Flash: Down, but not out
May 24th, 2010 @ 5:58 PM

I've been developing within Flash for about three years now. In all of my time working with Flash, never have I said, "Wow, this project would be easier done with [insert alternative program here]." Flash has a way of simplifying things that other programs would have a hard time with, like HTML5 for example. HTML5 has the capabilities to make projects as extravagant as anything you've seen in Flash, except they are more demanding to make. Sure Actionscript isn't the greatest language to code anything in, but it is straight forward enough to make most projects viable. I don't foresee Flash going away completely, no matter how much people think Apple wants it gone. That is just not the case. I also don't see HTML5 as trying to run Flash out of business. It just so happens that HTML5 is adding features to the web that Flash has dominated in the past. But Flash is not going anywhere, especially with all of its prior success and promising future.

Flash has recently been scrutinized by web business professionals everywhere, saying that Flash lacks security, reliability, and can't compare to the new combination of HTML5 and CSS3. Steve Jobs even threw a stick in the fire, saying that Flash will not succeed in the "mobile era" that we now live in. Flash was created during the personal computer era, and was especially made for people to use a mouse to navigate the user interface. I haven't seen any mice that come with Apple's latest touchscreen products. Flash websites with rollover and rollout effects are hard to view via touch. I'd like to say that's why there is no Flash on the iPad, but it's not the whole story. Apple has already decided to move on and take the ideas HTML5 creators had with video. The new way that HTML5 is encoding video will make them load faster and playback smoother. HTML5 also offers ways to create websites and applications equal to that of Flash. But every positive side has a corresponding downside, and this is no exception. Flash has always boasted simplicity in creating rollover and creative effects. An HTML5 equivalent of a semi-complicated and creative Flash-made website navigation would be difficult to code. Flash gives you the tools with its IDE to do anything you want. It has a built in word bank so that you can code anything you want, without even knowing Actionscript. HTML5 will be an addition to the already well known HTML 4. As soon as Apple announced an iPad without Flash compatibility, and everyone assumed Flash would fall from existence. I don't see this being the case at all.

No matter how you look at it, coding the same advanced project in HTML5 will be easier to do in Flash. Actionscript is certainly not the most ideal scripting language, but it is still an object oriented programming language. HTML5 is a web script. They do not compare at all. The video tag for HTML5 looks promising enough to take 99% of Flash videos off the web. Even then, Flash would be far from gone. Flash websites have become more popular over the past few years, since people are becoming more concerned with aesthetics. Flash as a program gives you more freedom to create than CSS and Javascript by far, and Adobe is too powerful to let Flash die completely. They have the secret of all secrets in their magic bag. Adobe has yet to come out with a solid program that can create 3D scenes like 3DS Max or Cinema 4D, yet we all know they have the capability of doing so. Once Flash becomes endangered, Adobe will have no problem encorporating more 3D features than ever into Flash, which will make it the "go to" program for many designers. Until then, Flash will be okay. Most Flash developers are in the business because of the interactive abilities of Flash. I can say with confidence that I learned more about interactive design through Flash than I could have with any other program. The abilities of Flash cannot be duplicated, and the uphill slope of advancement grew even greater once Adobe aquired Macromedia.

The war between internet kings
May 17th, 2010 @ 7:34 PM

For the past ten or so years, there has been a standard set on the Internet when it comes to searching for information. That well known web standard is also known as Google. Google has become a household word, as well as a booming company out in California. Whenever I turn to the Internet with a question, Google never fails to provide an answer. From starting out as a small company with similar aspirations as Yahoo, they have grown to become one of the most successful companies dealing with new developing technologies. Now, just as Google challenged the power of Yahoo and others, Microsoft's Bing, previously known as Windows Live, has arrived as the next worthy opponent.

During the previous week, I have been experimenting with Bing, while still using Google as my primary search engine. There are a few differences that immediately stand out in my mind when comparing the two searching engines (and no, I'm not talking about the fact that Bing advertises on television and Google has never had to). First off, Bing's layout is very similar to Google's, but this is a blurry comparison to make because Google has made so many slight visual changes to their site in recent weeks. Besides a strange and striking resemblance, there are a few more reasons why I don't see Bing overtaking Google as the dominant search engine in the near future. Microsoft's advantage is their advertising, which has always been a plus for them. Bing commercials are strange, but they have a good marketing strategy going on. Google has always been subtle when advertising. Their logo would appear on the commercials of affiliates, say the powered on screen of a cell phone. Google's best shot at advertising came with Apple's iPhone, where they have always been Apple's search engine of choice. The Google search app on the iPhone really boosted them the extra mile to become the best search engine. There have been rumors that Bing would become the next default search app on the iPhone because of Apple's growing relationship with Microsoft, and their deteriorating relationship with Google. That is also something I don't see as very likely. I wouldn't expect Apple to promote anything from Microsoft other than Office.

As far as the technical stuff goes, Google is still in the lead. Personally, one thing I love about Google is that it shows me exactly how long it took to generate my search results. That is something I would like to see out of Bing. Google usually generates its pages within a fraction of a second. Bing doesn't exactly say how long it takes, but I would imagine it to be very close to Google. The one thing I found Bing to be superior to Google in is page indexing. Bing does a great job indexing new pages to the overall search query, and takes about an hour to do so. In that hours time, Google has just started its indexing process. This is Bing's strong point, and also how they can catch up to Google. But if Bing is that much better at indexing new pages, one would think that Google is right there working to get better and faster in the same category. WolframAlpha reports that Google is the most visited site on a day to day basis with over 7 billion daily page views. WolframAlpha also reports Bing to be 22nd in the same category as Google, with approximately 210 million page views daily.

I ran some tests between Google and Bing to find out some information on quality and quantity of page results over the same topics. When I type the word "search" in Google, I was returned with almost 5 Billion results. Compare that to the 3.8 Billion that were returned when I searched "search" in Bing. The irony in this is that the first page result in Google for "search" was for Bing. Google was seventh on the list for "search" on its own site. Bing did not return Google on the first page of its results. It appears that Bing's search engine optimization is better than Google. Yahoo finished in the top three of both Bing and Google. Next, I searched "powerlifting" to see what kind of results both engines would generate. Bing returned less than half the number of pages that Google did. The thing I like about this search in Google is that it returned not only page results, but also image and video results over the main feed. Obviously, image and video results would be available over both engines when you search them specifically, but Bing did not provide any alternative information about multimedia results on their main feed. They provided the same pages as Google, just without the extras.

Although Bing is owned by Microsoft, one of the strongest technology companies in history, Google is becoming more of a superpower themselves. They became known as the standard homepage for many Mozilla Firefox users. Google owns companies like Youtube, GrandCentral, and GeoEye. Google turned GrandCentral into their type of VoiceOverIP called Google Voice. GeoEye partnered with Google to launch a satellite, forming the program known as Google Earth. Other important partnerships of Google include Sun Microsystems and NASA. Another thing that easily gets overlooked is Google's recent purchase of the product BumpTop. This is a desktop application used for sorting and organizing folders. Google has a variety of ways that they could use this, be it on their Internet browser Google Chrome, or possibly on an updated version of their operating system, Google Chrome OS. With all this in mind, Microsoft will be one of the most powerful companies in the world as long as Bill Gates is in charge. He is a business master mind and will do anything for his company. It will be interesting to see the battle of searching engines play out, but in the end, I still see Google coming up victorious. If anything else, because of their slight edge of experience and resources.

Finishing my first year
May 5th, 2010 @ 11:04 PM

Weeks after our first place finish at Collegiate Nationals, I'm back into the swing of things. It's about time too, since my first year is almost over. I've been working on a few articles about modern hacking, search engines, and superior artificial intelligence. As soon as I finish at LSU this year, be ready for the design juices to flow again. I can't wait to get back into design and development for the summer when I can focus on it. I've also been working on an interactive typing interface, designed to mimic the iPhone's texting application. It will be coded in Flash with Actionscript 3.0, and you can see the preview on my deviantArt account. That was just a "for-fun" project that I worked up in a few hours. Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Baseball predictions
April 6th, 2010 @ 3:52 PM

As the baseball season starts, everyone has been looking at spring training teams and making season predictions. It's now that time for me to make my predictions public. I'll go as far as to say who wins playoff spots, and how I see the playoffs turning out. This season seems to be very predictable, but I do see some surprise teams sneaking out of the shadows. One of those teams is the Texas Rangers, who I see winning the AL West. I think Nolan Ryan will be correct when he said that the Rangers will be a 90 win team this season. The Seattle Mariners will be shortly behind Texas, in an exciting race for the Wild Card with Boston. Moving across the American League, the Twins and Yankees will take the other two division titles. Despite losing their closer for the season, the Twins will have no problem with any other teams in the Central because of their offense. With Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau, Minnesota will certainly be a threat. The New York Yankees will be challenged by Boston, but like last year, the Red Sox won't be able to stop my Bronx Bombers from taking the East again. New York has too much offense, and although the bullpen needs work, the starting rotation is killer. Boston will take the Wild Card spot over Seattle by a few games, thanks to their five starters who will be nearly unstoppable. A few teams to take note of will be the Anahiem Angels, who won't be nearly as strong as they have in the past, and the Tampa Bay Rays. Both of these teams will end up third in their respective divisions, but Tampa will have a much more promising season. Over in the National League, things get a little more sketchy. Obviously the Phillies and Cardinals will be powerhouses, but the other two playoff spots are up for grabs. I think the NL West will be a one-two show between the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies, even though neither team will win in the playoffs. The Giants look good with the addition of Mark Derosa and their ace Tim Lincecum pitching strong. The Rockies will make something out of nothing with their pitching staff, beating out the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs for the Wild Card.

Now for my postseason predictions. The first round will be an easy victory for the Yankees and Rangers, as they beat out the Twins and Red Sox, respectively. Texas' Offense and rock solid infiled will hold off the Red Sox, who will collapse like they did in the playoffs last year. The Yankees will sweep the Twins, as Alex Rodriguez continues to play strong in the postseason after getting the steroid monkey off his back. The National League Divisional Series will go just as smoothly as the American League, as the Cardinals and Phillies move on. The Phils will sweep the Rockies, as their pitching dominates Colorado. The Giants will make a series out of it, but the Cards will eventually finish off San Francisco with multi-homer games from Albert Pujols. The Yankees will beat the Rangers in the ALCS, and the Phillies will conquer the Cards in the NLCS. St. Louis will get swept by Philadelphia, as they reach their saturation point and choke out of the playoffs. The Rangers will keep it close, but New York's pitching will take them out of their first postseason play since 1999. This will ultimately lead to an epic, seven game rematch between the Yanks and Phils in the 2010 Fall Classic. I think the Yankees will take the series again, giving them their first back to back championships since the late 1990's. Once we reach October, I'll look back at my predictions and see how good, or bad, I did.

Time for a work break
March 23nd, 2010 @ 4:48 PM

I have recently finished up the website for BotanicLink LLC. It can be viewed at botaniclink.com. I can't upload this to my portfolio, since it was done through Intuit's CMS servies. So I didnt develop the site as much as design it. A quick word about using Content Management Systems for creating your website: be carefull for traps. The people who work at Tempest Bio got stuck with Intuit, after they had bought a domain through GoDaddy. Intuits prices were lower, but you get what you pay for. Intuit's available resources were limited, and customer support was nearly absent. I made due with what I could, because someone once told me to never lower my standards for any reason. So I worked hard for them and finished the site to their liking. They sell anti-aging facial creams, as well as tea and hangover preventing drinks at fair prices. I would certainly reccomend buying from them. As of right now, my next project has been put on hold, since I need to take time for schoolwork.

If you were to look at my last post, you would see that I had the Colts winning the Super Bowl by 34 points. Instead of shying away from that and forgetting about how incredibly wrong I was, I will just say that I am still shocked that the Saints won, and good for them. And I expect them to lose to my Cowboys next year in Big D. On to a different sport, I recently lifted in the March Madness Maniacs Meet, put on by Paul Fletcher's House of Power in Baton Rouge. I was 5 of 9 in my lifts, missing all of my final lifts. My total was 890, with a 345 squat, 210 bench press, and 335 deadlift. I couldve had a larger total, but instead I went with the "go big or go home" mentality and failed my last lifts. I feel good about where I am strength wise, and now I'm just going to work on gaining weight. And the only thing I'll say about our intermural softball team is that we've been outscored 54-2 after two games. Ouch.

An update with more to come
February 6th, 2010 @ 6:10 PM

Its been a long time since the last update on this site, but as promised, I finished the LSU Powerlifting site. And no, I haven't been working on it since October. It was a fun project, and I especially enjoyed it since it means so much to me personally. I am currently working on a website for Mewa Singh of Tempest Bio. I can't add the website to my portfolio, but I can advertise for them. They are selling topical facial creams through their smaller company, botaniclink. Besides that, I have a few other pieces in mind but they will have to wait. Jobs and schoolwork both will come first, but without doubt, the pieces will get finished sooner or later.

On a smaller note about the super bowl, I am dissapointed with who is playing this year. The Colts are a very good team, and surely deserving of a Super Bowl spot. Although the Saints had the best record in the NFC, I still think there were a few teams better than them. The Vikings smashed my Cowboys, a game which should've been the best of this years playoffs. Those are the two teams that i think are better than the Saints. The Cowboys beat them head to head, and I was confident that they would even weeks before the game was played. I still think that if it came down to it, Dallas could've beaten the Saints again to make it to the Super Bowl. The Vikings are an amazing team, led by who I think is the top top quarterback in the league, Brett Favre. They were extremely off their game against New Orleans, and I think they should've won. But either way, I'll be watching the Super Bowl as a football fan, rooting on the Colts to victory over the Saints. My prediction for the game is that the Saints will have no answer for Peyton Manning, and the Colts smash the 'Aints 41 to 17.

Great time for sports
October 13th, 2009 @ 2:26 PM

It has been a pretty good month for sports, and hopefully the good fortune continues. The Yankees are unbeaten in the playoffs, and are looking for another World Series title after finishing the regular season with the best record. The LSU Fightin Tigers are now 5-1 after suffering a miserable loss to the Gators, but I know we'll bounce back. After the bye week, we'll have to play Auburn and Alabama in the next month. It's not going to be easy, but if we can beat Alabama, we can better our chances for a rematch against Florida in the SEC Championship game. In other sports, the Cowboys have a winning record - for the time being. Who knows where they'll go with their inconsistent quarterback.

I haven't had much time to work on graphics lately, especially with the mix of Tiger Band, Powerlifting, and Mid-terms. But look forward to a new web site design in the near future, possibly for the LSU Powerlifting team. A personal piece dedicated to the Yankees may pop up as well, but it all depends on time.

Snow Leopard in review
September 8th, 2009 @ 2:11 PM

If you have an Apple computer, and were wondering whether or not to upgrade to Snow Leopard, you should do some research before purchasing. I'm not going to advertise or brag for apple (like I usually do), but I did recently purchase the upgrade for $10 and found it useful. There are not many asethetic differences comparable to that of the transition from Tiger to Leopard. Most changes made for Snow Leopard are backend coding differences, that will boost the running speed of your machine. Apple's main gimmics for upgrading are within Exposé, Safari, Microsoft Echange, and the smaller coding refinements. I personally do not use Safari since I like the Web Developer toolbar that Mozilla Firefox offers, and I have no need to use Microsoft Exchange. However, I can offer insight on the changes in Exposé, as well as the smaller refinements such as visual differences and backend changes.

Exposé has some new features that will make life easier if you are in a hurry, or if you are like me and prefer shortcuts for everything. Once in Exposé, you have many options to help you choose which window you want. You can hover over a certain window and press the space bar, which enables Preview, a full screen view of what you are looking at, without actually selecting anything. If you don't like that option, you can always hover over icons in the Dock to select a specific window. Say you have fifteen windows open for some reason, and you just want to reopen Dreamweaver. Instead of looking on the screen at all fifteen windows, you can just open Exposé and click on the Dreamweaver icon in the Dock.

Apple has also redone Finder. It may not look that way, but in Snow Leopard, it has been completely recoded in Cocoa. This makes it more modern and quicker to respond to your tasks, which ultimately results in less RAM being used by your computer. They also changed up Stacks some. You can now scroll in Stacks, as long as it is in grid mode and not list mode. My favorite upgrade to OS X 10.6 is the Stacks because it now acts just like a Finder window. In Leopard, clicking on a folder in Stacks would bring up that folder in Finder. In Snow Leopard, however, clicking a folder in Stacks just opens that folder, so you are still viewing everything within Stacks. The only time you would leave Stacks is if you click on an actual file, or if you close it. The last change that I found was pointless in my opinion, and will probably not be used much. You can use Preview on icons now, which serves no purpose. If you weren't sure in the first place which movie you wanted to watch, you could open it with preview and check it out. Preview at least opens the movie to a watchable size. Now you can watch a movie by clicking the play button on it's icon, which is probably about a 50 pixel by 50 pixel area.

These are obviously not the only changes in Snow Leopard, just the ones that I found reasonable enough to talk about. If you were to ask me if the price of 25 dollars for Snow Leopard was worth it, I would say probably not. But if you quallify for the $10 upgrade for purchasing a Mac between a certain date, I would say go for it. I paid $10 dollars and I certainly got my moneys worth. There is just not enough change here for $25 for my taste.

Summer coming to a close
July 22nd, 2009 @ 1:36 PM

Summer has gone well, even though it's almost over for me. I've just been relaxing and hanging around. Louisiana is just a few days away, beginning with STRIPES Camp, then Computer Science Camp, then Tiger Band Camp. Those three week-long-each camps will lead right up to the start of school. At least I'll be able to move in to my dorm a week early. I'm excited about the start of college, but really not looking forward to my classes. 19 hours a week, and a 7:30 calculus class every single day. Maybe Calculus wont be as hard as I've heard since I sort of enjoy math. The thing I am looking forward to the most is the computer science camp and all the football games I get to go to for FREE! I haven't started packing yet, but that will probably get done the day before I leave. We've gotten all the necessities for living in a college dorm: towells, kleenex, pizza cutter's and a pizza pan. I just recently got a small fridge, and just bought my new Trek mountain bike.

I am typing this post from my birthday present: a 17" Macbook Pro. The best birthday/graduation combo I could imagine. Along with the Macbook, I got a medium Wacom Intuos graphics tablet. It is definetly something that I will use for a long time and that will help me pursue my goals of getting better in the graphic design field. My new laptop has a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an upgraded 8 GB of DDR3 RAM. I would reccomend this to anyone into computer graphics without hesitation.

GEAUX TIGERS!
June 26th, 2009 @ 5:14 PM

Way to geaux LSU! I just got back from Omaha, Nebraska, where the LSU Tigers beat the Texas Longhorns in the College World Series. That was by far the best sporting event I've ever been to. The fans were crazy, and I was on TV quite often.

Since we were in the outfield, we gave Kevin Keyes, the Texas right fielder, a pretty hard time. It was all in fun though, since he signed our giant picture of him jumping on the wall only to miss a ball hit by DJ Lemahieu. It was a pretty awesome trip, since LSU beat the "tiger bait" Longhorns 11-4 in game 3. Definetly worth the 11 hour drive from Dallas. I cant wait for the 20 hour drive next year from Baton Rouge to watch them defend their title. Before that trip, I was in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. We went to Orange Beach and Pensicola Beach, and then took the long drive back home. During the Omaha trip, I traveled through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska. Including Texas, I've been in ten states in two weeks. I enjoyed what I assume to be my last family vacation for a long time to come.

If you didn't notice, or if you haven't been here before, my website has changed from ryanpproductions.com to ryanprimeaux.com. Typing ryanpproductions.com into the address bar will still send you here. I think it's more efficient for the website address to only include my name, mainly for search reasons. It was something that I decided I could afford, kind of like a birthday present for myself, since I'm turing 18 tomorrow.