Recent Entries

One thing Digital Octane has been very fortunate with is client referrals. Our best sales team are our current and past clients. This positive side effect of good customer service has really impacted how much time we taken to effectively market ourselves. Outside of a dismal business card printing, as a company we, haven't taken much time to invest in a solid website or even an effective "coming soon"

While we start putting the pieces in place for a new digitaloctane.com; it's a small start and a much needed shove in the right direction. Let us know what you think.

First off, if you work on the web you should familiarize yourself with HTTP Headers.

HTTP Headers form the core of an HTTP request, and are very important in an HTTP response. They define various characteristics of the data that is requested or the data that has been provided. The headers are separated from the request or response body by a blank line. HTTP headers can be near-arbitrary strings, but only some are commonly understood. - wiki

Wow, What did that just say?

There are two add-ons to firefox which will significantly help you troubleshoot problems with your site especially if your making alot of calls for assets. You should have at least 1 of them, take your pick: Firebug or liveHTTPHeaders. Both will monitor HTTP Headers for you. I am sure there others, however these are the ones i have used and have had success with.

Now lets talk about how this can help you.

When you deal with Flash in the manner that i do. Your loading a base swf and XML. loading content in various swfs who's content is loading XML, who's XML has paths to images and assets. That can be a lot of data to look at, and when something doesn't show up... Then what?

Personally, i turn to Firebug first. turn on headers and refresh the site. I then watch the headers, which is tracing every call I am making. With firebug you will quickly see red 404 show up with the file path that was called. This can very easily save you a TON of time digging through code... looking for some error only to discover you made a typo in the file name you called.

This very simple add on and change to your troubleshooting process can save you time and your sanity.

Firebug does not stop there, Firebug offers some Robust features for Inspecting elements which i will talk about at a later time. You should Install Now, And start using these great features.

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Well now that Mack and I have launched the blog we have been actively looking for contributors. We have some very talented people that have agreed to start writing for vectorlab.net.  Stay tuned as we finalize our list of contributors once everything is said and done, we'll be posting a more about our new contributors soon.

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Ok, I may be over exaggerating a bit by saying version control saving your life. But it can certainly save you large amounts of frustration. Picture if you will, you're working on a tight deadline; you have just about finished with your project and it's the 11th hour. You've done a bunch of work but you only  have 1 copy on our laptop. Your laptop overheats and will not turn on! Now that the stage is set, you may be asking "What the Fruit is version control and how can it help me with this problem?" Basically version control is a way for you and your design/development team to work on the same project and even the same files with out having to manually make copies as you make changes. As you make edits to any file within the repo older "copies" (I use copies loosely in this description because it's a bit more complicated than that behind the scenes) will be saved. File version control is really the tip of the iceberg regarding projects like Subversion which have project "branching", file merging and more robust features. Check this out Wikipedia for more info on Version Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control.

You may notice that some open source projects such as Tweener, swfobject and PaperVision 3D are all on code.google. Each project has a repo accessible through a UI such as tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac). This makes it a lot easier to make sure your files are up to date with out having to download zips and manage the files yourself.

So which one should I use?

At Digital Octane we utilize both a Subversion Repository along with a Dropbox account(s). This isn't a comparison between any syncing / version control apps. Each have their own benefits and it really depends on how you plan on utilizing your files when choosing one.

Dropbox

If you are a small boutique shop like we are, Dropbox is extremely useful for syncing/sharing files between our team, clients and freelancers. It's a very simple client side installation for any user sign up is a snap. Once the install is complete the user will have a series of Dropbox folders added to their Documents folder.docs-dropbox

Making file sharing a breeze for non tech savvy clients. For those of you that are used to another method for version control you may feel a bit hindered by the lack of file/folder controls. If this is your first jump into remote file syncing or version control for your files. You wont really know what you are missing. Just knowing that if you accidentally lost a file or need to access your file from the web you can.

Subversion: The 30 second breakdown

Subversion's overall controls are more robust compared to the abilities of Dropbox, but there comes a bit of  administration with Subversion and a little bit of know how (Which I will not get into here) to get things up and running. If you choose to go the Subversion route. You will be greatly rewarded for your hard work.

Here are a list of features within subversion

Some things to keep in mind about subversion

  1. You will need to install subversion on a dedicated server/machine that you can access locally and/or remotely.
  2. It's in your best interest to install client side controls such has tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac) to make it easier on your users.
  3. Read up on project trunks and branching. If you have a good process for branching your code base. It can make deploying code to dev, staging and production servers much easier.
  4. Subversion has pretty good integration with task management systems such as Jira (using a plugin) I am sure others are out there as well.
  5. The Subversion project is quite large and community is very active.

So what did we cover?

In this article I talked about Subversion and Dropbox but there are a ton of other projects out there and Adobe has actually started shipping their own version control within their Creative Suite. Regardless of which product you choose. It's a good idea to start implementing version control today if you haven't already.

Oh and if you are interested in using Dropbox how about using this link (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTUxNDA4ODk) so we get a referal bonus?

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Well after a boat load of delays, we finally launched our blog today. Even with the rock times with the economy this is a very exciting time for Digital Octane. We are becoming more active within the community not only vocally through this blog but also through example.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting some of the techniques Mack and I utilized to create this blog along with our own Website (which is still in development).

These are not only programming and design techniques but also production and process tips that have really helped us through out our careers.

I'd really like to take a moment to thank every one who has given us constructive feed back! It is much appreciated.

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Last year Digital Octane landed a contract with up and coming Professional NHRA drag racer Bob Tasca III, Bob holds the world record for fastest pass in an Alcohol Funny Car. Last year he made the next step in his career getting his Nitro Funny Car license. Bob had a strong showing in 2008, and with a new alliance with Wilkerson Racing... 2009 looks to be a great year for Bob Tasca III. http://www.tascaracing.com was built by Digital Octane to give his race fans something that they had never seen before from a professional Drag Racer. Up to date News, Images, and Videos from previous races. We built his site in ActionScript 3.0 and have integrated content from various companies including Ford / Quicklane and Motorcraft. We track his statistics with Google Analytics and Flash's External Interface. Where we can track every click within flash even though it doesn't truly open a "new page". With the work Digital Octane has put in, and Bob's growing popularity we hold a strong 18.18% conversion ratio on visitors to leads.

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So after a boat load of fixes and updates to our vectorLab template. We're finally ready to launch.  Only thing that is left to do is to slap a beta badge on this beast so we can keep making updates for  years with out having to actually "release" anything. I'm looking at you google!

The idea for this blog came about when Mack and I went to Flash Foward San Fran back in 2008 with some other colleages. The over all experience was great; We were able to catch up with an old friend we hadn''t seen in a while and make some new friends within our Industry.

While I originally felt let down by the experience. I took some time before writing this post to reflect on this summers conference and to give Mack and I some time to get our act together. 2008''s conference was presented by Metaliq and there were some major differences between Flash Foward San Fran and other conferences like FF Boston. The location did afford some great speakers from the west coast and a very memorable performance from Zoe Keating. One of the major differences was the way the event was organized. Instead of pseudo workshops around an hour+ long with a great deal of overlap, the event was changed to shorter monologues about inspiration and what drives each speaker to do what they do. I feel this is a topic you discuss after the conference finished for the day and you head to the bar. There wasn''t enough time for some speakers to get into the nitty gritty let alone opening up Flash or writing a line of code.

Instead the conference was riddled with Infomercials in the guise of "lessons", a few professional speakers that do not really care or have any involvement in our industry and a pretty big hole in the pocket of a small boutique design firm from the East Coast. I don''t want to portray the event as all doom and gloom. I give Metaliq and Beau a lot of credit for putting the event together and some of the speakers were truly inspiring including Grant Skinner, David Carson, Keith Peters, Erik Natzke and Stacey Mulcahy (who gave one of the best presentations of the entire event) to name a few. I think this was a great first step for Metaliq to help make Flash Foward even better in the years to come. I really put a majority of the disappointment I felt after the conference on myself for not really being an active part of the community.

Now that I think about it, in a way Flash Forward San Fran was a success. It was inspirational for me after all; it inspired me to create this blog and to put up or shut up.\r\n\r\nHopefully in 09 you will see Mack and I posting a lot more about the techniques that we utilize within some of our projects as well as some of the tricks of the trade we have created/developed or outright stolen to get the job done. So fly with me! FLY!

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