Extra Life was started in 2008 by a Sarcastic Gamer Community member. You should read about the events beginnings on the Sarcastic Gamer site. The communities story resonated because I’d also had leukemia in my family. I found myself being highly motivated for the event – I mean why not, marathon runners get sponsored for charity why not 24 hour gaming?

Last year Team Meerkat raised $577 for Extra Life, this year we’re setting our sights even higher, we want to bust that target! If you love games, want to help cure Cancer or simply want to make sure Local Hospitals get help, you should be doing Extra Life too! As the events awesome tagline says “Play games. Heal kids”.

It’s easy to participate in Extra Life at any level;

1. Sponsor an Extra Life team member, Team Meerkat team member or donate directly.

2. Signup to participate in Extra Life and round up four or more sponsors.

3. Create a team, join a team or choose to join Team Meerkat (we’d love to have you!) .

Be a gaming hero and pledge 24 hours to healing kids on October 16th.

Facebook could have avoided all the fuss a long time ago by having a clear Privacy Policy, there Facebook could have outlined exactly what data they wanted to be public. This Policy could have been outlined very early on and each new user would have had to accept it as part of the registration process. The user then knows from the outset which data will be held publicly for searches or advert targeting, and then the user has a choice – accept and use the site or reject and go elsewhere.

After the user has made their choice accepted the Policy and entered the site proper the settings should be simple, usable and use an ounce of common sense. Each post, update or upload is posted to only friends of the user, posting is then clear to everyone “your posts are only seen by the people you choose to be friends with”. Of course your application would also need an override to change the entry from private to public status, and it’s important that the User Experience happens in this direction. This is where common sense comes in: no one wants the hassle of selecting ‘make this private’ every time they want to hide information, what’s far more intuitive is selecting which entries you wish to be public.

Some barriers are good

Yes One’s first objection will probably be that this adds a barrier to entry. Yes it does. This barrier is one Facebook should want; only users who accept or don’t care enough to read the Public Policy become their user base. Facebook would then be free to use the agreed data for any purpose they have outlined openly in the Policy. This totally eliminates having any type of heated community banter over privacy, as long as you stick to your own outlined rules – which brings me on to my next and final point.

Be consistent, don’t go pulling the rug from under your users every six months. No one’s saying you shouldn’t change and evolve your rules with the community and the world at large. People like stability, users are people. Move to a flexible Policy change cycle, once every eighteen months with a period of consultation before the start of the next cycle. Stability  alone isn’t going to cut it though, constancy is needed also. Flip-flopping between Privacy directions, radically changing interface controls or changing Policy definitions is not being consistent. Again, evolution is expected with software and internet applications so change is not an outlandish idea, gradual, intelligent, user friendly changes are paramount. A user shouldn’t have to work to understand an application’s Policies, the application should work to make it’s Policies usable and communicative. I believe the average user is far more accepting than most think, if things are out in the open and clear to understand I think Registrations would be on par.

Enough theorizing, Facebook doesn’t really have any of those options anymore. Not unless it would be willing to rewrite some base Facebook Policies, lose some users along the way, eat a whole lot of humble pie and be willing to take an extended time to rebuild trust in it’s products and data use.

Think like a person

Be clear, be consistent  and be usable. Plan for your data use from the start, anticipate and avoid the Facebook backlash.

Let’s start with one of the most important aspects of Flash building.

Reuse your symbols

Where possible you should reuse symbols instead of creating new ones.
I.E. you need a cloud graphic, an oval button and a spot light effect. For each of those elements you only need one base symbol. Start by creating a circle of any color then convert it to a graphic symbol. Drag an instance of the circle from the library to the stage, go to the properties and set the circle color to white via the ‘tint’ option. Copy and paste this circle a number of times, changing size, shape and opacity where needed to create your cloud. Return to the stage and create your other two elements using the original circle symbol following the same color/alpha change process to get the desired effects.
The same types of symbol reuse can be used with a number of different shapes or combination of shapes. Need a forest? Create one trunk and one leaf, copy paste the leaf to make the tree, return to the stage and pull in as many trees as you need from the library.

Symbol reuse in this manor helps Flash keep the number of individually rendered elements to a minimum.

Keep symbol numbers to a minimum

The number of individual symbols you create works hand in hand with symbol reuse. The simple rule is: do not create symbols unless you need them and where possible create a new symbol from an existing one and transform it.

Never animate using keyframes

Using separate keyframes containing separate artwork is a sure fire way to make your file huge. As a rule, you should always animate your symbols using motion tweens, one moving element is much smaller than using multiple elements to create the same effect.

Never use shape tweens

Under no circumstances should you be using any type of shape tween. The shape tween feature will bloat your movies and substantially slow down play back.

Use Jpeg’s sparingly

While Jpeg’s are sometimes needed to complete a Flash project you should try and limit their use to critical applications only. Jpeg’s affect the file size of Flash movies in a big way, if you have to use them, make sure you’ve used the ‘save for web feature’ in Photoshop before importing them into your Flash library.

Stream user initiated audio and video files

Audio and video files should always been linked to and loaded as a stream from your main Flash file, never include these files inside your main file.
To ensure optimum User Experience, audio and video files which are loaded from within your Movie should always be initiated by the user and should contain Play/Pause/Stop and/or Mute functionality as a minimum. In some cases the ‘no auto playback’ rule may be broken; Video files inside a Flash ad may start immediately, audio files should still require user initiation.

Depending on the type of Flash file you are creating, some or all of the following tips may help you reduce the size of your exported Movie.

Limit your color palette

Using a limited color palette, much like saving a GIF at 128 rather than 256 colors, can substantially lower your Movie size.  It is recommended you use tints of existing colors where possible.

Limit use of gradients

Limiting the use of gradients works hand in hand with limiting color palettes. A good rule is: two is great, five is too many. Remember this refers to individual different gradients, reusing the same gradient is fine (see: symbol reuse).

Limit use of transparency

Using transparency can allow you to create some great effects, but those same effects are slowing and bloating your Movies. As a general rule: individual items which include transparency, I.E. a button with drop shadow, are fine. You should try to avoid layered transparent items and you should definitely avoid tweening multiple transparent items across each other as this will result in playback slowdown.

Should you need to further shrink your Flash file after following all the tips above you may wish to try the following;

Save for an older version

Unless you absolutely need your Flash file to play in the latest plugin it is recommended you save for files for Flash Player 8. Saving files down from a later version to Flash 8 can sometimes shave as much as 25% off the file size.

Drop frame rate

25 FPS+ is the realm of TV and video, your Flash files should be around 15 FPS for optimum playback/file size. Dropping the frame rate, even below 15 FPS may be needed to lower your file size further.

And that’s about all I’ve got in the ‘must haves’ category, if you think of anymore ‘must haves’ or just want to share some advanced techniques please feel free to do so in the comments.

Let us not underestimate that last sentence. This is an important step for the gaming community, not just for the Apple users but for all PC gamers. What Am I talking about? Competition. Having games created for and released only on one PC platform inevitably hurts the market as a whole. Think of how the console market would look like if the only one available was a Playstation. Now imagine if that one console maker released an update that gave you a bloated unusable interface and then forced all it’s game developers to create games for the platform because it was the only way to use new features.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we have choice and a competitive market with consoles. This isn’t even about games, it’s about people being able to use the system they feel most comfortable with.

The Apple platform is now as good as any PC for gaming, gone are the architecture differences of decades past. It’s about time game developers saw this market for the potential it has, but it’s up to us as gamers to help support Valve and any other companies that create games natively for the Mac. Supporting Valve now is an integral part of making this work. Why? Because you’ll not be finding any other large studios games on the Apple Steam platform for a while, at least I think. My guess is that the large publishers will be looking to Valves sales of it’s own Steam based games before making any decisions about bringing their ported or porting/creating games for the platform.

For the good of PC gaming itself, that is why we need to support Steam on Macs.

If you’ve not caught any of the hubbub on BoingBoing or seen any of the teaser images head over to the article Gallery: Valve tease Steam/Half-Life/Left 4 Dead for Macs, in style for a look see.

Update: There is an interesting article and discussion at rockspapershotgun.com where they also point out a list of already ported Mac games. Quite a few in that list so we may see more than just Valve games at launch, however I still think the big publishers will be looking at Steam sales to decide whether to make an Apple push themselves or not.

Update: I took a little break from posting to plan a wedding, in that time Valve have confirmed, beta’d and shipped Steam for Mac. In fact it’s currently installed and downloading Portal which Valve gave away for free with the release of the Mac platform. Here’s hoping other publishers see the value in our gamers too! To comment on the above update quickly: Valve have released a list of supported games at launch, hopefully we’ll see some more mainstream titles shortly. I’d love to have Dawn of War II or Valve’s own Half Life 2 on my OS X side.

Personally this just helps the decision Aaryn and I made about staying with tap water, estrogen and all, solidify itself as the right choice. Of course living in California means we do keep bottled water in the house and car as part of our earthquake readiness kits, but we usually keep it until a few months before its use by date drink it and then buy more (don’t forget to get extra for the kitties!). Day to day we just use filtered tap.

I’m re-posting the infographic here with permission, but please feel free to head over to the source instead;

Dangerous Juggling Stunts (Part 2 Extreme Fire)
Things on fire are great, things being juggled while on fire awesome! Though I’d liked to have seen more unicycle action ^_^

Head over to the YouTube page to comment and rate!

Dangerous Juggling Stunts (Part 3 The Chainsaw)
Yes you read that correctly, a freaking chainsaw. I’ve no idea were you’d go from there though, maybe riding a tiger juggling flaming chainsaws?

Head over to the YouTube page to comment and rate!

Awesome stuff all round again from Nick. Please head over to www.nickpikejuggler.com if you’d like to get info and watch more juggling and show videos, you’ll also be able to checkout where his next gig is in your area!

I’m going to embed the video below for ease of viewing, but if you like what you see head over to www.nickpikejuggler.com to watch more videos, you’ll also be able to checkout where his next gig is in your area!

I don’t want to give anything away but: knives and broken glass aren’t the only crazy things planned!

Head over to the YouTube page to comment and rate!

Team Meerkat, the 4 of us, start the Extra Life event at 8am PST (that’s 4pm GMT in the afternoon for you euros) on Saturday, and will continue to play games online for a full 24 hours until 8am (4pm GMT) on Sunday.

There are a few ways you can keep in touch with what we are doing and make sure we’re actually playing games, not goofing off;

Firstly, we will be streaming as much of the gameplay from the event as possible via two streams. We’ll also record the start, finish and any ‘special’ moments for repeat viewing.

You can view the live steam from my computer here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/team-meerkat-live-reishi

You can view the live stream from Alik’s computer here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/team-meerkat-extra-life-event

We will also be making an appearance on MAD-Radio twice. Our first appearance will be at the start of the 24 hours to get things underway. The second appearance will be on Sunday, so you can hear how much we are hurting with only a few hours to go.

You can listen to the shows live at;
iTunes/VLC/Winamp – http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88/listen.pls
Windows Media Player – http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88

You can also follow our progress on twitter @teammeerkat

It’s going to be fun!

Update: The team raised a total of $577 for Extra Life 09
Good going team, I hope to see everyone again next year to raise even more!

Why am I moving to a new URL?
For a while now I’ve been trying to get http://www.paulwest.com, I already own http://www.paulanthonywest.com and http://www.paulanthonybrianwest.com which both point here.  I’m not rich and I’ve got other projects that need money injection, add to that the fact I’ve not ever got a reply about it either way.  So I officially quit stalking it and will take my personal branding in another direction (post about that soon).

I’ll update here once the switch over is done.

UPDATE: The move is done and all links in place, everything should be working fine now.  Had a few issues earlier this evening when I was a total nab trying to run php5 code on php4 settings, but that was easily fixed.
I’ll be posting some more articles I have backlogged this week and if I don’t get too busy with other things you may even see a re-brand!

Now before I get “you’re not even an American” comments. No I’m not, however my wife is, my cats and all my possessions are in the US and I consider it my home, I feel I have the right to comment. So there.

I have said all along, since the beginning of this whole economic debacle, that, if companies are going under because they either are a) already in debt or b) have horribly bad management, that we should let them go.  Some companies are so tightly entwined within the country that their demise would cause catastrophic meltdown, yes. But these are a very small minority. And that’s a whole other issue.
Why should we let them go under? Simple and already stated: they were either already failing or were terribly managed. That is the type of company we do not need.

So if we’re not saving the old, what do we do?

Save the new.
Think about the future and the people who’ll live in it. Work with them, listen to them, help them. Most importantly don’t alienate them. If the new coming through just see old out of date systems, systems that wont embrace them or help their new ideas flourish, we’ll lose them.
That means we need more money to technology, science, space and to keep those resources ‘in-house’.  That also means biting the bullet by taking some of that money you were going to use to prop up failing business and giving it to people with ideas.
The old systems don’t work, I’ve seen many examples of that in my own lifetime – and I’m only thirty.  So if they don’t work, stop listening to the people who say they need fixing. Start listening to the people who give you new, imaginative, ideas.

Improve infrastructure.
Providing for new and future businesses is one thing, but what about the huge manufacturing worker base we have out of work?  The administration should, as was done in the depression, start and start quickly to improve existing infrastructure and build new better projects for future generations.
These new public projects should, as far as is possible, be only staffed by skilled out of work people. The sheer amount of manufacturing jobs lost over the last year shows just how much of a workforce is available to such projects. And from some of the events over the last few years it’s clear that the US could do with an infrastructure update. Hell the US is one place that does need a high speed link right across it. I’m not even going to go into what that would do to slow the coastal migration.

Moving swiftly back to my main point: Obama made sense.
He talked about creating jobs, my guess is those will come from public projects. More importantly he talked about money for technology and science projects. Such projects should help provide for the countries future, while keeping its upcoming talent within the US.

The thing America, and all countries of this planet, has to do now is think about the future. Where do we go and what do we do. Forget about fixing old antiquated systems. Let the chaff fall away and build a better system.

Evolution does this all the time.