I think I MIGHT just love Flash. A certain turn of events have ended up motivating me a great deal to finally get my hands on the elusive software known as Flash. But I only had Flash MX, which according to flash artists friends of mine, is completely outdated and ancient. So, credits to the Arab for bringing me a slightly Trojan’ed Flash CS3!

What’s my first creation? Nothing too fancy, just a lineart vector traceout of one of my pencil sketches. Once its done, I realise why many webcomic artists use Flash to outline or ‘ink’ their sketches. Its pretty cool. So here below you will find, Eirana, the female Riftwalker from the pioneer game me and my group made in Uni.

Meanwhile, I’m about to find out if a human can learn action scripting from basic to somewhat intermediate knowledge in two days!

Oh, if anyone noticed, I changed my profile picture image on the home page. Not just that actually, I did a mini mini super mini revamp. I dunno, I actually wanted to make that banner thing all animated and stuff. Well, see how later. Till then… expect more flashy goodness from Suadref Studios!

In light of recent interview-going frenzy, I happened to stumble on this little short film from Rejected Jokes. It’s pretty funny. Love the guy’s smucked confidence. His sheer blatantly ridiculous resume, his attitude and his super high self esteem… perfect package.

Meanwhile, I’m finally picking up flash again. It’s something I had wanted to do since umm, I first started designing for the web. But the somewhat poor experience in Poly, when I was learning flash, sort of put me off for most of the time. I even went as far as looking at other code-heavy alternatives like Javascripts and its spawns (mootools and whatnot). While these are cool, I don’t really have a full need for them and what I do want to do, I can do with Flash, mostly.

So I’ve been doing a quick refresh of the software. Luckily it all falls into place rather easily, since I’ve done some of the things before. But now I’m looking at the more cool stuff like scrolling galleries and character animation.

I’ve been in denial by saying that Flash sucks and makes websites run slower, load slower, and search engine bots can’t crawl through it. Well, all that is partly true. But it also offers interactivity at an almost unlimited level. Just take a look at this Jakarta based website, Magnivate.

And about the bots not being able to crawl. Those apply more for the full flash websites. Even so, I’ve seen that there are tutorials on how to incorporate metatags into the final published movie/site.

That leaves my accusation that flash makes websites load slower and run slower. Well, again, partly true, but that is entirely up to the designer to optimise the website to load quick, run smooth. Even extremely heavy CSS websites that load up a plethora of images which aren’t even optimised can be painfully slow. And when people go overboard with Ajax or Mootools or any Javascripts, the website could become a nightmare.

It’s all good on the net, just how you build it. Meanwhile, I’m taking a break and checking out bestwebgallery.com

I’m currently trying to look for a full time job, since its been a few months since I finished UOW.

So like all net-savvy jobseekers, which I think exist in throngs, I joined up any job search website I can think of. And one of them is called st701. Straits Times Recruit is a well known recruitment channel in the print media. And thus, I would respect their web presence as well.

Then comes this part: I was sending off my applications, and I saw in my junk mail, 2 failed postmasters delivery notice mails. I saw that they’re from ST701. I opened them and they’re actually the mail which they forward to the potential employers from all the online one-click applications.

It was interesting to see the backworks of the system. But there’s one thing that took me back quite a bit.

I saw the following line in one of the mails. Its for a webdesigner position:
Total Potential Candidates 714 (6 Candidate Applications)

Then the other one, for a senior graphics designer position:
Total Potential Candidates 1263 (7 Candidate Applications)

What a crowd. All these from ONE website. Who knows how many websites they posted their ad to. Or newspapers, for that matter.

Well, good luck to all of us trying to find a job these days!

I can’t resist. I have to make a post, even though I don’t have an idea whatsoever what to write on. Why do I have to make a post?

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7! It’s super sweet I tells ya. It’s sleek and beautiful, and I haven’t even explored its functionality yet.

This was what it looked like when I’m making posts. I love it! It’s great.

And now, my plans for the future:

Hopefully, I’ll get more projects to get my gears grinding again. Lots of cobweb and dust have settled on the creativity section of my brain. And the rust had accumulated on the coding skills side of the brain also.

Also, a revamp of the entire site is up for consideration… it’s about time too. Time to ‘break free’ of the narrowness. I’ve started looking for opportunities by sending this URL off to many potential employers/clients. I think I’d be happier if they see something closer to the super cool standards of great websites like:

• http://www.studio7designs.com/
• http://www.fullyillustrated.com/

There are so many more, but I don’t really wanna list them here. Don’t think it’d be a good idea.

Right, I just wanna make a post after this new upgrade. I love it! Happy 2009 then!