This is pretty exciting for me, and I think that after all of the hard work we put into that site the entire team at Odopod deserves a hearty congratulations… I’m really glad to see this site receiving the recognition that it deserves.

Also – it’s nice to see the CMS getting some of the attention – although I’m biased – because I wrote this one.

Yes, it’s true. I’ve resigned from position as Senior Developer for odopod. I really enjoyed my time there and I learned a great deal from both the partners as well as my colleagues – and I wish them all the best.

I just found myself increasingly drawn to my freelance work, as well as my various personal projects – most of which sit unfinished (including this website). I’m excited to have a chance to revive some old stuff, and introduce you to some of things Kiala and I have been busy dreaming up these past few months.

I’m very lucky to know a fantastic group of wonderfully successful people who have been able to provide me with steady work so far, but I’d always love to hear about new projects – you can reach me @ dane@doesnotvalidate.com.

I’ll be updating this site with my most recent launches – like this project that I worked on with the guys over at Instrum3nt for DC shoes, and the new Odopod site.

I’ve got some really exciting stuff happening in the next few weeks, and I’m very optimistic about the future. Thanks to everyone who helped get me here.

It seems simple, but one of the most troublesome tasks is to get a Flash fly-down (or drop-down) menu to reliably collapse when it sits over non-Flash content. Some browsers (IE) have trouble recognizing the change of control from the Flash Player application instance to the browser. For that reason Flash won’t always read when the mouse has moved outside the bounds of the Flash Player… worse still – it just receives no notification at all, which means that if you’re relying on Flash to read when the mouse has moved outside the bounds of the navigation – you’re out of luck.

Over the years I’ve come up with many tricks to help deal with this – some more effective than others. Today I found the best solution to date. It’s not 100% effective, but it’s much better than any of the other options that I used.

I decided to try using the jQuery hover method to detect when the mouse leaves the Flash’s containing DIV element in the DOM.

The AJAX code looked something like this:

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$('document').ready(function()
{
    $('#flashNavReplace').hover(
        function()
        {
	    //rollover functionality here
        },
        function()
        {
            getFlashMovie("flashNavReplace").jsCloseNavigation();
        });
});
 
function getFlashMovie(movieName) 
{
    var isIE = navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1;
    return (isIE) ? window[movieName] : document[movieName];
}

and then the Flash side uses some code like this:

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import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
 
/**************************************************************************
* 
* CONSTRUCTOR
* 
**************************************************************************/
public function TopNavigation()
{
    //setup the JS callback
    ExternalInterface.addCallback("jsCloseNavigation", jsClose);
}
 
function jsClose():void
{
    Logger.log("CALLED FROM JS");
    //close the nav
}

This works for me pretty much all of the time… I can break it if I really try, but it works great for normal usage.

Congratulations to the entire NVIDIA team here @ odopod on the success of the Speak Visual site on being featured in F:E:D, StyleBoost, and being chosen as the FWA Site of the Day.

Adobe was at the odopod offices yesterday to interview Tim, Jacquie and Andy and to take some footage of the team here using their products.

I’ve accepted an offer to work as a Senior Develop @ odopod in San Francisco starting next month. Which means that we’ve got a little under 4 weeks to move from Portland to San Francisco with no planning or forethought whatsoever.

dammit.

I’ve really loved my time at Nemo – but this is such a tremendous opportunity that there was no way I could let it slip away. I’ve been a huge fan of odopod’s work for a long time, and I’m honored to be asked to join their team, and I’m very excited to go.

I also think that there will be more writing opportunities for Kiala in San Francisco, so I think this will be a good move for both of us.

I think we’re both going to truly miss Portland… and while we’re excited for the change – there is a lot that we’ll miss here – but I’m sure that we will return someday.