Aarron Walter

Todd Dominey’s ever popular SlideShow Pro is a great Flash utility that many people use to display their photos on their sites, but Jonathan Schemoul has a nice JavaScript alternative called Smooth Slideshow. Smooth Slideshow uses the Mootools JavaScript library to create elegant cross fading, and passive or active navigation through photos. Mootools is similar to Scriptaculous, but is allegedly a bit slimmer to cut down on download times.

I doubt Smooth Slideshow is going to dethrone SlideShow Pro as the king of slide show mechanisms (especially with the recent introduction of SlideShow Pro Director), but it’s nice to have an alternative. Speaking of slide show alternatives, you might also want to check out Mono Slideshow, another flash slide show application with very similar features as SlideShow Pro.

When getting started in the interactive design field you can find yourself a bit intimidated by the breadth of knowledge required to succeed. Design, programming, and user science are each multi-facited with much to learn and explore in each sub-discipline under the umbrella of interactive design. Here are a few great articles that can give you a head start on fundamentals free of charge! Don’t you just love this internet thing?

I have compiled a small collection of scripts that I have written or modified from other sources. There are lots of useful things like a working PHP shopping cart, a mailing list sign up widget that connects to Mail Chimp or your own database using Ajax, a PHP contact form with server-side validation, an RSS parsing script, a Scriptaculous photo slideshow tool perfect for showing screen shots of your work, and a few others as well. All of these things have been useful to me, and I hope they do others some good as well. If you modify or make use of any of these tools I’d love it if you would shoot me an email with a URL so I can see what you have done.

While you are checking out the code examples in the resources section, you may also want to check out my list of design tools, recommended books for interactive designers, and links to various interactive design resources.

My family has a problem. Many of us live in different places across the US, and subsequently have a hard time honoring a long Christmas tradition of ours. Each year we draw names from a hat to determine who will be the recipient of our Christmas present. We started the tradition when I was just a kid because we didn’t have a lot of money to buy everyone a gift, but it has turned into our favorite part of Christmas. Everyone closely guards the secret of the name they have drawn, and there is often espionage involved to determine who might be buying you a gift.

Since we all live in different cities now, a physical hat drawing won’t suffice anymore. To solve the problem I wrote a little PHP script that does the random drawing for us, and emails everyone the name they have drawn, preserving the secret.

Take a look at the code here.

The script creates two parallel arrays; one listing all gift exchange participant names, and the other listing their email address. Next, it runs a loop through the names array and generates a random number between 0 and the number of names, making the name selection. The trick is you should not be able to draw your own name or a name that has already been drawn. To prevent this, there is a while loop inside the name drawing loop that will redraw a name if the above criteria are not met (this was the trickiest part). Next you have to store the name drawn in an array that tracks who has already been selected so you don’t end up with someone getting more than one gift. Lastly, just send an email using the PHP Mailer class to the person telling them what name they have drawn.

It works like a charm, and lets our family tradition continue for years to come!