Mike Industries

Congratulations Boston on your well-deserved World Series victory tonight. It’s been 86 years and you deserve every ounce of credit for the most amazing comeback in baseball history.

Coming into the Series, one would have thought Boston’s toughest task would be getting by the Cardinals. Instead, it turned out to be getting through the 7th inning of tonight’s game when someone inexplicably let the lead singer of Creed on the field to sing God Bless America.

Such a shame to have to share the spotlight with Scott Stapp.

I smell another curse…

I grew up on baseball. From watching games, to collecting cards, to little league, to high school ball, and then back to just watching games, baseball has been a common fixture in my life since I was six years old. In 1986, when I was 12, I had my first major formative baseball moment in the form of the 1986 World Series.

Living in Los Angeles at the time, I had just endured a brutal American League Championship Series with Boston’s Dave Henderson homering off Donnie Moore to eliminate our beloved California Angels and advance the Red Sox to the World Series. The homer was such a powerful event that it not only crushed the Angels but it also led to the eventually suicide of the pitcher who threw the pitch.

Furious at the Red Sox for beating the Angels, I adopted their World Series opponent, the New York Mets, as my favorite team of the moment. I watched the entire Series thinking Boston was going to win. They played a great Series and had the Mets down to their final out in the 10th inning of Game 6.

And then I was introduced to the Curse.
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I’m 30,000 feet above Seattle right now heading to Vegas with Keith, Jason, and The Wolf and all I can think about is what’s launching tomorrow. By the time you read this, we will have launched a brand new ABCNews.com. Several months in the making and several years since the last major redesign, the new ABCNews is the latest major media site in the Disney family to jump on board the real-world web standards gravy train.

A collaborative effort between the ABCNews team in New York City, the Disney Internet Group in Seattle, and a few outside consultancies, the new ABCNews.com is a refreshing reminder that dramatic change is possible in organizations of any size. I feel lucky to have worked on this project and wanted to share as much as possible about what went on behind the scenes to bring you what we now believe to be one of the best news sites on the web.
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UPDATE: Version 2.0 is now available. See article here.

Alright, we have a solid release candidate! This evening, I present sIFR 2.0 Release Candidate 1, and unless any major problems are found, this will end up being the exact code in the final release. I want to thank everyone who has put sIFR through its paces and helped Mark and me squash bugs and add feature enhancements. It wasn’t until I released sIFR that I fully realized the power of open source. What may have taken months to develop otherwise, instead took only weeks… and only evenings at that. I know I still have to create the official sIFR primer and idiotproof instructions, so I’ll be doing that over the next week or so and monitoring this comment thread for any issues which may arise. The download is here and the updated example is here.

And since David Guillory asked, it is indeed pronounced “siffer”. Spread the word to the homies.

What’s new in this release

Here are some details about sIFR 2.0 RC1:

• This release was mostly for fine-tuning. The concentration was on stability and reliability.
• Proper uppercasing is now supported and it won’t mistakenly uppercase your URLs in the process. Please note that “upper” or “lower” are now passed in as the last parameter of the function to induce uppercasing or lowercasing. This is the only change which may affect existing implementations.
• Various DOM and speed improvements.
• More consistent font sizing.
• Support for common usually-escaped characters like “, ‘, &, and %.
• Automatic whitespace-stripping, following the same conventions as HTML.
• Complete IE 5 Mac compatibility.

Quick Instructions

The usage instructions are identical to the previous betas with the exception of the upper/lowercasing change mentioned above. Here is what to do:

1. Download 2.0 Release Candidate. sIFR is licensed free of charge under the standard CC-GNU LGPL.
2. Get familiar with index.html. That’s really the only file which contains the things you’ll need to adapt. It contains the replace statements at the bottom and the CSS at the top.
3. To make your own .swf files, simply open up the .fla file in Flash, doubleclick the textbox which is on stage (it takes up the whole stage), and choose your own font from the Properties palette. Then, choose File > Export and you’re done!
4. The parameters to use in your replacement functions are explained in the html file. Plug in your parameters and you’re good to go!

Additional Notes

You won’t have to replace any of your existing replace statements (from beta 2) unless they are affected by the upper/lowercasing change mentioned above. You need only replace your .js file and your .swf files. You may notice a slight font sizing difference between the last beta and this release. This release’s sizing is more correct and consistent so please roll with the new.

There are only two significant issues I know of which remain unsolved:

1. Possible weirdness in certain versions of Opera.
2. Certain typefaces, especially script fonts, may contain characters with non-conventional metrics which can cause clipping of letters in some cases. An example is a handwriting font (like Cezanne, for instance) where the crossbar on the “t” extends far beyond the width of the T. Sort of like if you were signing your name and you dragged the tail end of the last letter back over the word. The problem with this sort of font is that Flash is unaware of the stray strokes. The only solution to this, moving forward, is for users to manual adjust the left and right margins in the Formatting palette in Flash if necessary. I don’t consider this necessarily “solving” the issue, but if you find yourself in this predicament with an ornate script font, give it a try.

The #1 movie site on the internet just got a facelift yesterday. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Chad Roberts and the Movies.com team upstairs along with some Flash and video work from our own group, Movies.com now has themselves a CSS-driven, standards-based site which is quicker to load, easier to use, and ten times more flexible than its predecessor.

The Movies.com relaunch is the first of several major relaunches you’ll see out of Disney in very near future. While not the biggest site in Disney’s portfolio, Movies.com represents other example of a category leader moving towards web standards in a very meaningful way. Where ESPN.com led the way a year and a half ago, other Disney sites are now following suit as part of their normal redesign cycles.
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