Jacob Nielsen stole my lunch money in high school

Jacob Nielsen has about 70 high-resolution photos of himself on his site, with the following warning: *most of the large photos are several hundred kilobytes to download.*

I find it amusing for someone so concerned with usability to offer so many high-definition choices of his own image. I'm being a bit mean spirited, its true, picking on him like that, but for someone with such strong opinions put out there on the web for all to see, he's gotta expect that a little bit.

Anyway, I think he has some good points about Flash, the best points being about usability for people with disabilities and that search features don't see inside a flash application. But as he implies in his addendum, browser support for such things will only get better over time, as they already have. He's a bit self-satisfied though, when he gloats that

Even a big software company will listen to the insights provided by leading usability experts.

Also in his photo (I had to resize it down from about 5000 X 4000 pixels):


My last quibble with Nielsen is that his site is very plain and boring. I was going to be mean and say "like his haircut" but I decided not to. And the writing is not great, especially his intro to this page. OK that's the last one.

My own flash animation for this assignment features a picture of a cicada I took in North Carolina a year ago August. Here's the original:




I used a nice feature in Flash which is a nifty way to convert a bitmap (regular picture) to a vector image, which you can in turn convert to a symbol to make it move around. The command is Modify>Bitmap>Trace Bitmap. You can adjust the color threshold to get more or less detail. I could have done much better than I did if I had used a slightly larger original image size... I like the stylized look the traced bitmap can give.

I was very frustrated by Flash. I had my animation perfect and then tried to add more and in trying to edit the new stuff I was adding it ruined the older stuff. I think maybe I forgot to start a new scene... $%^(%^&(&$#%^(@!(#&!)@()@#&)%@#!!!! Oh well... Live and learn. The end result is that the "orient to path" did not "take" on the last part of my animation -- I even had it doing a motion and shape tween at the same time at one point, but in editing it -- the "undo" and history features are not as handy, thorough or literal as in photoshop-- I was unable to return to an earlier version of my flash document, and had to start over several times. It just takes time to learn these things. This last week was not a good one for practicing patience, speaking personally....