The pic below is vector. Don’t believe me? Hit it to open it big and it should magnify even more when you click on it again. 
This comes from Egba94′s Deviant Art page. Oh man, I hope the ’94 part doesn’t mean he/she was born that year… Oye, my art could be getting schooled by high schoolers.
Archives
All posts for the month January, 2010
The owner of BadBoyComics just emailed me to say hello, and his site is worth mentioning here. He’s even got a quick, non-talkie Photoshop demo on digital inking. If you click on it below and jump to YouTube to watch you should see a much higher resolution version….
Wow, I’m downloading this update now…
Adobe Flash CS4 Professional 10.0.2 Hotfix
…and REALLY hope this finally fixes a problem thats plagued some of us Adobe Flash on the Mac users. Its a whooping 140 MB update, so this isn’t just an update to Flash Player. Okay, Safari, I must shut you down to install this…. see you on the other side, brother.
Anddddd, success. I’ve been working on a project tonight that was constantly doing that, and its fine now. Okay. Saga over. By the way, I noticed this issue only affected 4 Core and 8 Core Mac Pro Desktops. I’d love to know what percentage of Flash users that is, because this has been a major annoyance since Flash 10 came out, which was a while ago now. Especially for certain video-based training instructors that like to publish often and not have to shut down their screen capture software to edit out all the times a blank publish window appeared.
Check out what my buddy John wrote back in April 17, 2009 about Apple and a possible tablet…
vs.
He nailed quite a lot. Even the price being more like $400 instead of the much predicted $1000. And while some folks back in April were saying Apple wasn’t even considering making a tablet, he was dreaming up the accessories…
"Thanks for the ideas John!" - Steve
Anyway, so who of my readers is going into further debt in a couple months to get an iPad? I’m already standing in line.
After writing everything I just wrote below I need some animation for the top of this blog. Its too full of text damnit!
Here’s a nice piece from the eye-in-the-sky at Vimeo that somehow knows what to email me exactly when I need it….
Okay All, if you get anything out the answers below, you can thank Shawn for emailing me at the right time with the right questions. Here’s what he hit me up with via email at 2Am. And by the way, these are probably only the 5 hardest questions EVER regarding freelancing =)
How does one begin the first steps to being a sought after designer?
“Steps”, plural. I like that. Well, create a site for yourself that a potential client clearly sees is well-crafted, feels immersive, and personable. Stay away from abstractness and seeming unapproachable. And whatever you come up with doesn’t need to tailor toward what you think a client is looking for. You can’t anticipate where Coke or Nike’s brand is heading. Be yourself and create the type of site you want to be at.
From whatever weirdness that is, a potential client might say “I love your site, its really fun and I wish my company could have a site like that… buuuutt I know it just won’t work for what we are”. And hey, what a great hypothetical response because all you’re looking to do is get ANY response from someone that wants to pay you money. Your site just needs to strike up a conversation. If someone doesn’t want to hire you, they won’t make any contact at all. They also might not make contact if you don’t nudge them a little toward doing so. If you make a big button that says “Why Not Email Me?!”, they are more likely too than a small one that says “Contact” . Or a contact form thats buried too deep or too abstractly.
So as long as you’ve impressed someone at a company with whatever, its easy to say, “well I can do anything you guys want”. But no one will believe that unless you have something extraordinary done already. And it could take months to create your little world on the internet that is unfathomably cool, but if it does take months, the time will be well spent.
Also if you’re totally stumped for what to build, find three or four sites by designers you think are sought after, and figure out what you can copy. Some reading this will say thats stealing, but usually its not because if you start off copying something, you’ll end up with something unique in the process. And if you do end up creating a clone of some other site, you’ll have done more than just doing nothing, and before long the beating of the tell-tale heart will drive you insane until you change the site enough to be your own.
In the past I have been a designer who outsourced to another designer when the client agreed. Then things went down the drain due to not asking enough. Can this be done if so how would you approach this?
Yeah outsourcing can be risky. But if you were honest enough to tell the client you were passing the job onto someone else, you might have been better off just telling the client to work with your other developer directly and you do some kind of finder’s fee with the developer. You could even help the two settle on a price for the project (plus that way you know how much of a fee to get). Of course that developer won’t be very happy with you if you ask for a lot of money for doing nothing, but if you are fair, you probably won’t have any trouble getting paid. Thats all supposing you were going to tell the client you were just gonna outsource the job. Which is easiest, but less money usually.
I’d probably recommend you NOT tell the client anything about who exactly works for ya, and then try your best to manage both ends of it. Just be sure there’s plenty of room for error. Like if the client is giving you 5k and you’re paying someone else 4k, I don’t think thats good. But if you’re getting paid 5k and paying some else 2k, there’s room for something to go wrong and you’re still okay.
How does one begin to set the right prices without sending clients away and win the job?
Well start with a little more than “the right price” for you, and then see what the client says. If they go for it, great. If not, you gotta talk it out and see what’s possible. Remember that the client is still around even if they didn’t like your initial quote. They haven’t gotten on a plane to the moon where you can’t reach them.
My feeling is that if you strike up the right vibe with a client prior to getting into the money stuff, you aren’t at much risk of sending them away entirely. If you act like you want to work with them, they’ll want to work with you and really try to make it happen.
How does one compete with other markets, for example, India?
Don’t think about your competition. You really don’t have competition in the usual sense. Competition is 8 guys lining up to race on a track and 60 seconds later seeing who went around the fastest. Nothing like that ever happens for web developers. If you lose a job to a company in India, you’ll probably never know you were even competing. Jobs get lost and won too anonymously to ever be worth thinking about in a competitive sense.
If a potential client visits your site, and doesn’t bookmark it to come back to later, thats the only finish-line worth considering. So again, just focus on the awesomeness of your own site.
Is there any advice you can offer on how to code Actionscript perfectly or to learn new stuff clients ask for?
I think you mean “code Actionscript perfectly the first time around”, and yeah that is very tough to do if you feel your internal freelance clock-ticking, like you’re spending too much time on screwing up and not getting your money’s worth for it. And that is an age-old issue with freelancing. The screw-up’s are on your dime usually. Its not like a salaried job where you can get away with telling the boss “I need more time to learn this” and get paid the same as last week.
My feeling is that if you promised you could do something, and can’t deliver without some painful learning or trial n’ error, its on you. You’ll know for next time.
But it is possible your client asks for something so unique that you have to ask for money to research what’s possible. For example, lets say someone asked me to program an iPhone app that would control a Wii game. It could take days to figure out if thats even do-able, and weeks of training if it is possible. Your job in that case is to convince the client that this is one of those “nothing ventured, nothing gained” situations. Fancy talk for a gamble. But you’ll probably find that your client already knows this, and has been ready to pay for that all along. Just be sure you get paid throughout the R&D process.
Hope that helps
See for yourself. Here’s a very well done re-do of the classic Star Wars scroll using HTML5. Notice that once it gets scrolling you can select the text. Its also interesting to view the source code too. It looks like this short bit below formats and animates a lot of the text…
#crawl { color:rgb(252,223,43); font-family:FGD, sans-serif; text-align:center; font-size:36px; opacity:0; -webkit-animation:crawl 120s linear; -webkit-animation-iteration-count: 1; -webkit-animation-delay:16s; -webkit-transform-style:preserve-3d; }I guess I have to learn some HTML5 eh.
Star Wars: Episode Nerd
So my app is done, Zombie Air Strike . And now its time for some answers to your questions, like… Why is it about zombies? Was it done in Flash or XCode? What about us Droid users? You spent that long on THAT?
Actually that last question I’ve just been asking myself. So here comes a mega article and hopefully I can sum up this small adventure of actually accomplishing something I wanted to try. Was it a success, failure, or both?? I’m both a teacher and a student, so I can be as brutally honest with myself as possible and then decide whether or not to walk out of the classroom with my head held high or shluff out kicking a wad of trash that is…
My Own Final Report Card
"Oh Bender, you've drunk too much, or not enough, I can't remember which it is with you robots"
For Justin, all the good…
- Can learn new things: A
- Solves problems well: A+
- Project completed: B+
Yeah I can learn new stuff. I proved it once again. And if nothing else, this has been a huge boost to what I know. Wait, did I just write “if nothing else”. That would suck if nothing else comes of this but some brain grease. I want fortune and glory!… No really, this will go down in Justin History as another obsession driven learning experience. And probably little more.
I tried way more than a year ago to learn Objective C / XCode and failed big time because I never started a real project. I need project goals, tasks, little notes and checksheets to really push me try to learn something new. There’s gotta be an uphill battle, which book training doesn’t provide (but keep buying video training, video training is great!). The books you see above rarely lead to failure.
A lot has been written about failing to succeed. Lincoln, Wired Magazine this month, etc. And failing to learn is part of that optimistic view. I definitely hit plenty of road blocks in this app and that forced me to spend 2 or 3 days learning new stuff, or sometimes relearning how I was doing something wrong that I thought was right. And sometimes you just gotta say “aw, screw this, I’ll just NOT do what I wanted”, which I think is a fine last resort too.
I give myself a B+ for getting this done. I rarely feel like anything I do is ever perfect, and when a project gets close to being done, I get that ants in my pants feeling like “ok, I’m starting to get really sick of this not being finished”. Which is probably the only real feeling of a deadline I ever give myself. So anyway, I think I rushed a few things toward the end, but had I spent another week or month developing this app, it probably would be 99% the same.
For Justin, all the bad.
- Multi-tasks well: D-
- Meets deadlines: F
- Project completed as directed: C+
I read a study once that concluded people who brag that they are good multi-taskers are actually really bad multi-taskers. Now I know I’m a bad multi-tasker, so that must make me really really bad. I’m terrible at juggling a lot at once. And fortunately I work alone with no boss, and no real deadlines to rein me in when I get too single-minded. Wait, thats a bad thing!!
I can go on a work bender and arise from this basement smelling and looking like the Swamp Thing. But 99% of that time goes to the one ultra-task, and everything else piles up. Like 30…40…50 unread emails. Actually unread means, unresponded to. I read them all. When I am a great “representative” of CartoonSmart is when I’m on vacation, and I have a laptop and no real capability to work on something major. Which isn’t to say I’m always on a mega-project here at home, but giving nothing else to do, I’ll check email like crazy, hit the forums, get into completely unnecessary conversations with strangers, basically do tons of free consulting, and have a good ol’ time at it. And thats the bad part of The Large Project Obsession, the communal aspect of what I do here takes a back seat.
I’ll give myself a C+ for completing this project as directed. I wanted to make an app that blew up stuff using the iPhones location services. That was finished back in November probably. After that the tangents started. The “what ifs”. What if I could switch bombs, add little perks, or switch cities while playing, and then eventually I realized I was making a game, not just a call-in-an-air strike app. Thats where the word “Zombie” got added. Actually I think that will be one of the better stumble-upons during development that I added the word “zombie” . Yes, there are 100,000 apps and growing, but there’s not an absurdly long list of zombie related apps. And boys love zombies. Boys love blowing up stuff. Boys love free apps. So that could be a good long term way of finding new users.
For the Project Itself: Good, bad, or just the app with the gun.
I think the app came out very well. Hey its no Tetris. But what is. Almost every game on the App store calls itself “addicting.” There’s been like maybe 5 games ever that I’d say are addicting: Tetris, Solitaire, Phantasy Star 2, and Modern Warefare 1&2. Okay thats 6. But only two in that list are on the iPhone. But fortunately for me, I don’t have to rely on my own opinion of the game to measure its worth. ITunes has a star-review system in place, so anytime I want to see how great or how sucky my app measures up, I can look at the stars. And possibly cry a little.
Good news though, raw data wise, in 3 or 4 days of being in the store, its gotten at least 3000 downloads (its free, thats not sales folks, don’t hold me hostage) and I think thats pretty good. Maybe in a month that will be down to 1 download a day though. But if so, I’ll enjoy knowing I’ve partially amused that one person for as long as they decide to not uninstall that app.
All the rest.
So I did get a question yesterday asking if this was made in Flash CS5 Beta or XCode. I definitely did not make it in Flash. Despite all the psychic messages I’ve been directing toward Adobe HQ, no one there has picked up yet that I’d love to try the Beta. So no. And while I’d love to be proven wrong on this, I think XCode will always be superior to Flash for creating iPhone apps. Apple’s got home-field advantage here. Their tools, their device. And early on in this project I was constantly crashing the app trying to do stuff I thought was relatively process un-intensive. So I can imagine the frustration of adding a couple simple animated movieclips to the stage that crash the device over and over again.
But yesterday I did go and look up again what API’s Adobe is including to get Actionscript working with some of the cool stuff the iPhone does and one of them is the Geo-coder. Which in Zombie Air Strike is the fun part to me, that you can use location services or any map as a game background. So it seems like you could do that with a Flash made app too. And if Flash CS5 does publish out a perfect Apple-friendly app, I could definitely see myself just saying “aww screw it, I’ll build this one in Flash.” Although at the moment, my Actionscript 3 is probably rustier than my Obj C. Thank god for all these great CartoonSmart Flash tutorials. Shameless linking, I know.
Yesterday someone posted a comment asking “what about us Droid folks”. Oh boy. Another SDK to learn!? I don’t think I could handle that for a while. I do agree that there’s plenty of potential there. But I know I”ll stick with the iPhone for a lot longer. There is something really, really exciting about developing an app for such a slick device. I’m not at all amazed anymore by what my desktop computer can do. For example, playing Zombie Air Strike in the iPhone Simulator on my computer isn’t that great, but messing around with it on my phone is awesome. Oh and plus I’m not buying another phone either. Sorry Google.
And speaking of the Simulator, for the iPhone-less other there…
Here’s is the game in action.
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Yeah, my App is finally approved and downloadable! You can find out more details at ZombieAirStrike.com , or just Click HERE and jump to the iTunes Store. I’m planning on writing a lot more on the whole process of developing it and getting into the store, but since I’m being called to babysit, I’ll just hit Publish and enlighten ya more later. But for now, if you have an iPhone, I’d love to get some downloads today. Its only 6mb (the size of like two songs), and you can do some pretty fun stuff which I’ll describe more later too.
Thanks, me.
