I got you an AIR app.

For those coming in to the blog, please do stop by my portfolio site: Sam Brenner, New Media Design Portfolio

Go check it out! A brief bit about the site: It’s built in AS3 and XML; I also used swffit so I could use the browser’s scroll bar instead of making one in AS3 (see how the height changes on each page! I think that’s pretty slick). There are a few bugs and missing features (a way to display progress work, a more integrated way to view still image projects) and those changes will be made soon. I’ll also be moving this blog over to the new domain sometime this week.

Of course, now I have to bump that page up in Google for my name to maintain my hard-earned number one spot: Sam Brenner New Media Design Portfolio.

UPDATE: I released the code, get it here.

It was more fun than I thought to read through the entire stimulus bill, and even more so to do it again, with a different version, when the bill was signed into law. Fortunately, I stumbled across the website stimuluswiki.com, which made the second readthrough considerably easier. After turning all the numbers into XML, I ran it through Processing, fixed whatever errors I had (including an extremely perplexing error involving Processing not liking my XML file generated in FlashDevelop, but having no problem with the exact same code copied and pasted into Dreamweaver) and went to the printers. I’ll take a picture of the print itself later, but for now you can click on the image above for the whole thing or see some actual-size details below.

The unfortunate thing about choosing stimulus package (officially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) as my dataset is that it gets updated quite frequently. So when I started gathering data, the latest version was the one passed by the House. Now the latest version is the one passed by the Senate, and soon it will be the one signed into law. So I stuck with my original version, which means eventually I’ll have to go back in and find whatever changes have been made. The good news is that the generator works like a charm! There are some design obstacles for me to overcome: a more graceful way to handle the text will be necessary, and the overlapping branches aren’t exactly what I wanted the diagram to look like. I’m swiftly converting all of my data to XML, but here is what I have so far: the Depts. of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense and Education.

It’s my birthday! But more importantly, it’s Groundhog’s Day. Let’s appreciate some lesser-known prognosticators, and their predictions (as of when I wrote this):

• Wiarton Willie: More Winter
• Staten Island Chuck: Spring
• Shubenacadie Sam: More Winter
• Balzac Billy, the Prairie Prognosticator
• General Beauregard Lee, PhD (with a 94% accuracy rating)
  

To design the silliest interface ever!

This new video shows us that multitouch has finally advanced beyond the art of haphazardly spinning and resizing pictures and entered the realm of making you look like an idiot.

It took a few months, but that extremely-hard-to-read green color that used to scream “I’M A LINK, CLICK ME” is now a nice ol’ grey. There are too many other projects to worry about right now, but totally redesigning the blog is in the back of my mind. Let’s say… completed by the end of the year.