Favorite Pastimes :: Website Development

Ronald has been working wholeheartedly in website design and development since May 1998 as a hobbyist before making the transition to becoming a professional in April 2002. Since that time, he has come across a plethora of programs that have been promoted as being the must-have tool(s) to add to a web developer's arsenal. For all websites found within this domain, Ronald used his three staple applications Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop (together knows as The Triumvirate) among others. Below are descriptions for some of the applications used to produce websites, namely this one:

Adobe Dreamweaver

Ronald had been a Microsoft FrontPage (please don't laugh, no seriously...stop) user up until April 2002. FrontPage is good for people who wish to create static websites with images, and can enhance that power if and only if they understand the code to put it all in manually. This notion was indeed the case for Ronald's earlier projects, including The Gravity Realm. However, Ronald felt that his subsequent work needed to follow the current trend of dynamic web pages, and so he began to work on server-side scripting using PHP and Perl (mostly PHP). As of now, Microsoft FrontPage cannot support either language. Adobe had been well-known for their website developing tools Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver UltraDev. However, both programs contained annoying little popup windows that blocked about half of the screen. Because of this, Ronald continued to use FrontPage until the preview release of Dreamweaver MX was released. Adobe had done away with the popup windows and instead created a collapsing menu interface, which was ideal for increased workflow. It also supported PHP and contained references as extension modules that could be installed within the program. Moreover, document editing was a lot more efficient, as excessive and useless HTML is not inserted into pages. With all that in consideration, Ronald vowed from then on to work with Dreamweaver for all subsequent projects, and has done so for over a year. It also has the ability to interact with cascading style sheets and MySQL databases and other live data sources using ColdFusion. Adobe Dreamweaver is also excellent in tackling accessibility issues, making it one of the best commercial web page editors on the market today.

Adobe Photoshop

Now what's a website without graphics? Graphics are what initially sparked Ronald's interest in website development in the first place since they were the easiest to create in the early days. In the search to find a graphics package that was worth learning, he found that 97% of the websites surveyed used Adobe Photoshop in some way, shape, or form as the staple graphics editor. Overjoyed, Ronald began playing around with Adobe Photoshop 4.0 in the student computer labs on campus. His preseverance with the program has provided many opportunities for him as a graphic designer, including the official Indiana Science Olympiad 2003 logo and the IU OneStart website. Nowadays, most of Ronald's graphic work gets imported into Photoshop for manipulation in some degree, and in the case of the RDWonline websites, almost entirely produced and generated. Ronald favors the glass/plastic, metallic and industrial styles, but does so in his own unique way. Several websites later, Ronald has learned much of what Photoshop can do, and is still learning more to this day.

At times third-party filters are used, much less now than before. Third-party filters are Photoshop modules that are using within the host program to extend its capabilities. These programs can produce an array of effects, including lens flares, fire, smoke, distortions, glass and textures. Like many inexperienced people, Ronald was certainly among those who saturated their images with these filters with minimal effort. Over time, Ronald began to value the abilities that Photoshop natively possesses and used fewer and fewer third-party filters over time. Nowadays, if third-party filters are really necessary, they are used. Ronald's favorites include Kai's Power Tools 5, AlienSkin EyeCandy and AlienSkin Xenofex.

Adobe Fireworks

As stated previously, Ronald does a vast majority of his graphic work using Adobe Photoshop. However, at that time the JPG compression algorithm implemented by it and Adobe ImageReady is inferior when compared to that of Adobe Fireworks, which could certainly explain why Adobe discontinued ImageReady. Ronald generally uses this program for image slicing and optimization, and chooses it over similar programs because of its straightforward approach. Adobe Fireworks is ideal for graphic designers who wish to interact with sharp vector graphics for navigation bars and menus. Graphics created in Fireworks can be seamlessly imported into Adobe Flash for rich multimedia and Internet applications. Ronald has utilized this program extensively for rdwmusical III and rdwmagicollection III.

e-on Vue Infinite

Initially overwhelmed by the complexity of 3D applications, Ronald first decided to ease into 3D graphic design using a more controlled environment: landscape generation. The first program Ronald was able to use to initiate this was Bryce, which was surprisingly powerful to him at that time. However, over time, the atmospheres, especially the clouds, were simply not as realistic as desired. One night, while discussing 3D with some people online, Ronald learned about a 3D landscape application that far surpassed the power of Bryce with relative ease. Vue d'Esprit, a 3D atmosphere generator developed in France, is indeed an interesting program with similar capabilities of Bryce. The interface of Vue d'Esprit looks like it was made for the Mac because of its heavy use of the aqua pills for buttons and headers. Furthermore, Vue d'Esprit is argued to be so intuitive that people decline to open the printed manual until after they have played with many of the program's features. Ronald first became acquainted with the program at version 4 and did not begin to really produce serious work with the application until its 2007 release of Vue 6 Infinite and Vue 6 xStream. The latter program operates exactly like the former when run in standalone mode; however it is different in that a host 3D application such as 3ds max, Lightwave, XSI, Maya and (in Ronald's case) Cinema 4D can open scenes created in the application and can therefore commingle with the environment of the host application to create even more astounding graphic creations.

While Ronald was not able to use this program as much as desired on the Epoccontinuum, he was able to use it in the interface for the Seoquouloxolocadium and some new 3D landscapes can be seen in The Digital Portfolio.

Maxon Cinema 4D

Ronald spent a lot of time researching standard 3D applications in hopes of discovering one that would create astounding 3D renders without a egregiously steep learning curve. After several months of deliberation, Ronald settled on Maxon Cinema 4D over Autodesk 3ds max (at least for the time being). To some 3D designers, Maxon Cinema 4D is a lot more "powerful and stable", though it is quite a pain to find books on the software at your local bookstore. Recently, Ronald has been using Cinema 4D to render different shapes and/or booleans, or manipulating vector splines into 3D shapes using HyperNURBS. Fortunately, Ronald was able to add in a couple of abstract renders from Cinema 4D into this user interface. Expect to see more 3D renders and compositions produced using this application in the coming months.