Interface Development team weeknote (week 1036)
Week ending 09/07/10:
Andrew spent some time this week catching up with our TripleLBi colleagues in Copenhagen, and was pleased to find the Danes were developers with sharp skills. Project Battle of the Giants is being built out of Copenhagen with Andrew advising on architecture and beer. And them Danes are giants: what do they feed them over there? Yes, I know, bacon and blue cheese; blue cheese that made Andrew’s eyes water and filled his hotel dreams with monsters with flowing fair manes.
Jon conjured up a nice piece of news over on Project Raiders of the Orient Express: they’ve tamed the Photoshop JavaScript engine (actually ExtendScript, Adobe’s extended implementation of JavaScript), which has been a standard part of the application since version 7. Using it they’ve written a script to receive a JSON file and an image button template and automatically generate 50 buttons in 5 different styles and themed 5 different ways. That’s 1250 different buttons! The script generates in 15 minutes what may take a tablet-wielding Mac operator much, much longer, no matter how strong their Photoshop-fu. Apparently the JavaScript took a while, but that’s an impressive return on investment.
Tom and Ray delivered another massive code drop to Project Incident In Istanbul, which includes some seriously innovative banking transaction representations. I’d love my bank’s website to have even a tiny bit of the impressive functionality and design polish that this project is currently rolling with.
Martin spent last week involved in yet more discoveries around the capabilities of CSS3 gradients and RGBa opacity, and investigating server-side image generation to enable Project Aurora to use fonts that we are unable to embed via @font-face due to restrictive licenses. It seems that this is the only non-sIFR method of including such font faces that doesn’t require JavaScript to work, and won’t present the FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text ). It’s not a discovery he’s particularly pleased about, and says it’s very frustrating to deal with font foundries who refuse to embrace the changing nature of the web by updating their licensing (seriously, he’s been bitching in the back-channel all week long about technologically-retarded and reality-denying font foundries)
Tags: bacon, cheese, font-face, fout, interfacedevelopment, javascript, json, photoshop, rgba, sifr, triplelbi