Speaking of Clover.

Mail Chimp

Mail Chimp version 4 is coming out this weekend…  and I realized I should mention how awesome this service is, in case you haven’t heard of it.

MailChimp.com let’s you send emails out to big ol’ lists of people kind of like Constant Contact or one of their other competitors.  The funny thing is, they’re nothing like their competitors.

I’d like to go out on a limb and say that Mail Chimp is the Clover of the email world. They’re over-the-top casual, easy to use, and they still manage to pack in a ton of features.  I was about to list some of their key features, but I realized it would make this post a lot longer.  So instead, I’ll just tell you to check them out for yourself:

www.mailchimp.com

If you have any need to send emails to your congregation or any other group of people, they might just be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Bezier Curves (and other code)

I have a confession to make. In all the years that I’ve been learning from other people on the internet, I don’t think I’ve once given anything back. Ok, I do answer a lot of programming questions from strangers over email, but as far as contributing code to the online community, I’ve been pretty silent.

I think maybe it’s because I’ve never wanted to publicly admit that I’m a nerd. Or maybe it’s that I’ve never felt like I had time to talk about programming when I had so much of it to do.

Either way, it’s about to change. Nerd glory, here I come.

(Disclaimer: If you’re not an ActionScript3 programmer, you probably won’t care to read past this sentence).

Last night at about 11pm I decided to tackle a problem that had been bugging me for years: How did the amazing programmer Robert Hodgin create the beautiful glowing curves on version 7 of flight404.com? (Yeah, I know it’s been keeping you up at night, too).

I started working on it and then got a little side-tracked… but I did manage to create some nice code that I couldn’t find anywhere else on the internet. So in rare form, I decided to share it.

It’s a class for AS3 that draws bezier curves. Or more precisely, curves with any number of control points. It’s based on the simplified curved lines from Grant Skinner, but I changed it so it doesn’t start and end with a straight line segment, and more importantly, I made it a really simple class for anyone to use.

The example code does a lot of stuff… and hopefully it’s valuable for any budding coders who are starting to ask the complicated questions that come up after that first Hello World plateau.

Here are some things you might get from it:

- Bezier Curves
- How to structure classes and objects
- A bit of TweenLite animation
- Full-browser flash (with minimum height and width)
- Drawing a background gradient that fills the screen
- Handling browser resizes
- Creating and using a custom event class
- Keyboard events
- Simple physics with gravity/magnetism/friction

View the example
Download the full example source code (AS3)
Download just the Curves Class

Adobe Kuler

Sometimes it’s easy to get in a designing funk. For some, a simple brilliant color palette can kick-start a design block. Here’s a great resource for a little inspiration: check out Adobe’s resource, Kuler.

This can especially be a great resource if you’re looking for some inspiration on you Clover site’s color palette. Spend some time and mess around on the site… It’s a bunch of fun.