Anyone that knows me knows I like Apple/Mac stuff. The first computer I owned was a PowerMac 7100/66. Man did that baby hum after I upgraded the ram to 72MB. Anyway, though I love Apple and have a self admitted gadget lust problem, the AppleTV’s rather limited palette of functionality really turned me off. Only being able to play iPod video… needing a computer to sync to, not having a web browser, etc. Turns out with all the hacks coming out almost daily, by the time the second gen product comes around, the AppleTV might just be about perfect.

Divx/XVid are here, Perian works, Keyboards and Mice are up and running, people are working on USB harddrive access, all of this is great news for the hacking community and in turn Apple. Can’t wait to see what happens when the iPhone comes out!

While in Highschool I was pretty active in community service, college, a bit too… While living in Chicago, not so much. Now back ina  smallish town, I just think I’d like to get back in to serving my neighborhood. I met this evening with a representative from the neighborhood association and I am going to be helping them with the revitalization of their website.  I am planning on installing a Drupal site with a customized theme for them. We have some ideas for basic typical community content, calendars etc, but I am wondering from those out their in the developer community… are there some modules that I should be specifcally be looking into?

I normally don’t like the idea of Drupal being called “community plumbing”, because I never use it for community site, but in this case, I guess it fits.

My post about Dreamweaver 9’s impending release laid out my hopes and dreams about what I’d like to see in the next major release of the application, and it’s first release from Adobe.

Most of them look to be coming true, if, at least you don’t care too much about web standards…

• I like the XML integration, alot!
• I like the CSS layouts (as much as I can with out seeing the code they produce)
• The addition of some AJAX support was a necessary thing, certainly.

My main gripe with the whole thing, is how can I sell myself as a standards based designer when theAJAX library chosen produces nonstandard markup… case in point:

Even Odd Row Samples - Pretty sure this isn’t valid XHTML: <tr spry:repeat=“dsEmployees” spry:even=“even” spry:odd=“odd”> - in fact look at the validator results from that demo’s page.

Now, I just picked this one example from the larger demo’s page, and I don’t have the time to look through the other samples, but I’m sure that many of them use similiar sorts of custom attributes, etc.  Now, Alistapart addressed this very issue of custom namespace’s/DTDs about two years ago. From the article:

Custom DTDs can be a very useful tool to enrich the existing markup languages or create entirely new ones. One always has to keep in mind that they are tantamount to creating a new language, and that proprietary languages are best kept in closed environments where they can be taught to a limited set of agents and tools, and NOT to make the web a modern version of the Tower of Babel by unleashing them in the wilderness.

Sounds just like what we got from Adobe, right? Why not use Prototype or JQuery? I just don’t get it. Someone, please, fill me in.

I know I will… It will be webcast live at: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/launchevent/

Can’t wait to see the new interface for Flash, learn more about the Flex integration for IL and FW, see what Ajax-y goodness Dreamweaver has in store for us, check out the PS/AI import for Flash, and learn more about Photoshop CS3 Extended’s 3d Support…

Overheard on a mailing list I subscribe to:

The new version of Photoshop CS3 announced today allows you to “edit
existing textures on 3D models directly within Photoshop Extended and
immediately see the results. Photoshop Extended supports common 3D
interchange formats, including 3DS, OBJ, U3D, KMZ, and COLLADA, so you can
import, view, and interact with most 3D models.”

In other words, it allows you to load and display a Collada scene, including
basic manipulation of objects and camera, edit the textures of the models
and see the results directly. Only texture editing seems to be currently
supported.

Absolutely sick!

When I started using Flash at version 3, I was inspired by GaboCorp and Eye4U, as I am sure many of you were. The tool at that time was relatively simplistic, pretty much all nested timelines and other symbols (remember using buttons and graphic symbols?) with only a smattering of actions available compared to it’s big brother, Director. The actual sites/designs coming out were able to be counted as they occurred, with server side interaction only a gleam in some engineer’s eye. You could see the site, emulate the visual effect with the drawing tools in the IDE and put out a nice SWF that put you in the game after going through the tutorials (Remember the skywriting airplane? if you do, comment on this story, please!) and a having a bit of design talent.

Flash 4 came out and the tool matured, though really only marginally. The barrier to entry for new designers was a few weekends behind a closed door and some determination.

When Flash 5 hit the streets, the dot syntax was liberating (no more “/:” woohoo!) and the buzz could easily be seen in the amazing new work being put out by Yugo P, Hillman Curtis and Joshua Davis to name just a few. The createEmptyMovieClip/attachMovieClip, rudimentary drawing API and and a few other niceties like primitive html support allowed PHP/MySQL Flash sites to spring up like daisies and we were off.

Flash forward to today and man, things are nuts… AS3.0 is rapidly becoming the norm for high-end effects and application development, and me, being a bit old school (I really only recently started using the Flash 8 filters in billable work), I just can’t imagine what it must feel like for new designers entering this arena. Hardly an experience site or app out there today doesn’t have programmatic animation, XML to the gills and a hearty amount of server side interaction along with some hot shot 3rd party API.

I teach university students (currently HTML/CSS but sometimes Flash), and it’s tough to even know where to start out… a semester or so with the timeline, another with some simple AS1.0/2.0 stuff and then it’s off to the races. What was their normal way to set up a movie, (nested timelines and tons of stop(), gotoAndPlay() commands everywhere) is soon taught to them that it isn’t really the best way to apporach things. Externalized libraries, animating with MCTween, LacoTween or Fuse, XML, etc. are the way to go if you want to produce pro level work. When you then point them to OSFlash and the stuff that people are doing with MTASC and FlashDevelop, Se|Py and all the rest, their minds just get blown.

The students seemingly get things quickly, but the time that I have behind the wheel has been invaluable to me… I just don’t know if I would be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed if I knew, that in order to be a Flash ninja today, you basically have to live eat and breathe OOP and MVC, use third party compilers and get ready to code like Neo or whip crazy timelines like nobody’s business.

Of course, yes, there is young talent out there, but that bar is excruciatingly high… Anyone else out there feeling this same way?

Techcrunch had a post on the landscape of the semi-connected web application yesterday, talking about Firefox 3’s local storage and Joyent’s Slingshot as competitors to the Flash/Flex/Apollo combo… Seems a bit odd to call a web browser specific technology a competitor to a cross platform runtime, but oh well. As far as Joyent’s Slingshot goes, the screenshots are nice looking, but I have to guess there are probably 100 times more Flash/Flex developers out there than Ruby on Rails developers.

At this point, I’m not sure if any of these technologies are going to really stick, but with the Flash platform’s entrenched market lead, I’d say Apollo has the best chance of doing it. Macromedia learned a lot from the smoking corpse of Central and I’d venture to say they have addressed most all of the issues associated with it. The development community seems to be a bit mixed. Many seem to think it’s the greatest thing since dot syntax or the v2 components, but some aren’t convinced yet.

I can’t see these other smaller niche development communities having the same sort of visible prescence out there. When you take into account that with the Flash platform, because of Flash’s strong graphic capabilities, any clients truly concerned about brand integrity and uniform presentation are going to most likely choose the clean vector art provided in Apollo. Firefox Local Storage and Slignshot still use the same tired old HTML/CSS combo that doesn’t have the wow IMHO.

When you approach it from a corporate IT perspective, I would speculate that Adobe’s software is going to get a green light to be installed on workgroup desktops before an opensource technology like Firefox 3 or a relatively unknown hosting provider (Joyent).

Thoughts anyone?

After playing with the Apollo Alpha and my copy of Flex Builder for the last few days, I wonder if my last post about Team integration and desinger/developer workflow was a little misguided. Does it truly have to be a turf war where designers are told to step away from the Flex Builder and developers are not allowed to propose views/states for their RIAs? I’m not prepared to answer that fully yet.
I guess this may be common sense for you that are working in heterogeneous environments with code monkeys swingin’ from the rafters and designers in chic glasses scoffing at their Pez dispensers and Transformer collections… but something hit me, why can’t a talented designer with UI experience lay out views and states, plan for the transitions and integrate the snazzy CSS into Flex Builder? Honestly it isn’t too hard, really. The devigners will use the Flex Style Explorer and the Flex Builder 2 IDE and produce snappy UIs that sing.

AS3.0 is probably where the programmers get separated from the designers anyway, right? After the devigners check in their files, the deselopers can use their free Flex SDK and their highly customized Eclipse environment, snap some quick AS3.0 to connect to the webservices they have been creating in their favorite srever side code and then hand the mxml files back down the hall to the cappuccino swilling pixel jockeys. They can rest assured in their hoodies and go recompile their kernels knowing that SVN/CVS will save their precious code should the devigners mess it up.

Am I that far off?

I’m sure someone closer to the project or more experienced with Apollo and the Flash Player will be able to explain this one to me. I downloaded the source to the Memory Monitor Component linked to on Lynch Consulting’s blog this morning. I created a nice little Apollo project in Flex Builder 2. I placed the component in the application. Ran it and found that Apollo .air apps don’t see the memory space used by the Flash player.

You can download my trial here and see the Lynch Consulting online demo of the SWF version here. I thought it would be cool to have a pocket Memory app to use for development, and maybe beef it up to have a FPS calculator, etc. I guess it makes sense that Apollo doesn’t know what Flash is doing, etc, but anyone that can shed more light on this would be appreciated.

Hot on the heels of the Flex Apache/IIS Module, the folks at labs have just put a download link for the Apollo Alpha up… SDK, Runtime, Samples, etc. Now, how I am going to have time to play with these is anybody’s guess. Between work my two and half year old, Sophia, and my new son, my days are pretty well sucked up. I do have  a couple older Flash toys I built that I think I’m going to quickly repackage into Apollo apps, though. I think it will pretty easy to quickly build some things based around the webkit renderer as well. I’ll post what I do.
Here’s to sleepless nights!

Truly unbelievable. For free? From Labs? Wasn’t this Flex 1.0? And it was super expensive then, right? …wow. Talk about making it accessible. I don’t have much time to blog on this, but I can see lots of applications for this in my future. Absolutely fantastic. Thanks Adobe.

I know Apollo will steal your thunder, but Flex for Apache module, you get my thumbs up. I may just putyou on my Mac Powerbook to speed up my Flex development on this rather pokey G4 processor.