Under Development - Water Blaster Technology articles

[isoaker]

As I noted in another thread, one of my goals this summer is to get more in-depth articles on general water blaster technology pushed up on iSoaker.com.

While the writing part needs much more work, I've been drawing up some illustrations and wanted to share a sample here.

Trigger Pump illustration

tech_trigger-pump_800.jpg (24.06 KiB) Viewed 2163 times

Not sure this is the final version of the diagram on the trigger-pump mechanism, but it's come along quite well, IMO.

More to come...

[SEAL]

Looks pretty cool. You should animate these pictures.

[marauder]

Yeah, I second what SEAL said. Animation would be great.

[isoaker]

Animation, while nice, would probably multiply time it takes to do them ~10-fold and, with no really good, consistent means of showing animation (use of Flash and embedded movies not so great), I don't think I'll be doing animations, at least not for the first iteration. Definitely would be nice to eventually do, but that requires much more time and effort to do it well.

[soakinader]

Instead of animating, how about just doing a few frames illustrating the pump and water flow? You can just make some minor edits to the pictures you already have, showing the check valves opening/closing and the pump and water moving.

[HBWW]

Just use some HTML5/JQuery for that. No need for Flash. GIF's work too.

[isoaker]

Just use some HTML5/JQuery for that. No need for Flash. GIF's work too.

I'll let you do that version for HBWW. Regarding HTML5, I'm holding off doing any major developments using it until the standard is finalized and browsers really start consistently supporting it.

As for animated gif files, those get big very quickly (not to mention being severely color-palette-limited).

Showing progressing through pump and firing cycles is something I'm already considering doing, but am trying to figure out how best to illustrate each step.

[HBWW]

It's already more standardized and accessible from more devices than Flash at this point. Although with that said, animation is extra work in general and not completely necessary in this case. (Albeit helpful for explaining water blaster concepts we take for granted to those unfamiliar.)

[marauder]

I remember the day when all the cool sites were like 90% flash. Now flash isn't even supported on iphone. Weird.

[HBWW]

Perhaps it took the mobile revolution for people to realize the importance of open, non-proprietary, and accessible web standards.

With that said, I really need to spend more time in Illustrator, but I haven't been picking up any projects recently that I could use it with. (I'm too comfortable in Fireworks right now, but still can't export to .svg... Oh well, maybe later I'll update.)

[isoaker]

The main problem with HTML5/jQuery development is that there is a lacking of good tools to simplify development currently. Add on the innate complexity of doing animations and the effort it'd require for me to create the content isn't worth the time I'd end up spending. While static pictures of each step are not as nice as full animations, still pictures so have their benefit as well and that content can be developed much more quickly.

[HBWW]

There were never really great tools for coding web pages in general. I've never found any tools that could do the job cleaner and better than Notepad++, Chrome/Firefox, and WAMP/XAMPP server. SVG is another story though.

As for JQuery/Javascript, I don't see much in the way of avoiding direct coding, though there are some higher level scripting languages out there that compile to Javascript. (i.e. Coffeescript)

That said, you're correct no matter how it's put. Setting up some static images together is always faster and is a good strategy for sake of time, something we all need a little more of these days.

[isoaker]

There were never really great tools for coding web pages in general. I've never found any tools that could do the job cleaner and better than Notepad++, Chrome/Firefox, and WAMP/XAMPP server. SVG is another story though.

As for JQuery/Javascript, I don't see much in the way of avoiding direct coding, though there are some higher level scripting languages out there that compile to Javascript. (i.e. Coffeescript)

That said, you're correct no matter how it's put. Setting up some static images together is always faster and is a good strategy for sake of time, something we all need a little more of these days.

For website building, while not perfect, Dreamweaver has been a long time friend o' mine. the fact it also lets you dive directly into the code to clean things up helps immensely as well as various code hinting and tag assistance, particularly for CSS bits.

For animation, I could rock the Flash world fairly well, but the thought of having to try to move pieces/layers around using HTML5 and jQuery just makes me cringe. I've dabbled in some bits of animation and just would not be able to achieve the effects I'd want to easily (not without hours of tweaking). Adobe had been developing Muse to help with HTML5 animation development, but now that Adobe is moving to a subscription-based model for their applications, my fondness for future upgrades has dropped immensely. Looks like, unless things change, I'll be sticking with Adobe CS6 for as long as possible.