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I’ve mentioned this application in my Twitter before now I want to explain what it is in more details

My gallery is a Flash application that displays images in a very unique way. It’s not a traditional image gallery. Instead of thumbs it’s got an overview mode where images scale down and load smaller size thumbs. It’s got a scrollbar at the bottom that scrolls images in overview and full modes. You can hover your mouse at the edges of any image and edge of the next or previous image will show allowing to click on it.

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I have update my blog with my own custom theme. The idea was to create a simple and clean unique WordPress theme. I was surprised how insanely easy it is to work with WP. It’s got a very flexible back-end. I’ve came from Flash and ActionScript background, but I learned a lot about HTML, CSS, WP and PHP as I developed this theme. It’s very easy. I’ve been using a lot of free WP themes since the beginning of my blog and I thank all the authors of those themes. They were all great. But to make website unique designing and developing your own custom theme is the way to go.

Most people use WP for blogging and it is a blogging platform after all. But the things you can do with WP go beyond that. Anyone can use WP as a very robust, lightweight CMS. For an average website it will work very well as CMS based on my experience. However there are challenges where more complex CMS, like Joomla or Drupal, maybe a better choice.

I’m still testing my current theme and fix bugs as I go along, but It’s pretty readable and usable as it is right now. Like it or hate it leave the comment below.

For the next day or so this blog will be update with my custom theme. So if you’ll notice any weird activity just so you know it’s me working on my custom theme.

I expect to finish by tomorrow, but it might take a little more than that. Just bear with me.

I’ve just updated my website. It’s not just a minor face lift. It has a completely new back-end, performance has been greatly improved and file size was reduced almost 1.5x (see my previous post).

For my website I’ve used Eaze tween library by Philippe Elsass, Motor2 physics engine by Michael Baczynski, Vector graphics by wu-media.com and icons by freshpixel.fr and pictoico.com.

I’ve chosen Motor2 because it is using Vectors instead of Arrays so it’s much faster than Box2DFlash. Also syntax is much simpler. I’m also using Michael Baczynski’s MemoryManager class located in standalone version of the data structures library for AS3 to further increased performance. Eaze is a new tween library and I prefer it over other tween libraries for a few reasons: syntax, lightweight, performance and it’s free. VectorText class helps quickly write simple text in the application. I also want to thank Freshpixel and Pictoico for a great set of custom free icons.

My Flash application has also a completely revamped backbone. I’m using Zend AMF for remoting, so much of you see on screen is driven by MySQL database and PHP.

Fruther updates are to be expected in the near futher. Meanwhile, I’ll be working on few other personal projects as well.

Two news in one post. First off my website has been opened yesterday. I’ve still got few things to polish here and there and I’m still beta testing it, but overall it’s bug free. If you do find any bugs please let me know by posting a comment.

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