But they’re not your ordinary business cards, they’re mini. I didn’t even know that was an option!

And they’re a good one for her: since they’re a different size, they’ll stand out amongst the other cards; they’re inexpensive, and allow her to print in small numbers; and you can have different images on one side of the card.

I’m not sure about the print quality, but $20 isn’t too much to find out.

Here are the images, but they include the bleeds because I was too lazy to crop and re-save them. There are 15 colour variations for the one side, and one shared information-side.

Text side:

Image side:

In Opera, Safari, Firefox, and IE everything was great; in Chrome things went so very wrong: lines would wrap, lose opacity, and display behind themselves. Code was super difficult to read.

But now it works! And, to be honest, I’m not sure why. I updated the version of EditArea it uses, and didn’t see a change. When I switched its allow_resize option from both to y everything magically got better. I was pretty happy. But then I changed y back to both and things didn’t get worse, which left me confused and a little scared.

I hope the issue was resolved by updating EditArea, and all the confusion was caused by some weird caching issue. Or maybe I forgot to refresh?

Codepaste v1 still gets heavier use than Codepaste v2. I wonder if that is by conscious decision, or if people just don’t know about Codepaste v2 and how much better it is.

Here it is in my card viewer:

Or, in images, if you hate flash:

The more prominent versions are the ones that were selected, and the smaller ones below are some alternate options I provided.

I did two save-the-date designs for Matt and Erin. They are getting married, not sure if you knew.

The wedding’s theme is wine (the red colour), accented by a green – which is hopefully similar to the green I used!

The first one is my favourite. That lily took a long time to illustrate.

You see, he once posited that no one ever donates. And now, finally, after all six of these months and 100978 icon conversions, someone has. An entire American(USD) cent, and all the way from Italy. I mean sure, it may have been a mistake. I might even concede that it probably was a mistake. Either way, it’s a counter example!

Theory disproven.

Yup. Sure could!

Ticktacwhatsit is made up of nine (9) blocks, and each can be either blank, an X, or an O. That’s so easy to represent in flash!

I started by making a symbol called called block which had two layers and three keyframes on one layer: blank, X, and O. On the other layer, i added the action stop(); to prevent it from flipping through the frames.

I dragged 9 instances of block onto the stage, and arranged them into a game board (named them in sequence) – and drew some lines between them.

And then I wrote the game code:

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var boxes:Array = [ b0, b1, b2, b3, b4, b5, b6, b7, b8 ];
var nextSymbol:int = 0;
 
removeChild( done );
done.addEventListener( 'go_again', restart );
 
function restart( e:Event ) : void {
	nextSymbol = 0;
	for( var i:int=0; i < boxes.length; i++ ) 
		boxes[i].gotoAndStop( 1 );
	removeChild( done );
}
 
for( var i:int=0; i < boxes.length; i++ ) {
	boxes[i].addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick );
	boxes[i].buttonMode = true;
}
 
 
function onClick( e:MouseEvent ) : void {
	if ( e.currentTarget.currentFrame == 1 ) {
		e.currentTarget.gotoAndStop( nextSymbol+2 );
		if ( checkGame() ) {
			trace( 'won!' );
			done.gotoAndStop( nextSymbol + 1 );
			addChild( done );
		}
		nextSymbol = (nextSymbol+1)%2;
	}
}
 
function checkGame() {
	for( var t:int=0; t < possible.length; t++ ) {
		var val:int = boxes[possible[t][0]].currentFrame;
		for( var i:int=0; i < possible[t].length; i++ ) {
			if ( boxes[possible[t][i]].currentFrame != val || val == 1 )
				break;
			else if ( i == 2 )
				return true;
		}
	}
	return false;
}
 
 
var possible:Array = [
		[ 0, 1, 2 ],
		[ 3, 4, 5 ],
		[ 6, 7, 8 ],
 
		[ 0, 3, 6 ],
		[ 1, 4, 7 ],
		[ 2, 5, 8 ],
 
		[ 0, 4, 8 ],
		[ 2, 4, 6 ]
	];

So the main idea is that we have a bunch of boxes and whenever one of them gets clicked, we may have to do something. I added each of the boxes to an array (line 1), so I could easily loop through them all (line 14), and set the buttonMode and add an onClick event handler to each. A true buttonMode tells flash to display the little hand when you mouseover the object.

The main processing is done whenever you click a block, and the onClick event handler starts on line 20. That’s really all there is to the game, the rest of the stuff are just extras.

The mouse event is passed as a param to the event handler. Its currentTarget property represents the object clicked, which in this case is one of the blocks.
The first test to do on that block is see if it’s empty. If it’s not empty, there’s nothing for us to do.
A block is empty if it is still on its first frame, which is where currentFrame comes in. If it’s not on its first frame it’s either an X (frame 2) or an O (frame 3).

If it is empty, I need to either fill it with an X or an O, whichever wasn’t used last. For this, I have the nextSymbol variable, which is only ever either a 0(X) or a 1(O). I set the block using its gotoAndStop function, passing it the frame we wish it to change to.

After that, I just check if a player has won!
I was pretty lazy about checking; I made a list of every possible victory combination (line 46), and check each of those (line 32) to ensure all the squares in each aren’t on the same frame, or on frame 1 (line 36).

Done!

Line 28: I wonder why I did nextSymbol = ( nextSymbol + 1 ) % 2; instead of nextSymbol ^= 1; Laziness?

Am I traveling toward a lopsided portfolio, if ever one exists? Will I lose credibility when it comes to programming complex web-systems and sweet interfaces? It could happen – though, frankly, I doubt it.
It would surprise me if many noticed or cared. Still, it’s time to get more programming contracts if I can figure out how.

That being said (up above, in case you missed it), I am very confident in my ability to program, less so to design. So all this design is hopefully a good sign!

Above is a newspaper ad for Dr. Stephanie Tsang of Tsang Dentistry. It still needs some work (I’ve only recently altered the layout, and need to play around with it a bit) but that should be pretty much it. Hopefully it is clean and clear, and attracts the eye in print. I’ve never designed anything for a newspaper before and can’t be sure what it will look like.

And placed two on what I think will be the final version of the banner:

That tooth means business, IMO.