Dear Future Self: Before you go doing another independent project, please read me first.
(Note: This little ‘letter to my future self’ is just a way of reminding myself of a few points I encountered after working on a little experimental project using Adobe Flash. I don’t know if it’s worth squat, but feel free to read on. Not much tech crunchiness inside, I’m afraid.)
Dear Future Self,
By this time, it has been a week or so after wrapping up your first paid independent project. I know you’re apt to forget little things here and there when your mind’s eye is busy looking at new things to work on whatever you’re doing now, but it wouldn’t hurt to read this little bit. Maybe keep a sticky note of this url somewhere on that white flat wall behind the monitor so you’ll see it a lot. I’m pretty sure you’ll say, “Oh yeah, right. Funny that slipped right through my head…“
While there many things to talk about, try considering these points first:
Remember the lesson of magic number 16,000. Adobe Flash (or at least the version you were using back then) has a 16,000 frame limit. The tech might have been upgraded by Adobe or whoever has the flash license in that future of yours, but it wouldn’t hurt to check if your flash software still has that limit. This helpful note is for CS4, but it’s worth saving…
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/144/tn_14437.html
Remember that wonderful time you had when suddenly your animation stopped without any error outputs? That sucked. Hard. Sure you had thought of a workaround back then, but what if your little magic fix isn’t feasible this time around?
Better know the limits of your stuff so you can compensate early on. And you can tell the client why, so you two can agree on something.
And if that Html 5 thing ever catches up and is actually better, you’d be better off knowing what its capable of , trust me.
Keep a work journal (No, not the design document, but that’s pretty important too). No, that half-assed attempt of scribbles on the thick spiral notebook ain’t cutting it. If you have an insight on what you’re doing, a lingering problem, a potential bug, or if you had dawned on a cure for cancer (okay, maybe not that one) list it down clearly. Keep a .txt file on your work folder or something. Add a date each entry, so you can review your progress. So when you’re double checking your work you can make sure you have addressed everything you’ve written down.
Log in your production time every night before jumping to bed. I know you’re super tired and everything, but it’s just a little thing. Just write down time spent so you can check on yourself if you’re doing good progress later when you’re more sober (so to speak). You don’t want that super long time calculating session at the end of the project.
The “just a little bit” is never a little bit in the end. I know you still want to work on that little science fantasy epic you’ve been cooking in your brain since forever, but it has to wait. You are your own boss now, so the temptation of slacking off is there (well frankly, it’s always there, it was just really shy when your old boss was around) . The internet’s cool for research and all, but don’t ever ever try to search on stuff you don’t need for work. You know how it feels after going through several tons of unrelated hyperlinks… and you just flushed valuable production time down the drain. Save the extracurricular activities when you’re munching on your breaktime sandwich. Or save the longer activities for “HappyHappyFunFunSaturday“.
Hmm… so much stuff to write about, but they’re not formulating quite right inside my head. Maybe some sleep will give more helpful insights, but that will be for another letter in another time.
Best Regards,
The June 4 2011 build of Jelsan.
Quick Tweak My Desktop
While dealing with a severe case of the sniffles one rainy afternoon, I tried to change the way my desktop looks, with as minimal tweaking as possible. Something akin to physically shoving off all the tchotchkes off your desk and then rearranging some of them again. Maybe get a better penholder or so, but nothing new and fancy…ok, let’s go to the details before my trail of thought drifts off somewhere.
To me there’s something alluring about that little dock thingy you see on those Mac interfaces. Well, that might come from being spoon-fed Microsoft products since elementary school, and getting sick of desktop icon clutter. I decided to try ditching the standard windows icons on the desktop and lay it out on a quick-access strip way down on the bottom of the screen instead. So I took my time to download a neat little app, Rocketdock, which some of you might probably be familiar with. Installing it was a snap, and since it doesn’t change anything underneath the hood, it’s cool.
Next step was to add docklets to the dock, to add extra features. The app came with a watch docklet, but I installed a new digital clock instead. And to keep the amount of icons visible to a minimum, I also added the Stacks Docklet, which displays the contents of folders in an elegant fanning list. Then, I sorted shortcuts of applications I need and put it in folders, to be added to the dock as separate icons.
To completely achieve the clean empty look for the desktop, the desktop icons and the taskbar simply had to go away.
The work on the icons was simple enough. Right click on the desktop, and simply deselect the Show Icons on Desktop option under the Arrange Icons by subheading. That way, should I wish to revert to my old desktop, all of my stuff would still be available. But of course, if you have tons of files stacked on your desktop, it might be better to transfer all non-shortcuts somewhere else first.
That leaves us with the pesky taskbar. Rather than use any external tools to force the taskbar to disappear (and since I still need to access it every now and then), I fudged a little by simply dragging it to the left-hand side of the screen, and setting it to auto-hide (right click on the taskbar and tick the box that says auto-hide the taskbar under the Taskbar Appearance box). Sure, you people might argue that are more elegant ways to do this, but this is a simple solution that works for me, so there.
I could have stopped there, but I decided to add extra minimalist displays to keep important information visible while I’m on the desktop. The solution was the handy Rainmeter, a free desktop enhancement for windows. One of the preset themes, Enigma, is simple and elegant enough for my tastes that minimal tweaking was required to get the look I liked. I decided I needed an editable notes section to remind of those small things I’m apt to forget, as well as the old standbys date and time (the fancy arcs design on the left side of the screen is a clock) and a few quick glances on my computer’s system performance and network connection. The black bar where the old windows taskbar used to be is also from Rainmeter, I simply stripped it clean of meters and kept it to visually frame the Rocketdock dock.
There. Finished. This simple tweak has a few nagging problems, like the lack of a Show Desktop command (which is still available on the hidden windows taskbar, or if memory serves me right, there is an available docklet for that purpose) quick access for power commands (again, taskbar or downloadable docklets) , and your system tray icons being invisible thanks to the auto-hiding taskbar, among other things. But for now, this setup looks clean and appealing, and suits me just fine.
Footnote:
It’s inevitable that people will ask where the wallpaper came from, so to keep it short, it’s made by an artist named soma (sohma) and I lifted it from a Danbooru imageboard. That specific imageboard contains NSFW images, so I’ll skip on posting links here.
This is the Electronic Dogbone blog
Hello, I’m Jelsan, and this is the Electronic Dogbone blog.
This blog holds various notes made while I am making freelance projects of different kinds. Topics vary, and your mileage may vary on whether the said notes may prove useful to you.
That said, feel free to browse. You may never know, you may stumble into something you may not have never heard about.
