Web Animation for iPhones

Posted by on August 25th, 2015  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

I have taught Flash since last century. I’ve been gradually phasing out Flash in favor of it’s replacement: javascript.

Here is a new banner I taught to my animation class this quarter:

http://www.websterart.com/html/due-next-class-day/banner-vert.html

The animation is a loose copy of this one on the Greensock website.

He has built his own javascript library. It runs parallel to the open source jquery movement, and even mixes with it, if needed. Making things move can be a fun way to earn money.

Painting dad’s shoes

Posted by on August 14th, 2015  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

Over two months have passed since my last entry. I’ve been doing my usual blend of climbing, painting and teaching. We lost another of the family elders a few weeks ago at age 90. A week later, his grandaughter had a baby. My brother coined a nice phrase: “The grand circle of life goes on.”

Dad's Shoes

Dad’s Shoes

I have a Facebook business page now:

https://www.facebook.com/websterart2

And I started an instagram account:

https://instagram.com/markhwebster/

My most recent art can always be found at the root of my website:

http://websterart.com/ 

I wonder at times why I bother with this blog. One lasting reason is because it is so easy to forget huge chunks of time. Reading back over this blog reminds me of what I did. I can go back to 1997 via this online journal, and as far back as 1971 via my paper sketchbooks. My sketchbooks are places where I draw, and write down my thoughts. They can be fun to look at, like an old family album.

Yesterday I picked up some art supplies in Seattle, as well as some epoxy resin to make a foot mold for the shoemaker who is going to build me a pair of custom rockclimbing shoes.

Making the foot molds works very well, though expect to blow at least $150 on two feet. Especially if you make  a mistake, as I did. I didn’t mix enough Alja-safe and was only able to cover part of my foot. One thing that did work well was I bought some clay along with the Aljasafe and sculpted a “dry dock” one inch larger than my foot into which I could mix the Aljasafe.

I’ve been custom modifying my rock shoes for the last 10 years to fit my wide feet. But my last pair blew out in two months. I destroy the engineering of the shoe when I cut them down, and the quality of materials in commercial shoes varies widely. My usual problem is blowing through the sides of the shoe above the rand.

I’m hoping this custom pair will last at least a year. At work we’ve been building an animated banner. I used to do those in Flash, but needed to teach animation that works on smartphones. Make stuff move has alway been fun, and doing it using cutting edge programing code is especially nice.

Here is some of the code we’ve been developing:

.from(“#webster”, 0.9, {opacity:0, y:50, ease:Elastic.easeOut, delay:0.5})
.to(“#wrapper”, 1.5, {opacity:0, scale:0.5, ease:Back.easeIn, delay: 0.5})
.to(“#banner”, 0.1, {backgroundColor:”#dadada”, delay: 0.3})
.from(“#diagonal”, 0.5, {x:-600, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.3})
.from(“#callUs”, 0.5, {x:-350, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.5})
.from(“#phoneNumber”, 0.5, {x:-300, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.1})
.from(“#showTime”, 1, {x:-900, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:1})
.from(“#sentenceOne”, 1, {x:-900, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.2})
.from(“#sentenceTwo”, 1, {x:-900, ease:Cubic.easeOut}, “-=0.5”)
.to(“#banner”, 1, {backgroundColor:”#666″, delay: 1})

Programming in Javascript is a lot harder than Flash. You don’t get the friendly timeline on which to visualize your movement. With scripted movement you have to do a lot more guessing. I suspect there will soon be something that does it all for you, so the designers can have fun too, and not write any code. I’ve heard that Adobe Edge does some of that, but I’ve never tried it. I’m soured on Adobe in general after they stiffed me for $120 when I canceled my account.