed within the Bar and Beat elements.

In addition, the Sequencer element of the site features the option to save your work to a gallery for others to play and edit. You can deeplink straight to either yours or any track in the gallery and if that wasn’t enough, you can also embed a cut-down version of the player in your blog that automatically cues up and plays your track. This mini-player has the option to launch the track editor in a light-box so you can create and save tracks from right within your blog.

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A fun little site for SCA (Bodyform in the UK) to raise awareness about all the steps SCA are taking to be a greener company and reduce their carbon footprints.

The site uses a parallax system of layered landscapes and elements to give a sense of movement within the scenes and there are some great, hand drawn animations c/o Tom Butler (check out the cat )

The ‘Your Journey’ area features a quiz of sorts – mainly designed to promote thought rather than test knowledge – and a section where you can see (and vote on) issues that are of global concern. In addition, it is possible to take away an ‘eco-savvy’ badge and either post it on your FaceBook wall or on your own blog.

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Reebok Classics Homepage

This project was released in two phases. This phase was a small microsite, consisting of a video intro page, a ’scatter-style’ product selection page and a product detail template page. The fun bit on that side of things was creating the product scatter – as a secondary navigation was available on product detail page, I had to ensure the zoom out effect on leaving the detail page animated to the position of the current item rather than that of the originally chosen item.

Reebok Classics - Product Scatter Page

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Adidas football homepage

My first major project with De-Construct, this site for Adidas was a biggie to say the least. Having re-factored an existing framework by one of their previous flash devs, I was responsible for the framework, initialisation and core asset management and navigation. Once the framework and navigation was in place, we brought in a couple of very good freelancers to fill in the blanks.

The site uses SWFAddress and features an internal sitemap system whereby all navigation requests are validated against the sitemap. Illegal navigation requests are ignored, reducing the chance of site breakage. As all navigation is routed through SWFAddress, with NavEvents simply updating the current SWFAddress value and dispatching a change event, it was a load simpler process when it came to implementing deeplinking across the site.

Another nice feature on the site is the dynamic page resizing. Moving between the homepage and the content pages, the site needs to swap between a scrolling, unlimited height page and a fixed size page. The main navigation bar also moves between a central position To achieve this, I exposed some methods to javascript using ExternalInterface and sequenced the call to the client-side javascript to resize the page at the correct point during the transition animations.

This was a labour of love. With little time for a non-profit project and the intent to get something really cool together, there was late nights in my immediate future

The concept was to create a timeline of 2008 using images we’d stored throughout the year. These were captures from our office webcam, cover shots of the London Metro (a free paper), holiday snaps from colleagues, office stats, New Year resolutions and inspirational sites. In the end, I synched a SWF timeline of content to a date-driven mechanism that loaded in a hi-res copy of any image the timeline is stopped on.

Screenshots:

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Unionview homepage

This project was a site for Universities in the UK to advertise themselves to prospective students. Through the site a student can research universities further than just what courses they offer. They can watch bespoke videos on each university, in which real students give their opinions on the campus, facitilities, social life and the surrounds.

Not being much of a mathophile, the prospect of creating sine/cosine generated carousels fills me with dread. In fact, trig and matrices have always been the bane of my professional life and I usually try to avoid them. I’m more than happy banging out algorithms for scrollbars, dynamically resizing layouts and have even drawn the odd curve here and there, but I just never really got comfortable with angles. It’s not something that I absolutely cannot do – rather I prefer to leave to those who are either interested in it or good at it.. either way, the site looks better for it and the client gets a better result.

In this case, I didn’t have that option, so I cranked the hack up to 11 and got trawling the net for carousel code! I think the end result was pretty cool – I even got in a startup animation that spins the carousel to stop evenly at a random university. In this case, the tricky part was in the fact that to keep processing down and to maintain a level of separation between the images in the carousel, I had to keep a fixed number of items on the carousel itself and, depending on the direction of rotation, swap out items as they passed through the rear-most point of the ellipse. This gave the impression that the carousel held many more items than were actually visible, whilst maintaining the overall shape and performance of the spin.

Unionview university video/info page