So, I have a beautiful new 13″ MBP. I enthusiastically used the migration assistant to copy over all my data from my desktop, excited to finally be able to work efficiently with all my files handy while traveling. Everything seemed to go smoothly until I go to update my desktop wallpaper and screen saver and the system preferences pane freezes up. I force-quit and try again, restart and try again, even re-install OSX and migrate my data again, but still the Spinning Beach Ball of Death haunts me.

After much googling, I discover at the very end of this complicated thread (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2035030&start=15&tstart=0) a suggestion to download and install the iLifeSupport update (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/ilifesupport903.html) which worked BEAUTIFULLY.

This is only my 3rd day of MBP ownership. Hopefully this will be the last of my troubles but if not you can count on me letting you know about it.

Last week I hopped on a bus down to New York to participate in the last half of Internet Week. I would’ve written about it earlier but I’ve been busy doing nothing at all by the pool at my mom’s house in South Florida. Such a difficult life.

Anyway, my first evening in NYC was Thursday for the Digg Meetup. After wandering the maze that is Webster Hall, getting freaked out by hallways full of tv screens, and squeezing through the crowds at the bar, I finally managed to settle down in a cozy back room of the balcony. Overall it was a fun evening… I reunited with some friends from SXSW (Jacqui, Aubrey, Trammel, & Tom), met some new friends, chatted with a girl who used to work for Scarborough Country (she said that Joe is a womanizing ass – why am I not surprised?), ate a free Klondike bar, saw Chris Hansen ( “To Catch a Predator”), and was totally impressed by a live set from Wallpaper.

The next day (Friday) I wake up to an email saying my meeting with SciFi was cancelled so I went back to sleep. Later that evening I went to Aubrey’s and Eva’s Birthday Party at 10 Degrees, which apparently was full of all sorts of internet famous people I didn’t recognize. Ah blissful ignorance. In one conversation with Mark Trammel we discovered that he used to be an adjunct professor IN MY MAJOR (Digital Arts and Sciences) at the University of Florida while I was a student there but I never took his class so we never met. Crazy small world. Also I met a few folks from Animoto and they are friendly and awesome!

After a fancy dinner with the birthday girls on Saturday the group of us wandered over to Whiskey Ward (love that bar) and then to another bar where karaoke was just ending (thank god) and I met Brett from Mashable and some guy who works for the Treasury Dept (awesome?). Towards the end of the evening I stopped having fun as strange boys got really aggressive and it seemed like Aubrey and I looked more like tasty bits of tender meat than actual human beings. But our heroes Rick and Marshall rescued us and escorted us home safely.

Sunday was a much needed lazy day. The Webbys Sunset Cocktails event happened to be in my hotel so that was a nice easy commute. I didn’t do a whole lot of mingling because Aubrey and I found a pretty cozy spot to sit, but I did finally meet Ozzy from Lolz. We talked about our mutual friends Terrence and Gillian the whole time, lots of mutual love and affection there.

Monday I took a quick trip for a meeting at AMC and then back to the hotel to start prettying myself up for the Webby Awards. I wore a dress I borrowed from Gillian (just like every other dress I wore all weekend) and Jeffrey Campbell shoes. The event was by far the fanciest thing I’ve ever been to, I felt a bit out of place until I finally got to cheer for my clients when Green Porno was called to give their acceptance speech (“Isabella Rossellini left the building”). Highlights: Trent Reznor in a suit, Sarah Silverman, Lisa Kudrow, the Victoria’s Secret models, Martha Stewart, Arianna Huffington, Beeker, chocolate-covered strawberries. Lowlights: not being able to find my friends at IFC. BOO.

Then the After Party at Hiro Ballroom. THERE WAS DANCING AND IT WAS AWESOME. Towards the end of the night Rick and I got ambushed and ended up in Gawker, I guess because we inspired a very confused photographer. Whatever, man, I’m kinda stupidly just excited to have been in Gawker. It’s particularly entertaining because the last time I visited NYC back in February I ended up in the Village Voice for attending a “Single Bloggers” mixer. NYC loves me. I love it right back.

http://www.massgeneral.org/cancer/
This project was a new challenge for me. MGH wanted to enhance the Flash animation I developed last year by including a video to play on page load, with controls hidden until the user’s cursor rolls over the video.

I coded their video players too, so I figured, piece of cake! WRONG. A few of my usual tricks for this kind of interaction failed me when any rollover of a button on the controls resulted in the whole menu slipping away right under my cursor. Seems calling “onRollOver” of one button also calls the “onRollOut” of another, even if they happen to be on top of each other. Eventually I settled on a cursor coordinates check that runs every frame and tests to see if the mouse is over the x & y bounds of the video. If so, and the menu isn’t already showing, call showMenu(), but if not, call hideMenu().

Some Actionscript2 code for you: (uses the awesome Tweener class)

function hideMenu(){
Tweener.addTween(videoHolder.menu, {_y:227, time:1, transition:”easeOutSine”});
hideVolume();
}

function showMenu(){
Tweener.addTween(videoHolder.menu, {_y:192, time:1, transition:”easeOutSine”});
}

function mouseTest(){
if (_xmouse > 400 && _xmouse 13 && _ymouse < 245){
if(!menuIsOpen){
showMenu();
menuIsOpen = true;
}
}
else{
if(menuIsOpen){
hideMenu();
menuIsOpen = false;
}
}
}
videoHolder.onEnterFrame = mouseTest;

As always, I welcome your more efficient solutions!!

Season Two starts June 7th, and to get you excited we’ve got a new Z Rock page design: http://www.ifc.com/zrock/.

The kids love it.

As you loyal friends and readers already know, I’ve been designing pages/video players/graphics for IFC.com for over 2 years. I am happy to say IFC.com has been nominated for a Webby for Best Movie & Film site!!! YAY! I am so proud of these folks; a girl couldn’t ask for a cooler group of people to work with.

Please vote for the People’s Voice: UPDATE: IFC WON THE PEOPLE’S VOICE! HOORAY!!!

The Mass General/North Shore Center for Outpatient Care microsite launched several weeks ago but I’ve been so swamped I forgot to brag about it.

This was a SUPERFAST RUSH RUSH RUSH job. Since it’s a fairly uncomplicated, temporary landing page, I figured I’d give Actionscript 3 a try.   Wow, that was NOT a good idea.  My hope was that building smooth scrollbars would make more sense in AS3, but NO, the scrollbars fought me the whole way just like always.  And then, to make matters worse, AS3 ended up requiring 3x as much code for the simple things like creating button links and rollovers!  Maybe I just don’t get it. Clearly, I just don’t get it. But I’ve since gone back to AS2 faster than a PC user to WinXP from Vista.   I just don’t think AS3 is good for what I do. Of course, feel free to go ahead and tell me how wrong I am.*

Despite my personal hardships, the site came out great! Of course, I was only the developer, not the designer, so I can’t take credit for the site’s beauty.  If I had had more time (and less frustrations with AS3) I would’ve liked to have added some more intro and outro animations similar to the opening animation.  Ah well, maybe next time.

*I welcome your thoughts on AS2 vs AS3, and I really REALLY welcome your scrollbar code.   I’d love to have something reusable so I can stop pulling my hair out over the damn things.

HOORAY!!  Hours upon hours and days upon days of blood, sweat and tears (or at least several achey wrists and fingers) have finally come to fruition!  I am so proud of the latest incarnation of IFC.com.

I worked with a fabulous team, many of whom I met in person for the first time only last week at the launch celebration!  My responsibilities included the design of the Media Lab Studios pages, both the main page and the templates for all upcoming contests, as well as converting most of the Web Series pages over to the new templates.   As if that wasn’t challenging enough, there was plenty of opportunity for new creativity in designing the customized background images.

Some selected works:
The Stagg Party
Little Big Planet
Z-Rock
Absolut Indies
Getting Away With Murder
Get Hit (my favorite background image)

And, somewhat unrelated, Facebook apparently knows me all too well, but consequently fails at actually advertising to me.  Yes, I am aware of the new IFC.com.  And YES, I LIKE FREEZEPOP ALREADY!!

As those of you who follow my blog already know, I’ve designed several of IFC’s Web Series home pages.  So, sure, I’m a bit biased, but I’ve also watched many of them and they are legitimately great and deserving of awardage.  Please take a moment today and nominate your favorite web series at http://streamys.org. Here are my suggestions:

• best dramatic web series: Young American Bodies (sesason 3)
• best comedy web series: The Guild  (sorry IFC, I have a HUGE crush on Felicia day, I’m sure you’ll understand.)
• best reality web series: The Stagg Party  (naked ladies, people!)
• best news series: Lunchbox
• best directing for a comedy: Get Hit’s Jeff Wiens & Peter Blomquist
• best directing for a drama: Young American Bodies’ Joe Swanberg

I am very proud to brag about my small part in helping develop this beautifully designed and infinitely resourceful website, the new www.massgeneral.org.  Though I had nothing to do with the design itself, I absolutely love it.  My role was Flash Developer.  Basically, if there’s a flash animation on the site, chances are I spent several hours pulling out my hair figuring out why something wasn’t working right.

Finding the flash pieces on this huge site might be a little bit like an easter egg hunt, so let me try and point out some of the larger ones:

1. First, there’s the home page, of course.  This animation has been hard-coded using primarily timeline animation, and the original prototype included some nifty parallax movement but unfortunately these first run images didn’t support it. Hopefully next time they want to update their leading image I’ll be able to get my hands on foreground and background images and show you what I mean.
2. The second flash piece on the site you may encounter is on the home page for the Centers (Heart Center, Cancer Center, etc).  This animation loads from an XML file, making it easy for MGH to go in and load their own images and copy and links.
3. The most complicated flash widget I’ve ever done is The Patient Experience (check it out on the Cancer Center page).  It also loads all it’s data from an XML file, includes 4 different types of slides including an audio slide, automatic thumbnail creation, etc. …and was a pain in the ass to debug.
4. And then… deep in the site somewhere there are multimedia players: video, audio, and image slideshows.  I made those too.

This was the largest project I’ve worked on in a developer role, and it was also my most challenging. Big thanks go out to MGH for their kindness and patience as I struggled and learned a lot throughout this last year.  Also HUGE congrats go out the the entire development team, each of whom took on whole new challenges to create this very complex site.

Check out the newest web series from IFC, documenting the life and work of photographer Ellen Stagg: http://www.ifc.com/thestaggparty (NSFW)

My job is awesome.