A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

Few days ago my good old 17″ Studio Display monitor died after almost 9 years of devoted service. It’s been about two years that my main computer is a MacBookPro, and the old G4 is nothing more than a file server & itunes jukebox.One thing that I wanted to change for a long time is the angle of the display when I am working with my portable Mac on a table. There are few professional solutions out there, mostly by Griffin, but I wanted something more practical, and yes, cheeper..Here I saw an opportunity – the cool stand from the CRT display, that was never equaled in any model by any brand (at least that I saw) can serve just this purpose, lifting the portable and making air flow easy for cooling the burning machine, tilt-able and even aesthetic.
If you want to try this at home, here’s a little tip: after disassembling the stand from the old monitor, you should change the spring direction, to support the portable weight which has the opposite direction from the CRT. to do that, remove the center screw, and the screw that holds the spring, remove the white anchor, and rotate the top of the stand, front to back.Put the white anchor back, and now the string will be facing the other side of the stand.
Now hook the spring on the plastic handle. that’s it – you’re done.

Sony Bravia new site (http://bravia.sony.eu/bravia.html) is a great example of 3D navigation system in flash, bringing a new and fresh feel to site navigation, worth the long loading.

Using keyboard arrows is so easy and intuitive for controlling the 3D menu, it’s a shame the actual sections content is not arranged for keyboard control and requires “traditional” mouse interaction. But it is very cool eventhough.

A new open source vector based 3D animation engine for ActionScript called FIVe3D has recently been shared by Mathieu Badimon. Thanks Mathieu!It is a ActionScript 2 classes package, enabling 3D rotation and position control over objects such as movieclips and text fields.For setting up a simple 3D environment, with simple objects and basic interactivity it is indeed fast and pretty simple, as described by the author. I am sure in few months it will pick up some more advanced functionalities, we should be proud that such exiting initiatives are emerging in the open source sphere.I was impressed by the thorough (and beautiful..) documentation he provides with the source code, neatly packed in a pdf file. that’s the way!

From time to time I get to work on someone else’s code, could be shared classes I download or a client that brings his own program for treatments, anyway it is something that nobody likes.The difficulties are obvious to anyone that deals with code this way or another, (hey, sometimes I have hard time understanding my own code from six months ago..) But there are also great advantages if you’re trying to improve, although the learning curve is often steep, it’s faster than learning from books.Sometimes, definitely not most of them, it can even lead to a real leap, in term of understanding new styles and patterns, I never stop learning new things : )At larger scales, translating ActionScript classes into UML would be a blast, making sense in a glimpse and not through lines of code.And an answer to this need (and more!) is about to be born – Saffron UML by Samuel Agesilas, built for AIR, has a cool UI design, and platform independent – you have to see it!Looks amazing ha?

When I just got my first car, It felt like I was set free – I could go wherever I want, whenever I want.. few years later I got a similar feeling when as a graphic design student I bought my first Mac – suddenly I could do everything (well, almost) on my own, in my own time.As a teenager I didn’t know how polluting my first car really was, just as I did not notice (up until recently) that Apple are ranked somewhere in the bottom of the Greenpeace green mobile and PC manufacturers line up.Hey, Apple, you can not allow this to your self, this is something that counts for your target audience, being different has to be better.