PiXELWiT

I needed an interesting new linear texture so I made this SWF to generate rectangular shapes with the following characteristics:

• All corners of each rectangular shape align on a single “X” pattern.
• The “X” crosses through the center of an invisible rectangle with 90 degree corners.
• The 90 degree corners are each located at the middle of their respective corner areas.

Getting everything to work the way I wanted was a bit more complicated than I initially expected.  The code for the above SWF looks like this: ...
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I’ve mentioned my fondness for FireFox FireBug before so when I read about the 5 Best FireBug Plugins I knew I had to share the news. It seems FireBug is popular enough to warrant its own subset of “plugins” or “extensions”. Nifty.

Out of the 5 available plugins:

• YSlow: Creates a report grading the speed of any site.
• FireCookie: Lets you inspect and modify the cookies a site is using.
• FirePHP: A PHP Debugging tool used to examine PHP header data.
• PixelPerfect:Overlays a transparent image guide to help tweak CSS.
• Rainbow: Color coding for scripts inside FireBug.

I found YSlow from Yahoo! to be the most interesting. YSlow uses 13 rules to grade your page’s performance and presents the results in a well-formatted series of tabbed views. When combined with the information found in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for High Performance Web Sites this FireBug plugin will definitely help you understand why your page is loading slowly.

Comments(5)

Sometimes I wonder where Adobe plans to lead the ubiquitous SWF file and its associated software. Hopefully it will never be as “BLOATED” as Adobe’s PDF Viewer.

Adobe Reader‘s large file size seems a bit excessive when you consider the fact that most PDFs can be “printed” to SWF files which in turn can be viewed with the comparatively minuscule SWF player.

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