Terralever employees, Scott McAndrew and Casey Rayl, were interviewed on Tuesday by Laura Foy regarding the newly released Zero Gravity game that employs Microsoft’s new rival flash technology, Silverlight.

Just updated my wordpress blog from 2.0 to 2.2 and it’s SWEEET.

 Love the widget functionality, it makes updating and customizing my sidebar soo much easier. Plugins are also very awesome, I’ve added Category Cloud, Twitter Tools, and WP Polls to create additional widget wonders! I’m still on the hunt for a flickr widget, so if you’ve got one, please let me know.

 I’m still trying to figure out how to widgetable my own layouts, but I found a pretty birdy layout until that happens.

I noticed our Creative team using a nifty program that allows you to create bookmarks to folders and files and then with a tap of the capslock key you can jump to those in an instant.

The name of the program is Enso Launcher, and it makes my life SO much easier!

I recently upgraded to Vista on my home environment and I absolutely love the new Dreamscapes™ Beta!

For those of you who don’t have Vista, Dreamscapes is video/animated desktop wallpapers. Most of them are just a few seconds long, and right now, since the technology is still so new, there aren’t a lot to choose from out there. But imagine the branding possiblities!

EDIT:

I noticed a lot of people were hitting this post since some how I became the #1 ranking site for Vista Dreamscapes. If you’re interested in getting more dreamscapes check out Deskscapes.

Download Deskscapes Here

Then you can pick up free (some of the better ones you may have to pay for) dreamscapes at the following site. They have a limit on the number you can download a day without registering. You WILL have to install Deskscapes to use these. I know some of them are kind of cheesy, but there’s some good ones in there too, I promise. I personally like the Beach Rocks, Bay Bridge, and Timelapse Flower.

Pickup Free Dreamscapes Here

This week I was again arm wrestling with the sIFR version 2. The production department has always considered sIFR implimentation more of an art than a science. There’s so many variables that effect it in unpredicable ways that make it a daunting task.

In this particular case, I was trying to add a secondary color within one header. Usually this is a simply span in CSS, but since we’re using sIFR to transform the header to a non-webstandard font, this is not so easy. After researching the web, I found that Mark Wubben has now produced a beta 3.1 version of sIFR. GREAT!

So I pull down the download, unpack it, finding it very similar to the 2.0 installation. This process includes creating a SWF of the font you want to use, adding a javascript file to control it, and CSS to control the formating.

NEW FEATURE NOTED: The javascript you used to insert at the bottom of files using sIFR is now seperated into a config.js file. This is nice, since you don’t have to include it on each master page, etc.

NEW FEATURE NOTED: The css file used to control the formatting is now seperate as well from your css files, keeping your files clean and tidy. However, when using themes this was a bit cumbersome to add a css file somewhere else within the file structure. Just another place people have to look to make a small change to a class. 

Once it was all in place, formatting my classes and headers was a learning process, but once I got the hang of it, it was a DREAM compared to the older edition.

NEW FEATURE NOTED: Now in the config js you can set css base styles as well as span, bold, etc. Which makes formatting in line a breeze! Just what I was looking for!

NEW BUG NOTED: In IE 7, the sIFR text just randomly disappears when positioned in certain situations. Refresh a couple of times and it pops back up right where it should be. It has something to do with the way the classes are reassigned, but from there I dunno what exactly is going on that makes it magically disappear.

BUG FIXED: In past versions we would have some issues with the sIFR headers stretching or shrinking depending on the height or width that was set to it’s class. Meaning the font would not keep it’s size, but become bigger or smaller instead of wrapping.

All in all I’m really impressed by the additonal CSS functionality. This adds a great deal of flexability. I’ll add to this post as I find additional benefits or bugs.