Now the question is: How Beyond Smooth are you?
See the movie, take the test and find out.

www.levelvodka.com
www.absolut.com
www.perfectfools.com
www.greatworks.com

Most weight here has been put on usability, accessibility and readability. I wanted to keep everything really clean and spacious, to bring up the content, which of course is the most important part. I think it works pretty well. Everything should be valid and look the same in all major browsers. If you however find something that’s wrong, please tell me.

All of the content from the old site is still here, just the layout has changed. Also all old permalinks are still valid, even if i changed the structure to a bit more logical one (so there’s no need to update your bookmarks).

A portfolio section has also been added, although it’s not finished yet. I will be adding new items when I have the time.

Also the about section tells a bit more than my name. Read it to know a bit more about me

Links have been moved away from the sidebar to a separate section for two reasons:

1. To keep the sidebar clean and relevant to the content on the page
2. To reduce clutter on the site

Try out the new, fresh, comment field! Tell me what you think!

Anyway, the module. The whole day yesterday we enjoyed the company of Björn and Chris from Perfect Fools, talking about case studies, inspiration and other tips. I won’t go into detail (you’ll have to apply to Hyper yourself to experience it!), but all in all it was a really nice lecture. Perfect Fools as a company has done some really impressive flash stuff (check out their portfolio!), so most of us in Crew 12 got really inspired. Cool!

Ok, so what to do with all this inspiration. I was asked to have a lecture and/or workshop in flash for the crew. It was really hard for me to plan it, since we obviously have pretty much all levels of flash knowledge and interest in the class. Anyway, I decided to take it full scale actionsript 2.0, focusing more on “how to think & plan” than “how to do” (= copy-paste for many, without understanding what they’re doing, hehe). Since we’re having the portfolio module, creating a portfolio base seemed pretty reasonable. So, that’s what we did.

A couple requirements: The portfolio has to be fully dynamic, using XML as it’s source of data, for all data. Images will load in with a cool preloader and the user can easily change images with numbered links. So very simple in it’s essence, but explaining the object oriented actionscript behind it, that was the real task. Below is a screenshot of the result (click it for the actual flash in a popup)

The code itself is pretty basic, straightforward actionscript 2.0, not anything special to somebody who’s familiar with as2. I shared the code with the class, so I might as well share it with you. I’ve attached the source to the project to this post (do I hear cheers?). The comments are in swedish, sorry for that
Use the code as you like, but if you do, a link back would be nice

Note: All the photos used in this project are downloaded from http://www.sxc.hu, and are copyrighted to their respective owners. You may not use them for any purpose without contacting the owner.

Download source files

I changed my webhost to Dreamhost, due to a growing need of webspace and bandwidth. I’m now getting 200gb hd and 2000gb traffic/month. What’s even better is that the hd grows with 1gb/week and the bandwidth with 16gb/week, for free! Sweet. I addition to this the web control panel is awesome, definetly liking it so far.

Due to this change, I’ve been experiencing some minor technical problems (mostly due to own sloppyness). More or less everything should be ok now again.
Update: There was a small error in the .htaccess, breaking some permalinks, fixed now. Sorry about this.

edit: Forgot to mention: Thanks to Niclas Bergström for the tip

Here: www.anttikupila.com

A few reasons for me to update

• CMS. I had no CMS on the previous site, so adding new content was a real pain in the neck. Now I’ve built my own, very versatile, CMS, so I can easily add content. Cool
• Display. May be the wrong word, but what I mean is that i wasn’t able to display the info I wanted. This included some sort of an ‘about’ section, and more importantly the portfolio/showcase, where i now can have multiple images per item.
• It was old, and I wanted something new

A couple features

• 100% flash, with php/mysql backend via amfphp.
• Fully functional history, so that the user can use the browser’s back button, like on a normal HTML webpage. I can specify where the state is saved, and it can be turned off (entirely, or for certain links/areas). Could maybe add some sort of a control panel so that the user could decide?..
• Trackbacks to every item, including all pages, and every item in the showcase (dynamically created, of course). This means that if you for example view an item in the showcase, you can send it’s trackback URI to a friend, and he’ll get to the correct item, just by pasting the URI in a browser. Easy, huh?
• Text size is adjustable. Again, like on a normal HTML page, either with ctrl +, ctrl – or with the mousewheel while holding down ctrl. The view > text-size menu won’t work, since, as far as I know, there’s no way to get that amount into flash. The text-size set by the user is saved in a cookie.
• RSS reader for this blog. Shows the up to 3 most recent entries’ excerpts.
• A whole bunch of other features I forgot / won’t mention. Check it out!
• added Jul 13: Now with deep links, thanks to Fredrik Stutterheim for the tip

Special thanks

• Andreas Hamberg & Thomas Jaatinen for beta testing & ideas
• The amfphp team
• The whole Flash community
• Adobe
• Everybody else i forgot

Ok, sounding too much like a speech after getting an oscar, I’ll let you talk now.

update: This site is now offline.