Fonts have always been a major concern in webdesign, or rather, the lack of fonts. To remedy this, I have recently installed sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement for all headlines. sIFR replaces all H1′s, H2′s etc with a flash rendition of the text. Naturally you can select any font you have on your computer – giving designers complete typographic control over their headlines. Not to be used as a text replacement for websites, so designers still don’t have 100% control over type – but its very nice and degrades well for non-Flash or Javascript enabled browsers.

The installation process is relatively easy, the directions straightforward. Simply edit a js file, include it in your source and create the font. Font creation involves the use of the Macromedia Flash editor where you simply select the font you want your text to render in – then export the swf. Font creation can even be sped via automatic sIFR font creation through JSFL, Flash’s internal scripting engine. Overall, getting sIFR onto your site is easy – making it look good is slightly harder.

The trouble comes in the tuning of your new flashy headlines. Letter spacing, line height, padding, font size etc are all variables that need to be tweaked to get the best looking headlines you can with your font. I spent a good amount of time staring at headlines with cut off bottoms before I finally landed upon the values that worked. You are not styling the flash, but rather a dummy text only version of the headline that is created a split second before displaying the page to the viewer. This dummy version attempts to mimic the flash font’s letter spacing and size so the javascript can accurately determine the real estate to occupy with the flash replacement.

Conclusion

Overall I really like sIFR – its great for someone who wants total control of design. Perhaps less important to others but designers are a particular bunch. While easy to install – its not easy to tune. Probably the biggest drawback is extra time it adds to your page load. This of course depends on your usage and number of headlines it is replacing.

Resources used:

http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/show/HomePage
wiki documentation

http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=408
Not particularly informative but she does hit upon a good practice. It will make it easier on yourself if you first set the letter-spacing and font-size before before tweaking line-height. The line height can drastically alter the size of the box sIFR is trying to replace and skew your letter spacings and font sizes.

http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/p67619682/
Danilo Celic’s Breeze presentation

A Flash based Flickr image browser. What a great implementation of the wonderful Flickr API and Flash’s ability to access dynamic content quickly and present it in a way only Flash can.

Are you a designer? Find yourself forgetting certain css selectors? I love Jack Daniels has a great cheat sheet section and has recently added a CSS cheat sheet.

http://www.mtasc.org/ lays out the claim of being the first open source actionscript 2 compiler out there – but what can it really do? I read the documentation, and it sounds great for coders, but how effective is it? I would love to see what programmers are doing with it.

Update: Claus Wahlers, author of DENG wrote me to inform me I inaccurately posted DENG 1.0 features as being DENG 2.0. To clarify:

“Development for DENG 2.0 has not even started yet (i’m at planning stage right now). DENG 2.0 is going to target Flash Player 8, and both the player and the compiler are not available yet (scheduled to be released August/September this year), thus i have to wait some more months until i can start implementing. DENG 2.0’s featureset is most likely going to be much more complete.

I envision fully compliant clientside rendering of XForms (at least the Basic profile) and SVG-T, amongst many other neat things (i.e. full CSS 3 compliance, as far as defined by the W3C already). To deploy DENG 2.0 on web pages, i most likely use the SEFFS method.”

The new rave is XHTML and standards compliance – everyone is doing it. Why not you? Want to play with new standards that aren’t yet supported in browsers? DENG 1.0 is capable of “rendering subsets of XForms, SVG, XHTML, XFrames, arbitrary XML (e.g. RSS) and any other custom XML application, styled by CSS 2 and 3″. What does this mean to you? Its a way to preview and render CSS styles not yet available in your favorite browser. If using Flash to render XHTML isn’t your bag; Claus Wahlers, author of DENG 1.0 also brings us SEFFS. Using a sIFR-based method of delivering XHTML SEFFS allows you to create a standards compliant site entirely of flash, with alt-content abilities. Look at his XHTML flash site.

In one of the largest announcements to hit the design community of late, Adobe has bought out Macromedia for a whopping $3.4 Billion. Thats not liquid, but using some sort of tax loopy stock exchange where current Macromedia stockholders would “own approximately 18 percent of the combined company”.

Macromedia’s site hosts a press release that contains the typical lawyerspeak and doubletalk that pervades every spin release and tries to make this aquisition seem more like a merger than what it really is: another loss for consumers.

The last few editions of Photoshop have not added much more functionality or improvements over older versions that many graphic artists just dont want to shell another $400 just for the honor of incrementing that version number next to the software title. While I love FlashMX I cannot say that your average animator needs it to create the same tweens that have been the cornerstone of flash animation. In fact, one could create the same animation with Flash 4 or FlashMX 04.

I hope I’m wrong and Adobe and Macromedia team up and deliver new products that incite us to want them.

For some other thoughts on the merger check out Mike Chambers’s blog. He’s the Product manager, Developer relations for Macromedia.