I’m so sorry. I would normally hope that my blog postings live up to some editorial standards. Today I prove otherwise with a bit of toilet humor.

I was doing a search and ended up at blogs.sqlxml.org. The logo for the site is a stick figure as the base of a nice green tree. Unfortuantely, it took me a few moments to see that interpretation. When I arrived at the page, my first thought was “Why is their logo a man being killed by a cloud of fart?” The really iconic figure does look like it should be on a warning sign.

Maybe he is running away from the cloud in terror. Maybe he is being eaten by space amoebas. Perhaps this is the alien that bleached Michael Jackson. You decide.

Note to self: get a second opinion before launching new designs.

Edit: I was wrong. The design does not belong to SQLXML. It belongs to CommunityServer2007. The SQLXML blog just runs on it. Community Server is an actual product. *shakes head*

The new Yahoo! Maps tile engine Galileo is beautiful. Beauty in this case is very readable text labels, color coded neighborhoods, county line markings, icons for things like hospitals, and on regional views, a shaded topographic mapping.

The thing that impresses me most about this release is that you get a lot more information without feeling like you are in information overload. All of the new features are subtle and intuitive drawing from everything people already know from using a paper map. I’m used to the pastel fields of color with an all caps word in the middle that defines it. I’m used to the little blue square with an H in it for hospital.

I’m also impressed at how well they blended the level of detail across zoom levels. Topography would be very hard to past at the fully zoomed in level just as color coding neighborhoods wouldn’t make sense at larger views. That seems pretty obvious, but what I think was trickier are the many levels of zoom between that aren’t obvious about how much detail is needed. So far I think it strikes a great balance.

My last kudos is on the text. it is very readable with a sub-pixel stroke of white to accentuate it. It is also a pretty font. This one change alone makes the map go from functional to designed in my humble opinion.

Now that I have paid homage the lovely, rich simplicity of the map, I hope they do extend their maps even further. When there are icons for hospitals and airports, I’d love to be able to click on them and route to them. In the case of a hospital, I have had the need to find one quickly and it was a real horror. I can at least see where they are, but I would still have to route myself to them or figure out the intersection and enter it myself. I know this isn’t trivially easy to do since putting to many interactive markers would interfere with dragging, but it would still be cool.

This would be especially interesting since the tiles for Yahoo! Maps are in SWF format. You could actual bake in fully interactive elements to the tiles themselves rather than just relying on painted pixels.

While they haven’t put a post up about the new tiles yet on the Y! Local and Maps blog, you should still check it out for lots of other interesting features that are available.

A lot of Flash work I’ve seen recently has had really choppy looking images in Flash. This is especially true in images that are rotated. Today I was randomly searching around for the maker of Chiclets (whole different story) and ran across the Cadbury Adams site (pictured above). Someone did some pretty significant tweening there to get the effect of the brands going along the animated rope, but as the images go around all of the boxes get really mangled.

There is a very easy fix that would have made the SWF look many times better, but I’ve been discovering that the feature isn’t well known about by people starting with Flash in the last few versions. To let your images to be cleanly smoothed as they are resized and/or rotated go to the bitmap in your library, right mouse click and select properties. From there select “Allow Smoothing.”

I’m trying to figure out if the default in the past was to have the image smooth since I don’t really remember seeing as many sites having issues like this one. Otherwise it could be a feature that has been lost to the ages (though I’m sure YOU know about it!) .

Also if you want to have your image smooth in some cases, but not smooth in others, you can always take an instance of the image and use break apart (not trace as bitmap!) which will take the image, remove it and replace it with a vector shape of the same size and position and give it a fill with the bitmap. This will always allow smoothing. Any non-broken-apart images then will remain crisp.