Disappointing DesignsWritten by Paul Hood
Fred Showker catches a line from a Pete Seeger classic, “Where have all flowers gone?” His flowers are web designers that he thinks are going extinct. He laments on seeming “decay” in art of web designing and says gone are designers who made a difference in making of web designs and who provided quality sites for people to visit. Showker argues that he has seen a decline in quality of web sites basing from reviews he made of several sites. From his statements, I can see that he is well-versed in making analyses of web sites and is a credible source of information. Many sites came under his meticulous scrutiny and not one was spared. Some of sites that he revisited were dead and others that are still up failed to meet expected standards. The changes he saw came as a shock since he did not expect many of them to go down drain. Riddler.com was one site that Showker said proved to be a disappointment as it took out of consideration reading pleasure of reader and instead took on a much commercialized look. Webshaker.com is similar as well. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was another site that was axe by Showker. Indeed, I was surprise to see a content in site about Black History month with Martin Luther King Jr.’s picture in it. I have to agree with Fred on this one as I see no relevance of content in promoting B&J’s ice cream. Perhaps there is an underlying purpose for that but I honestly don’t see its bearing here.
| | New Features of Macromedia Flash MXWritten by Maricon Williams
In times of yore, videos all over web are quite disappointing. It is like delivering a mediocre performance to annoyed expectators. But then, a transition from passé made a dramatic exposure. The release of Macromedia’s Flash MX marked a leap in development of rich content productivity and stability of video across Internet. It proves that these things can still be made superior and outstanding.Video compression is one of booming segments in online industry. The outcome of full-screen, full-motion video all over Net is improving everyday. This will gradually wreck pessimism towards online media. I agree that productive media is key to online advertising growth. I also believe that Macromedia Flash will turn out to be industry’s spine to hold everything in order. Macromedia will not change given fact in just a spur of moment however, this will ultimately result in a richer user experience. The increasing demand for rich media will give way to development of video codec algorithms which includes compression and decompression. Flash’s greatest ability is to deliver animated images in a vector format. It means that file size is not dependent on image quality. Vectorization now becomes subordinate to necessity to have rich and reliable content. Flash works with video by allowing developers to import a video file. Then file is manipulated, scaled, rotated, skewed, masked and made interactive using scripting. Video format supported by QuickTime or Windows Media Player together with MPEG, DV (Digital Video), MOV (Quick Time), and AVI can be imported.
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