PGA Championship 2004

Just quick post to note to announce that the official site of The 86th PGA Championship, which I art directed, designed and coded, is up and running. The site uses a lot of the same elements and styles from last year's tournament, but the formerly xml-driven Flash navigation has been replaced with CSS. The 'Course Tour' on the home page has also been re-architected to be a little more user friendly (content automatically loads now instead of being user-initiated), has been beefed up with much larger fly-over videos, and also includes some really nice audio narration / playing tips by course architect Pete Dye.

(If you go to the site and see a large ad for Cadillac, wait a few seconds -- the tour will eventually appear underneath. The Cadillac spot runs once per day per unique visitor -- which for the curious is tracked by a Flash SharedObject).

I had lots of plans and ideas for a much larger Course Tour, possibly with the involvement of Flash Communication Server to provide an even richer user experience, but with all the work I've also been putting into Ryder Cup, that will unfortunately have to wait for a future tournament. But for now I'm very pretty pleased with how it all looks. Should be an exciting match for golf fans.

(Go Tiger).

That damn flicker -- users of Safari will notice an odd flickering effect that occurs when mousing over the menus on the home page. Hovered list items are sliced out of the list, and unselected items are pushed either behind the Flash movie or simply disappear. I've run into this problem before, but have never tracked down the cause. If anyone knows of a solution, or knows Dave Hyatt and can let him know, I'd appreciate it. (mail AT whatdoiknow.org)

Fix in the mix? -- I received an email from a reader claiming that the drop down / Flash issue has been fixed in Safari 2.0, which is part of the developer build of OS X 10.4 Great news, but if true we'll have to wait a while.