Well a week ago I was just looking at my last post here and it was celebrating the first day of spring. I looked at my calendar and it was the first day of summer! Been very hectic and busy lately between college and work and needed a facelife on this site and also did a redesign for my company Seo Smooth Design. I’m happy now and I have a lot more content coming soon for this blog and my company blog, I promise!

First off HAPPY FIRST DAY OF SPRING! Next, I had my first venture the other day in switching a small company over to Google Apps from outlook. They already were using Gtalk and Google Docs so the switch should of been done long ago. Drawbacks at first? Google’s conversational view that cannot be turned off. Also no option for a preview pane. No big deal, right? Next, the fancy HTML signatures that you have in Outlook cannot be put into Gmail’s signature feature. It only allows plain text. Lame! After much research, the only way you could get to work was to download some pain in the ass add-on of an add-on for Firefox, Greasemonkey. First of all, this is not a viable business solution people, stop wasting your time with these scripts. Second, I want to use Chrome, which is so much faster with Google Apps than any other browser. Third, Chrome allows application shortcuts on desktop/start menu/etc. These shortcuts open up the Gmail App without you seeing browser buttons or an address bar, perfect for business productivity.

Thus, I found a workaround! That was unheard of on the Internet so perhaps I’m the first one to figure it out (doubt it, there’s always someone else that’s first). Just copy your Outlook signature into a Gmail e-mail message body, but first in Google Labs, enabled canned responses. Save the signature as a canned response! And wala! Perfect fancy signatures! Only problem is you have to remember to insert it each time you need it, but better than nothing. And I’m in a rush so I could give 2 craps less about my grammar this post nor my English class finals this week.

Between bronchitis and throwing out my back I haven’t been that active lately except to do the things I have to do (work and school). http://www.dejesusdriveways.com is one of the new sites I’ve done recently, and the first with a new partner, http://ahansendesign.com. He’s doing awesome work for sure What else is new, I bought a new web host, Slicehost, which is on a cloud and you program the server from scratch (I choose Ubuntu Intrepid), got pretty far, almost finished! I’m sick of Host Department and even Ix Web Hosting. Ix Web Hosting (this site is hosted by them now) is great, don’t get me wrong, but Wordpress is a bit slow on this sometimes. I’ll stick with Ix for static sites.

I’d also like to give a shoutout to Artisteer for there really powerful and easy to use design generator for Wordpress and HTML. I have 1000’s (literally) of sites that just need a simple ‘face’, but I don’t have time to custom make 1000 Wordpress layouts. With this tool I’m done in 5 minutes and it looks great. Also a shout out to CSS-Tricks for the FAQ jQuery tutorial they have that I used on the DeJesus Driveways FAQ page. I have a few more shout outs I’ll save for next post that I would like to spread the word about. I use so many great products and services everyday and a lot are really worth the mention!

Throughout my adventures I’ve seen a few very nice Flash sites. One is a Flash conference here in Boston that I would like to go to this May. It’s also a beer festival http://www.flashontap.com Is the address for the website for the three day event. Speakers include Flash professionals from many different award winning companies, you have sessions and workshops. It’s pretty apparent how they did their Flash menu, just a mouse over enabled with the “mouseover” state being the active page. After you click, it plays another page. The really cool part is the first part of the page when it loads, the beer fills up. I’m not sure if this is a video that they recorded and implemented. It seems the first part of it is actually video, until the beer fills up, then it seems like they have it there as a still image and stole some of the bubbles from the video and put them as a motion tween/movie clip. Notice how perfect the bubbles are once the beer is full; it’s a steady stream that seems to repeat itself moving up and slowly from side to side.

A second site that I liked and found is www.iwantmyflashtv.com, a site that is purely a Flash generated animation television site. Sites like this and the other ones were no way in heck done by one person alone, but teams of coordinated designers, developers, project managers, etc. I like their button mouseovers on the lower part, like the GO button, reset/send, and Get MT! It is a great idea to fade in and out.

I found some other great sites from looking at these ones, like Flash On Tap, the developers. http://www.influxis.com/ is another great site, and uses a beautiful combination of HTML, CSS, and Flash. Great design job on this site, probably the best out of the bunch in my opinion. How they did the Flash is pretty straightforward on this one, with buttons, motion tweens, masks, etc. and some developer side coding with their customize your Flash server plan page.

Another REALLY COOL site is www.infrared5.com , if you go to the page, click the FLY ME button, you fold the paper and fly a plane through an office (crash to the ground if you want to go back to the site). Really neat motion tweens on the navigation from page to page. Also check out the blog link, you can write on their blog with a pen.

The amount that you can interact on these sites is amazing.