I basically started the design for my new site (which should be coming up soon, btw) with the animation and built it from that. The small snippet of a picture of my screen is a bit of a teaser for the new site, and you might notice that I’m rebranding the site to my own name. While I enjoy the Bit by Bit name and the whole duality of it and stuffs, I felt this makes more sense as a personal portfolio website. Hopefully Google agrees, and I will no longer see my friend, Andy Mangold, ranked higher than me for my own name.

Despite digressing into a promotion of my redesign, I would like to point out some of what I consider to be the finer uses of Flash. It is most definitely a powerful tool, and likely something that can impress visitors, but it can also be overwhelming and distracting. By using Flash to introduce movement to your site in a sublte way, you can maintain a clean aesthetic and add just a little bit more to the site. It also allows the Flash to degrade nicely to a static image and continue to look great for all those (few remaining these days) that don’t have Flash installed.

I don’t think anything turns me off more when I visit a website on my iPhone to see half the design missing because I don’t have Flash installed.

1. It will help us understand the process of developing an application in general, a process that we may need to become familiar with in our future profession. While we may not be directly involved in its development in our future, understanding all the things that can go wrong, and right, will help improve any management opportunities we face.
2. It will give us a useful and/or fun application. There are plenty of things that we want our iPhones to do for us, but sometimes the offerings of the App Store are too expensive, general unknowns, poor implementations, or just plain ugly. By developing our own solution we will have the perfect harmony of cost, functionality, and aesthetics.
3. This application will offer us a cash generating opportunity. There’s no other way to look at it, the App Store can be a cash generating machine. Sure for every giant success story there is probably another 100 failures, but we are in a position that enables us to take a this risk will minimal financial loss.

While I can’t say if our endeavor will be successful in a purely fiscal perspective, I hope that we will gain valuable experience that could come in valuable later in our lives. Then again, I also hope that we can make $21,000 a day like the guy that created iShoot. I guess I should also discuss the matter of what name we should be developing under as well. We’ve considered using Bonsai Studios, but I guess we should check with the other parties involved.