Congratulations Boston
Congratulations Boston on your well-deserved World Series victory tonight. It’s been 86 years and you deserve every ounce of credit for the most amazing comeback in baseball history.
Coming into the Series, one would have thought Boston’s toughest task would be getting by the Cardinals. Instead, it turned out to be getting through the 7th inning of tonight’s game when someone inexplicably let the lead singer of Creed on the field to sing God Bless America.
Such a shame to have to share the spotlight with Scott Stapp.
I smell another curse…
The Curse is (Almost) Lifted
I grew up on baseball. From watching games, to collecting cards, to little league, to high school ball, and then back to just watching games, baseball has been a common fixture in my life since I was six years old. In 1986, when I was 12, I had my first major formative baseball moment in the form of the 1986 World Series.
Living in Los Angeles at the time, I had just endured a brutal American League Championship Series with Boston’s Dave Henderson homering off Donnie Moore to eliminate our beloved California Angels and advance the Red Sox to the World Series. The homer was such a powerful event that it not only crushed the Angels but it also led to the eventually suicide of the pitcher who threw the pitch.
Furious at the Red Sox for beating the Angels, I adopted their World Series opponent, the New York Mets, as my favorite team of the moment. I watched the entire Series thinking Boston was going to win. They played a great Series and had the Mets down to their final out in the 10th inning of Game 6.
And then I was introduced to the Curse.
Read more…
ABC News Redesigns
I’m 30,000 feet above Seattle right now heading to Vegas with Keith, Jason, and The Wolf and all I can think about is what’s launching tomorrow. By the time you read this, we will have launched a brand new ABCNews.com. Several months in the making and several years since the last major redesign, the new ABCNews is the latest major media site in the Disney family to jump on board the real-world web standards gravy train.
A collaborative effort between the ABCNews team in New York City, the Disney Internet Group in Seattle, and a few outside consultancies, the new ABCNews.com is a refreshing reminder that dramatic change is possible in organizations of any size. I feel lucky to have worked on this project and wanted to share as much as possible about what went on behind the scenes to bring you what we now believe to be one of the best news sites on the web.
Read more…
sIFR 2.0: Release Candidate
UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now available. See article here.
Alright, we have a solid release candidate! This evening, I present sIFR 2.0 Release Candidate 1, and unless any major problems are found, this will end up being the exact code in the final release. I want to thank everyone who has put sIFR through its paces and helped Mark and me squash bugs and add feature enhancements. It wasn’t until I released sIFR that I fully realized the power of open source. What may have taken months to develop otherwise, instead took only weeks… and only evenings at that. I know I still have to create the official sIFR primer and idiotproof instructions, so I’ll be doing that over the next week or so and monitoring this comment thread for any issues which may arise. The download is here and the updated example is here.
And since David Guillory asked, it is indeed pronounced “siffer”. Spread the word to the homies.
What’s new in this release
Here are some details about sIFR 2.0 RC1:
- This release was mostly for fine-tuning. The concentration was on stability and reliability.
- Proper uppercasing is now supported and it won’t mistakenly uppercase your URLs in the process. Please note that “upper” or “lower” are now passed in as the last parameter of the function to induce uppercasing or lowercasing. This is the only change which may affect existing implementations.
- Various DOM and speed improvements.
- More consistent font sizing.
- Support for common usually-escaped characters like “, ‘, &, and %.
- Automatic whitespace-stripping, following the same conventions as HTML.
- Complete IE 5 Mac compatibility.
Quick Instructions
The usage instructions are identical to the previous betas with the exception of the upper/lowercasing change mentioned above. Here is what to do:
- Download 2.0 Release Candidate. sIFR is licensed free of charge under the standard CC-GNU LGPL.
- Get familiar with index.html. That’s really the only file which contains the things you’ll need to adapt. It contains the replace statements at the bottom and the CSS at the top.
- To make your own .swf files, simply open up the .fla file in Flash, doubleclick the textbox which is on stage (it takes up the whole stage), and choose your own font from the Properties palette. Then, choose File > Export and you’re done!
- The parameters to use in your replacement functions are explained in the html file. Plug in your parameters and you’re good to go!
Additional Notes
You won’t have to replace any of your existing replace statements (from beta 2) unless they are affected by the upper/lowercasing change mentioned above. You need only replace your .js file and your .swf files. You may notice a slight font sizing difference between the last beta and this release. This release’s sizing is more correct and consistent so please roll with the new.
There are only two significant issues I know of which remain unsolved:
- Possible weirdness in certain versions of Opera.
- Certain typefaces, especially script fonts, may contain characters with non-conventional metrics which can cause clipping of letters in some cases. An example is a handwriting font (like Cezanne, for instance) where the crossbar on the “t” extends far beyond the width of the T. Sort of like if you were signing your name and you dragged the tail end of the last letter back over the word. The problem with this sort of font is that Flash is unaware of the stray strokes. The only solution to this, moving forward, is for users to manual adjust the left and right margins in the Formatting palette in Flash if necessary. I don’t consider this necessarily “solving” the issue, but if you find yourself in this predicament with an ornate script font, give it a try.
A Brand New Movies.com
The #1 movie site on the internet just got a facelift yesterday. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Chad Roberts and the Movies.com team upstairs along with some Flash and video work from our own group, Movies.com now has themselves a CSS-driven, standards-based site which is quicker to load, easier to use, and ten times more flexible than its predecessor.
The Movies.com relaunch is the first of several major relaunches you’ll see out of Disney in very near future. While not the biggest site in Disney’s portfolio, Movies.com represents other example of a category leader moving towards web standards in a very meaningful way. Where ESPN.com led the way a year and a half ago, other Disney sites are now following suit as part of their normal redesign cycles.
Read more…
ESPN Motion for Firefox Launched
Hot on the heels of the ESPN Motion for Mac release a couple of days ago, we’ve now enabled Motion for PC Firefox users as well. Just head to the ESPN.com front page and you’ll see your video selections in the sidebar running down the right side of the page. The sidebar, of course, follows you from page to page on ESPN so you can really access Motion from anywhere on the site.
Although I’m not really supposed to comment on these sorts of things, let me just say that the initial release of ESPN Motion for Internet Explorer a little over a year ago had nothing to do with the sorts of nefarious theories put out by a few ill-informed reporters. One reporter attempted to knock ESPN for not supporting web standards because Motion didn’t work on Firefox, when in reality, not only do we lead the charge towards web standards in our category, but Motion was clearly a “bonus” feature to the site and it was only made possible by technology not available in Firefox. Another reporter falsely concluded that the setup had something to do with our then partnership with MSN. Again, not true.
The initial release of ESPN Motion for Internet Explorer was strictly an issue of prevalent technology. ActiveX, for all of its shortcomings, provides a clear filesystem I/O which allowed us to download and store high quality video on users’ machines without any detrimental side effects… the downside being that it was only implementable in Internet Explorer.
Anyway, enough of that. Motion is now freely available to all. Happy?
ESPN Motion for Mac Launched
With our last redesign in 2003, ESPN.com launched a revolutionary video feature called “ESPN Motion”. By downloading high quality video transparently to users’ hard drives, we were able to give our viewers, free of charge, some of the highest quality video on the web, with no waiting, no buffering, and no noticeable encoding artifacts. With a simple installation of the little ESPN ActiveX control, users could watch freshly cut ESPN video right within our front page.
Well, it’s been a little over a year now, and there have been over 3 million downloads of the ESPN Motion installer with hundreds of thousands of active users viewing video every day. Through this trial, it became apparent that given high enough video quality and a wide enough selection of cuts, there really is a place for this sort of multimedia on the web, if you do it right.
Part of “doing it right”, however, is serving the largest audience possible. When we initially launched ESPN Motion, we had to limit the audience to Internet Explorer users on the Windows platform. This limitation was strictly a technological one, as the easiest way to download and access video on a user’s hard drive is by using ActiveX. With this in mind, we designed and engineered our own patent-pending ActiveX control to serve video to all Disney sites. With a 95% market share (for now at least), PC Internet Explorer accounted for the great majority of Disney and ESPN users, so this initial release of Motion at least served most of the market.
Now that Motion has proved to be such a popular addition to ESPN.com, it’s time to bring the feature to our beloved Mac users. We run a ton of Macs at ESPN and Disney, not just in the design department but in engineering as well. With this in mind, the teams in New York and Bristol today bring you ESPN Motion for Mac. By utilizing Flash MX video and plenty of fancy DHTML and CSS goodness, Mac users are now able to view ESPN Motion video without even downloading an installer. In this user’s opinion, it’s an even better experience than the original.
So head on over to the Mac Motion showcase to check it out, or just go to the ESPN front page and look for Motion in the right-hand sidebar.
sIFR 2.0b2: The Mo’ Betta Beta
UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now available. See article here.
Another week, another round of improvements to sIFR. I think we’re 95% of the way to an official release now. Here are the improvements in the latest beta:
- Syntax now 100% compatible with XHTML Strict, even when served as application/xml
- Optional conversion to uppercase or lowercase now supported
- Optional link underlining on hover
- Bolding and italicizing of TrueType fonts now supported
- Automatic removal of extra white space in HTML
- Full support for Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Mac IE, and PC IE
- Improved support for Opera
- Better international character support
- Ability to use quotes, ampersands, and other normally escaped characters
- Various speed improvements and bug fixes
For people who have already implemented sIFR, you don’t need to redo any of your CSS. Simply pop the new JS file into place, re-export your SWFs, and you should be good to go. Please make sure you have the updated .as files in the same folder as your .fla when you re-export.
There was only one minor change to implementation you should be aware of: The replacement calls must now go either at the end of your HTML document or at the end of the JS file. This only affects people who may have embedded the replacement calls in the middle of the JS file previously.
Alright, here’s the sIFR 2.0b2 download. Bang away.
I Found Some of Your Life
“Double Accidental Excellence / Awesomeness”A few times a year, you find something new on the web which you just know is going to get contagious. Today, via Phillip Torrone, I discovered such a thing.
Here it is in a nutshell: A few months ago, someone found a memory card in the back seat of a New York taxicab. The memory card was filled with 227 photos of some frat boy’s life over the last year. Trips to Amsterdam, keggers, ridiculous mugshots… the whole bit. Rather than just deleting the memory card, this extraordinarily creative (and a bit diabolical) person started a blog and is posting one photo per day from the reel. This, by itself, would not be so entertaining, but in addition to posting the photos, the blogger narrates each photo pretending it is his own life with his own friends. What a great premise for a blog. Seriously, it’s hilarious.
You could say that this is a mean thing to do, but really, can you think of a better way to get this person’s photos back to them? I can’t.
Check it out at: ifoundsomeofyourlife.blogspot.com.
UPDATE: On September 20th, the creator of this site pulled all content offline. I can only guess the cause was a scary e-mail from an armchair lawyer because the original memory card’s owner doesn’t seem to have stepped forward yet.
sIFR 2.0b: Come Kick the Tires
UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now available. See article here.
Without further ado, I present for download sIFR 2.0b (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement Two Point Oh Beta). Before I get into the details, I just wanted to post the link first, and also, an example of sIFR 2.0b in action. Note that this new example does not have a single image anywhere on the page or even in the CSS. It’s pure XHTML text. That’s it.
Now then.
How about an update on what’s occurred since 1.0.
Major goings on
Perhaps the most interesting thing that’s happened in the last couple of weeks is that according to Daypop, the original sIFR article was the 13th most popular page in the entire world (well, blogosphere at least) for a short period last week. That’s pretty cool, damnit. As blogging spreads from the techies to the general public over the next several years, reaching the top 20 is going to get harder and harder, so I reckon that’s probably it for me. Might as well retire now.
Besides the nice linkage, I received posts or e-mails from people in over 20 countries. Most posts or e-mails were feature requests, improvements, or written expressions of glee. Besides all the nice e-mails, it’s interesting to note who hasn’t shown up in the comments. The highly esteemed Joe Clark is absent, which means one of three things:
- Joe is vacationing on a beach and away from a computer.
- Joe is sick of responding to my nonsense.
- sIFR is actually accessible!
So now that I’ve shot the big accessibility flaregun into the air, we’ll see what happens. Great accessibility improvements have already been made, but I don’t claim to be a master at testing screenreaders, so if you have insight, please post it.
Read more…