Found this article to be a really interesting assessment of the trends happening with all the big players around the trend towards web-enabled desktop apps. One of Apple’s announcements at WWDC was their embracing of SproutCore for this purpose. Read on…

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/

Finally some seemingly real news about Search Engines having the ability to search Flash content. With the players involved, this seems like it might be legit:

http://mashable.com/2008/07/01/google-adobe-flash-search/

Great article from A List Apart

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome

Favorite Quote…

It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: “final content delivered.” It’s the perennial cause of delay and the stuff of myth (I once shelved a project for three years while the client “wrote” his content

We have a weekly ping pong tournament that jloopers live for. Lots of fun, very competitive. This weeks championship round was Mike v Jason. See if you can tell who won. Time is valuable, so the video is @ 5x.

idotjapan v bromike - JLOOP - 05.02.08 from Greg Stratford on Vimeo.

I’m trying out this little IM widget for quickly creating a way for users of your website to IM with your existing IM client.

We’re very proud to announce the launch of the new City On A Hill Productions website. This project was an amazing amount of fun for us. Shane Sooter and Kevin Bryan came out to visit us last Fall (from their homes in Kentucky) and we laid out the groundwork for a completely new online presence for their amazing Christian film production company.

We’ve all been there. There’s a teacher behind the podium, lecturing. A minister in the pulpit, preaching. When someone is talking at you, it’s pretty easy to tune out.

But when you watch a story unfold on television or a movie screen, you become part of the action.

You hear the waves crash on the beach. See the wind blow and the sky grow dark. Worry as you watch two men search desperately for something precious that’s been lost, anxiously hoping they’ll find it. It becomes your story.

That’s what makes story—and film—so powerful. At City on a Hill, we’re using that power for a higher purpose.

These guys do GREAT work. We’re proud to be on their team.

For more detail about this site, take a gander at the redesign launch email that we designed and sent out for City On A Hill. It tells a bit more about the approach to the new site and the promise of more to come…

I spent some time this weekend upgrading a bunch of WordPress sites to the newly released 2.5. So far, I’m completely impressed with this upgrade. The admin functions are truly improved and the overall design is beautiful and much more intuitive than the last admin panel. The dashboard alone is worth the upgrade.

We’ve also taken to a new approach for updating our WordPress sites. Since we’ve had a love affair recently with SVN for version control, I decided it made a lot more sense to use direct SVN checkouts of the tagged releases in the WordPress SVN, rather than FTP’ing the entire WordPress directory every time we get a minor release. So… here’s how we’ve got it set up:

1. First, we run an SVN checkout to get the tagged release. This gives us all the core WordPress files.
2. Next, we upload via FTP all the files that don’t belong to the core WordPress file structure. These files are:
3. wp-config.php
4. .htaccess
5. our custom theme
6. our plugins (besides akismet and hello)
7. the wp-content/uploads folder
8. Then we make sure that uploads folder is writeable by the server, and all should be well.

So with this setup, the next time that we need to upgrade the WordPress release, we can simply SSH into the server and run an svn switch command to the newest tagged release and it will update the changed files. Then we run the upgrade script and we’re there. Much easier when you have to update a dozen WordPress sites at once.

So. Anyone see any gotchas in this approach?

We’re very excited to announce the launch of www.earthfolio.net.  Its a site we’ve been developing with Blue Marble for quite a while now.  There have been many hurdles to bringing this amazing product to the market, but it is now officially available to the public.nbsp;

We’re very proud of the site.  We worked long and hard to develop an engaging brand platform for this amazing product.  There is a lot of detailed financial information and a fairly intricate architecture to the site, but we hope that the overall feel remains focused on the simplicity of investing with heart. 

Let us know what you think.

P.S.  We’ve been busy over here at JLOOP and we’ve got a number of projects launching in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

I’m a big fan of the Son of Suckerfish CSS dropdown menus at HTML Dog - executed entirely using CSS with just a touch of JavaScript to give a little extra help to certain browsers out there. Lately, we’ve also been making use of the Blueprint CSS framework on a few projects and I ran into an issue when combining the two. The dropdown menus were appearing behind content when viewed in Internet Explorer.

By default, Blueprint has a stylesheet for IE that adds a position: relative declaration to certain classes. Took me a little while to track this down and the solution is pretty simple: add a z-index property to the nearest positioned ancestor of the dropdown navigation, and set the value to something greater than the z-index of the content (e.g. 100). Voilà! You’re back up and running.

In short, I changed the first line of this:

<div class="column span-42 pull-10 last">
  <ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="#">COMPANY</a>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="/ourstory">OUR STORY</a></li>
        <li><a href="/executivemanagement">EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT</a></li>
        <li><a href="/news">LATEST NEWS</a></li>
      </ul>
    </li>
  </ul><!-- end #nav -->
</div>

to this:

<div class="column span-42 pull-10 last" style="z-index: 100;">

This is a truly impressive piece of work from BigSpaceship.

http://www.adobe.com/flashon/

I love seeing the next evolution of video in Flash. The fullscreen abilities are at full effect here and the HD video is awesome.