Like always, it’s been a busy week here at ripe. We’ve spent the past seven days trying desperately to climb out from under the deluge of intern applications we’ve been receiving since our previous post. Some have been great, some have been not so great, and some have not taken the time to follow the directions. To all prospective interns out there – when someone puts specific directions on their job listing, you should really consider following them! Although it does make the sorting process quite a bit easier. We just immediately put people who don’t follow directions in the reject folder.
We also launched a new website this week – Taylor Gourmet’s website to be exact. We wrote a whole blog post about it a couple days ago, but we didn’t discuss anything too technical. So why not discuss that now! Note: If you don’t care about technical Flash issues, feel free to skip the next paragraph.
One of our favorite parts of the site is actually one least visible elements – deep linking. This practice has been around for awhile now and it’s amazing how many Flash developers still fail to use it when they’re creating a full Flash site. What’s deep linking you ask? Well, when a site is done completely with Flash there’s never a page change, meaning the URL (that’s the thing in your address bar that currently says http://www.ripe.com/blog/…) never changes. Why is this an issue? What if you wanted to share a specific page with a friend? On a traditional website you could simply copy and paste that URL into an email and send it off and your friend could then easily look at the same page. Flash, however, does not change the URL as all of the changes take place within the Flash movie, and you never change actual pages. SWFAddress is a handy little deep linking tool that provides a solution to this issue. It makes the Flash movie interact with the URL in the address bar. So, for example, if you want to send a Menu page link on Taylor Gourmet to your pal, you can send him this URL: http://www.taylorgourmet.com/#/Menu and he’ll go straight there as opposed to the landing page. Pretty handy! For those interested, here’s a great tutorial on how to integrate it into your Flash movie. The SWFAddress site, sadly, does not have much documentation.
In other news, Tomas and Ian both recently bought new iPhone 4’s in spite of the whole “antennagate” fiasco. In all honesty, neither of us have had any issues as of yet, but we have had fun attempting to use the front-facing cameras to comprehend infinity.
