Veerle's blog

It took you countless hours of research, blood, sweet and sometimes even tears when looking for a solution to build a standard website that validates and looks good in every modern browser. So now you want to add a little Flash movie as icing on the cake. Most people will use the code that Macromedia generates for this.

At first everything looks fine in your browser, that’s until you go back to the W3C to see if it validates. What follows is pure frustration grrrl… Your hard work down the drain because it no longer validates anymore because of Flash.  Look at this ‘bad’ example to see what I mean. Click on the link at the bottom to check the validation and see the long list of errors.

Today’s post is especially for my PC friends who don’t have access to a Mac when developing a website. So no more excuses ;-) A cool showcase of programming skills done by Daniel Vine. With iCapture you can take a screen dump of your website as you would view it with Safari 1.2 under MacOS X. I’ve tried it and it works great. Ideal for cross browser testing. Within 30 sec you have your screen dump as long as the queue is empty. The screen dump is saved for 24 hours in the PNG format. The real deal is of course much better, but this way you get an idea if your page looks right. iCapture is quickly approaching 24,000 uses and hopefully a few more after my post here ;-)

Tired of movable type because of its limits? Then you’re in luck because pMachine just released a next-generation publishing system. Over more then a year in the making and built with the idea to be the most flexible, modular, and scalable web publishing system on the planet. The newborn’s name is ExpressionEngine. I am currently checking out this tool because it sounds so diverse and powerful. With its support for data modeling, web services, work-flow, dynamic data caching, nested category trees, and much more, ExpressionEngine gives you the firepower to create a weblog with zero compromises.

I don’t know about you but I kind of have a mixed feeling about Flash. I think Flash is really great, you can do awesome things with it and from a creative point of view you got the feeling that the sky is the limit. I would never doubt to use Flash for the creation of business presentations or other interactive projects like games or even CD-ROMs. But in fact Flash’s main purpose is web development. In fact Flash has evolved to a standalone web tool and is perfect for Rich Internet Applications.

At the beginning of 2004 I made a post of our penguin game, but when I took a closer look at penguin games I stumbled on another great addictive game. Too bad because the link to the game was gone the next day so I couldn’t make of post of it.  But now thanks to our member Johan Sahlön his weblog we’re back in business and I can share this great piece of work with my readers ;-)

The gameplay is pretty simple: You are a Yeti and have to hit the penguin and get it to fly as far as possible. Here is a screen dump of my record so far. What’s yours? 
Go play it and have some fun ;-)