Just in case there hasn’t been enough talk about the iPad and Flash these past few days, I’ll offer my thoughts, free of charge. Apart from my own personal preferences in technologies, my job remains the same: design beautiful, accessible, usable websites. While I still have to create workarounds for the ever-lingering IE6, most everything else is built around web standards. This insures that the sites I build will look and behave appropriately across different browsers, operating systems, and devices.

A few years ago, I would have opted to build everything in Flash because it averted the cross-browser issues. At that time, Flash was growing rapidly in market penetration, and it displayed content consistently in different browsers. Browser issues solved.

Enter the iPhone. What, no Flash support? Initially, I was quite bummed. However, as time has gone on, and as I’ve come to accept that Apple has no intention of supporting plugin technology on it’s touch devices, whether that’s Flash, Java, or (Microsoft, you should be so honored for me to mention) Silverlight. Jeffrey Zeldman emphasizes this in his contribution to the conversation:

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

I don’t know how successful the iPad will actually be, but it’s worth noting the hype. And the hype is big enough to create this huge stir regarding Flash support. There has never been a huge amount of mobile devices actually supported Flash in the first place, and the iPhone simply magnified that fact. But the iPad is now a Flash-less device that is magnifying the fact that people are browsing the web away from their desk on all sorts of devices. With the rise of these new devices, Flash’s market penetration is actually declining.

Kevin Yank sums it up nicely for web designers and developers in his piece iPad vs Flash: Developers, Choose Wisely:

The trend is clear: users want to access the Web on a greater variety of devices, and the only factor these devices have in common is support for open web standards. As developers, we no longer have the luxury of relying on plugin technologies like Flash, Java, and Silverlight if we wish to maximize the reach of the web experiences that we build…

Noting these trends, all I can stick do is the standards that most modern browsers hold to. Methinks I’ll be working less and less in Flash.

I’m no expert on Twitter, but I’ve had a number of conversations lately with folks who weren’t sure how to use it. Although I know how to use it, I’ve found that it’s not that easy to translate it into layman’s terms. Here’s my first attempt at articulating such things (which I’m expecting will need revisions)…

Basic Guidelines & Terminology

• A “tweet” is a single message on Twitter.
• Each tweet is limited to 140 characters.
• What you see on your Twitter feed (as displayed on your Twitter homepage) is unique to you, showing your tweets and the tweets of the people you follow, in chronological order.
• If you “follow” someone, it does not mean that they are following you, and vice-versa
• Twitter usernames are defined by a prepended @, like @sparrowvisual. This is the proper way to address other Twitter users.
• Twitter is unlike message boards, forums, or Facebook, in that tweets are not linked together to give reference to a conversation.

A Group Conversation Analogy

Imagine being in a room with a group of people all standing in a cirlcle…blindfolded. Everyone in the room has selective hearing, and can only hear the people that they want to listen to. The people you are listening to may or may not be listening to you.

Shotgun Comments

Let’s say your friend Chester announces, “I’m hungry!” A moment later, your other friend Sue (who doesn’t know Chester) says, “my grandmother is in the hospital.” Annoyed at Chester’s constant complaining, you shout out, “quit your whining!”

In this situation, your statement may be wrongly perceived by others listening. Since Sue didn’t hear Chester complain about his hunger, all she heard was you saying “quit your whining” after she said that her grandmother was in the hospital, and now wrongly assumes you were talking to her. It is therefore important to call out a name if you are talking to a specific person. In the case of Twitter, the proper way to talk to someone directly is to enter their username prepended with the @.

Old News

Taking this analogy a little further, let’s say you patched things up with Sue. A few hours later, after a good deal of conversation has passed in the room, you remember back to Sue’s mention of her grandmother. You know that Sue has 2 grandmothers, and you wonder which one is in the hospital. With your new-found etiquette, you appropriately say, “Sue, which one?” Unfortunately, over the last hour, Sue’s comments had shifted from her grandmother to her love life, which spurred this statement made just prior to yours: “I love my husband.”

Sue is again disturbed by your comment, as she assumes you are responding to her latest statement rather than the one you intended. Taking this back to Twitter, if you want to reply to an old tweet, make sure you make that clear in your comment. In this case, the appropriate thing to say would be, “Sue, which of your grandmothers is in the hospital?” And if this was a tweet, and Sue’s username was “sue1234″, the appropriate comment would be: “@sue1234 which of you grandmothers is in the hospital?”

More Harm Than Good?

Hopefully this analogy doesn’t cause more confusion than explaining Twitter in technical terms. Leave a comment with any questions. There’s a lot more to Twitter than this, but hopefully it will help with some basic fundamentals.

Prior to Christmas, I was working hard to complete a redesign for Blair, Church & Flynn, a civil engineering firm here in Clovis. The new site was launched in time to ring in the new year. Not only was the front end redesigned, but the back-end content management system was overhauled to give the Blair, Church & Flynn staff control over the project details and photo galleries, as well as content for staff, news, and other pages.

I enjoy working with clients from different fields. This being the first engineering firm I’ve worked with, I learned a bit about the folks who build things like parking lots, detention basins, and (coolest of all) military battle courses. I’m hoping they’ll give me a discount on the latter when I decide to re-landscape my backyard.

If you haven’t already, dig the new site.

Not For Sale is at it again…growing, expanding, and keeping me busy! This new site promotes their new Academy designed to educate and train modern-day abolitionists. Key features include an event calendar and online application processing.

As I mentioned before, more NFS sites are in the works.

Not For Sale was one of my first clients. Being a fairly new organization, I’ve been impressed with their forward thinking and shear growth over a short period of time; and all for a good cause. EndGlobalSlavery.org is a new site promoting NFS’s Global Advocacy Days event.

There are 2 more new sites I’m currently working on for Not For Sale, so stay tuned!

Today marks the one-year anniversary of doing business as Sparrow Visual. It’s been fun getting back into the freelance design business again, and I’m rather amazed that a year has already passed. I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of great clients who have challenged my little bird brain to creatively harness the web to help them accomplish their unique individual goals. I’ve learned a lot and understand that I still have a lot to learn.

As much as I’d love to reminisce about days gone by, there’s a lot of work still to be done. In short, I’m very thankful for the Lord’s provision and blessing, particularly in light of the fact that I don’t deserve it.

P.S. Sparrow Visual is now on Twitter. Follow @sparrowvisual.

Good point from G.K. Chesterton, from his book Orthodoxy:

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

(via John Piper)

I’ve been having a blast this last month working on a complete redesign for Mariano Friginal, a premier photographer in the California (and probably the rest of the universe, too). Mariano is a fantastic designer, as well, so he designed the page layouts in Photoshop and handed the files over to me to translate them into gibberish that only nerds and computers can understand.

The new site contains dynamic galleries to showcase Mariano’s stellar photography and videography, separate RSS feeds for blog posts and events, as well as some little gems like custom contact forms and dynamically-generated signup forms for events. The site was developed for scalability and longevity, in hopes of keeping the content alive for future face lifts rather than complete overhauls.

Mariano has photographed many friends of mine, so it was heartwarming to see images of them smiling while I was working on the site. Above is one such example.

Check out the new site (and be prepared to spend a lot of time there).

For the past few many months I’ve been working alongside James, Nick, and Mariano to revamp riverpark.org, the website of Riverpark Bible Church (my home church), and it finally launched today.

In the fall of last year, Pastor Joey rounded us up and we brainstormed about how we could improve the site, which had been launched about 3 years prior. What started as “well, we could change some colors” turned into a complete revamp to improve accessibility, usability, and overall aesthetics. In my opinion, Mariano’s photography is definitely the icing on the cake. I think it really helps communicate the message in a more concise way than a bunch of text ever could.

I’m excited to see how well the new design performs in real life. My hope is that it reinforces the fact that Riverpark is on the cutting edge of traditionalism.

Dig the new site.

Today a new identity was finalized for Ashley Gain Weddings & Events, a new boutique event management company in Arizona.

Ashley was wonderful to work with and had some great initial ideas that we were able to talk through to refine the direction of her new identity.