This year had a distinct theme – devices. From the free devices handed out to attendees, to the devices in the keynote, to the devices shown on the floor of the community pavilion, it’s clear that Adobe is very intent on getting their content production tools’ output on as many formats and platforms as possible.

AIR for Android, AIR on TV, Google TV, Flash Player on Mobile… Wow. The digital Publishing Platform alone is a huge step forward for publications looking to expand their reach to devices where they previously hadn’t been able to target. Pretty amazing overall, really. While some of the technology is probably still a ways off, such as the Mobile jQuery extensions for Dreamweaver (which John Resig helped to announce), there are other things like Flex Hero, with support for Mobile Development, are basically here (though in a Beta form). It’s exciting indeed.

Check out my photos from the event (shot on my spiffy new Canon S90)

The keynotes got mixed reviews from a lot of the attendees, and most all the people I track on Twitter that weren’t at the event were handily panning the skits and overall presentations given. Honestly, while yes there some dry spots (the Omniture skit spoofing Jim Kramer was terrible) and there were a couple minor technology issues (Epix’s video demo failed), I enjoyed them. I really though that Martha Stewart’s appearance, the BlackBerry Playbook demo and the mind blowing High Performance Flash player demos of 4k video and StageVideo, and MoleHill were just awesome.

One thing I noticed… The show’s opening with Joa and Natzke jamming some sick visualizations to a live AudioTool performance showed just how tough of a audience Adobe has to please… Here, I thought it was awesome and so did a lot of designers that I follow on Twitter. On the flipside… There were a ton of really smart and well known developers totally slamming it. WTF? It just highlights the heterogeneous nature of the Adobe customer base. You have creatives used to making beautiful or fun stuff with CS products and then you have these computer scientist developer types using Flex, LiveCycle and Coldfusion that just don’t care about that side of Adobe at all. One has to think that maybe Adobe needs to think a bit harder about what they want to be when they grow up… Or at least get the kids on each side of the fence to get along better. I stride the line between the two camps, so I love the creative mind blowing visuals and the whiz bang tech demos. Not everyone agrees.

Beyond the keynote announcements, there was some awesome labs sessions and concurrent presentations (my own presentation on Mobile Learning included. ). I really enjoyed Nate Beck’s multiplayer gaming session and the other labs I attended on both P2P and RTMFP and the other on the OSMF platform were both really enlightening. I attended a session on the Adobe InMarket service… and while it looks like it could be good eventually, it looks like it is a ways off for being flexible or powerful enough to warrant the effort. A lack of a public roadmap for the project could be a major turn-off for most app developers. How can you pin a business plan on a beta product?

The sneak peeks were great as always. Again Flash player improvements abounded as well as some super cool Flash player performance testing tools and output paths to HTML5 definitely caught my attention. The Coldfusion sneeks were pretty snoozeworthy to me, but I’m not much into that tech in general as it is. The real star of the sneak session was William Shatner though. Obviously oblivious to the bulk of the tech shown in the demos, he absolutely kept everyone entertained with a pile of jokes and incredulous responses to the advanced stuff on the screen behind him. Tons of fun.

The MAX bash was a great affair, with good food, entertainment (including some crazy dancing scantily clad snake lady, living statues, celeb look-alikes and a chain saw juggler), and the headliner “The Bravery”. A nice addition to the party, The Bravery put a good show on!

My session went well. I had about 60 attendees and ended up with a decent, though not superb rating. My topic, “Creating Mobile Learning with Your eLearning Toolkit” is an interesting one, mainly because it’s pretty much totally new to the Adobe crowd. The recently released eLearning Suite 2 doesn’t actually ship with a way to target mobile right out of the box, so it’s a little bit of a stretch for a lot of rapid eLearning tool users like people that use Captivate daily to entertain firing up a command line tool to package up the materials for AIR for Android or the iOS packager. I hope to release the deck and the demos files here soon, so please come back to get those here.

After all is said and done, though, the best thing was seeing so many friends from the community. Chatting with awesome people like Jesse Freeman, Elad Elrom, Michael Labriola, Aaron Pederson, Leif Weils, Stacey Mulcahy, Scott Janousek, Zach Stepek, Chris Girffith, Ben Stucki, Brian Rinaldi, Andy Mathews and so many more really made the time a lot of fun. I finally met a lot of people in the community that I follow on Twitter like James Ward, Rob Huddleston and Russ Ferguson and was reunited with a former classmate of mine from Bradley, the humble Flash platform genius, Dave Knape. Honestly, talking and connecting with so many smart, fun, and engaging people in a cool setting with so much going on is really the reason to go to these conferences. I get so much out of hearing their stories and experiences and sharing mine, too. These interactions are far more educational than any labs, really. Can’t wait to seem ‘em all again.

So what’s next for Adobe? Hopefully some great success for this year across devices and more OSes… For now, I’m recuperating and then starting to plan out what to build on my new Droid 2 and Google TV. Maybe some mashups or apps are in order… Choices, choices, choices.

We’ve been writing a ton of great stuff at that blog. You should check it out when you have a moment.

I promise to get back to posting here, and have a couple drafts nearly ready, but for now, I’m going to be mostly active on Twitter and may have some delicious links to post coming soon.

That said, I do have a couple milestones to share… It’s been 1 year since my URL shorteners went live at fnaweso.me and fnla.me… go use em and say hi, if you haven’t recently.

Also, this is my 500th blog post. Sweet.

Mini sites. Bah, old hat. Social Networking… hmm, not as effective for a small marketing business as you might think. Demo reels? Been there done that. Carousel Galleries? Puhhhhleeazzzeee.

So, we’ve been thinking a little “outside the box”… cliche I know, but the things we’ve been working on are hardly typical. Check this 3 iPad synchronized reel.

Or this multiscreen game featuring SMS interaction, mobile web and custom iPad development. We unveiled that last month at mLearnCon for the eLearning Guild..

Strange times, (and this economy certainly is a strange time) call for creative measures. We are definitely being creative. Its been a lot of fun working on efforts like this with the team we have at The Iona Group.

The very interesting thing about this is that after people see the demo, or play the game, not only do they want to talk to us more about our work, but often times they actually want to have a custom multiscreen demo or a mobile phone based game produced for them. It’s funny, but the portfolio pieces/demos we have created have actually become solutions that customers want for themselves.

The site features some great art from my friend and coworker, Matt Forcum. Matt runs the site Robot Beach, a webcomic about robots, crabs and seagulls. It’s good.

Take a look at this illustration from the site:

I hope you find the content at the site useful, as well. We are looking to make FloatLearning.com THE resource for mobile learning strategy news, information and opinion.

These tips aren’t about writing good software in the first place. This is all about the deployment and delivery phase of the project. A lot of these suggestions came from projects we have worked on over the years. Many of them are canon in our workflow because of our Technology Director, Jeremy LeBeau. He blogs at Silverwire and is on Twitter as jleb. Look him up!

1. Uninstall anything that isn’t necessary – Spamware, bloatware, crapware… whatever you call it. Many PCs ship with an abundance of free trials and demos of security software, photo editing junk and lots of other utilities you simply don’t need. Uninstall them to free up space and increase stability. You may find it easier to simply wipe the hard drive after getting a PC and reinstalling the OS.
2. Disable all those extra services – Look at the average system tray and process monitor of your average PC. So many cycle and RAM stealing little apps. Get rid of ‘em. A kiosk does not need a Skype Widget, IM bug or Weather Station app. Windows OEM versins tend to ship with a lot of these types of services. You should disable or better yet, remove them.
3. Run network cable to every station – If you can, try to make sure that every machine is network addressable. You might not need it right then, but trust me… It’ll come in handy at some point or another. Wireless N is an option as well, but a Gigabit Ethernet connection is better.
4. Install remote monitoring software – VNC, Apple Remote Desktop, Windows Remote Login, whatever you have available, put it in there. It may save you a long stressful drive somewhere. Of course, this kind of requires each machine have network access. See, I told you #3 would come in handy.
5. Use UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) whenever possible – You don’t want a power blip taking down your piece. A relatively inexpensive UPS can provide enough protection and piece of mind that you really should just plan purchasing one for each kiosk right from the start. Make it part of your routine hardware estimation process.
6. Test their temperature, modify their cabinets or cases accordingly – Computers get hot. Frequently, cabinets for installations are tight and offer poor ventilation. As part of your testing and burn in, run a temp monitoring software. Note the PCs temp after 5 minutes running… Then 50 minutes. Then 5 hours. If the PC is still running, great. If the temp seems a little higher than you think it should be (Anything over 65-70° C is cause for alarm, IMHO), you probably need better ventilation. If you can switch PCs to a lower power usage (and thus lower heat) model, great, do it. If not, it’s time to modify the cabinets. Put an exhaust fan or two in the cabinet. Get some standard or even small sized PC fans, and wire them into the power supply via a Molex connector. See the temp drop accordingly.
7. Schedule their startup and shutdown – A timed circuit typically does startup and shutdown of an exhibit. This is easy for the museum or convention center staff to manage. This is also generally bad for your hardware’s long-term health. I recommend scheduling the shutdown via a scheduled task on a PC. A Mac has this capability in the Energy Saver preferences. Automated startup is also nice to have on an exhibit, as it requires a lot less human intervention on the beginning of a day. Macs again win in this department as the OS manages it. On a Windows PC, you are going to need to set this up through the computer’s BIOS. A safe and programmed startup and shutdown is going to lead to less HDD issues and far less Windows disk checks, etc. In conjunction with this, obviously, putting your app in the system’s startup folder is a great idea, but you may want to write a startup.bat batch script or AppleScript to start things up a bit after the system has fully initialized. This will allow for any extra drivers or third party utilities to be running before the experience kicks in.
8. Protect their desktop – This is of paramount importance. If your app crashes, what does the visitor see? Hopefully very very little. I recommend using an application like Public PC Desktop to lock everything down. The desktop will be hidden, keyboard input can be limited and virtually everything you don’t want a user to mess with is disabled. I have used this utility many times and it has never failed.
9. Install an “Always UP” utility – I know your app will never crash, ensuring that the kiosk is always doing what it should, right? Well, just to be on the safe side, consider running a utility like “Always Up”. This little genius monitors active processes to check that your desired app is running. If it is, no big deal. If the app has hung or otherwise crashed it can restart it. Additionally, the application can be configured to email a contact should something prove to be unrecoverable. Bullet proof.
10. Clone their hard-drive – When everything is done, you have handed off the keys and sent them the last bill, what sort of security/peace of mind have you provided? If you give them an exact clone of the harddrive of the machine you just installed for them, a lot. Trust me on this, the extra $100 for the disk and the little effort it takes today to produce a drive clone is totally worth it. Acronis on a PC or Super Duper on a Mac to help you with that.
11. Purchase the OEM support – Most PC manufacturers offer 24/7 next support or at least 2 day support for business hours. These agreements usually cover just about anything that would happen to a PC in average situations. Fried Motherboards, failed power supplies, etc. are all covered. Pay for this now or you’ll pay for it later.
12. Use as low power of a CPU/GPU as possible to get the job done – It’s easy to get enamored with hardware. A hot new CPU and ridiculously powerful GPU are fun to develop for. You can really stretch yourself and provide top tier experiences for your client. A small bit of guidance though. If you can provide a great experience on a second generation of technology or a slightly less powerful CPU, do it. The extra reliability offered by a second or third revision of a machine is oftentimes a significant increase in stability and heat/cooling problems.
13. Hide the cursor well – Purchase a utility to hide the cursor. Using the Windows control panel is a PITA and unreliable.
14. Use logging software – Crank up logging in the Windows Event viewer. Write your applications so that they keep a simple log of their activity, too. If a problem ever does arise with your work, you’ll at least have a good starting ground for analyzing what went wrong, when it went wrong and where to go from there.
15. Disable auto updates if possible – Windows update and all the other auto updating software options on your PCs should probably be turned ff if you can manage it. A PC that doesn’t require tons of security patches etc should especially have this service disabled.

So, there you go. Hope this is helpful information. What steps are you taking to provide a stable installation that I haven’t covered here? I’d love to hear anything you have come across.

For those that come from a traditional Computer Science background, this sort of talk is like second nature. For those of us with a Graphic Designer brain trapped in the body of a hoodie wearing developer, it’s like command line jargon soup wrapped in a veneer of pocket protector CYA. Regardless of your preconceptions, it’s hard to argue with results. This sort of agile/test driven development generally leads to good results. The Iona Group has been using TDD, Source Control and Automated Builds in varying degrees for a about year now, and I can say that our stuff is better faster stronger (harder – Daft Punk!), less buggy and more often then not ahead of schedule far more frequently, now that we are using it.

This isn’t mean to be an article extolling the virtues of the process, or even a specific break down of how the individual pieces (SVN, Issue Tracking, Hooks and Automation) need to be implemented on a piece by piece basis. There are a lot of specific posts on how to use SVN, or how to write a unit test, etc. What I’d like to do here is give a you a topgraphical/flowchart view of how this process works in our case, and some info on how we are leveraging the hardware and platforms to do it. This seems to be like a secret sauce that everybody keeps to themselves, so the shared knowledge about the overall setup for such a configuration rarely gets shared due to intellectual property or security concerns.

In regards to our setup, I’m sure that this system is simplistic in many people’s views, but for our size and purposes, it works really well. This system is primarily used with developing PHP web apps, CMS sites and Flash/Flex/AJAX RIA. Of course the standard HTML, CSS, JS, XML get run through the system, so it’s pretty flexible. Finished binary assets (Graphics, etc) also get checked in, but the graphic design process files (PSD, AI) remain on the separate file server on our internal network.

A little on our team. We’re about 75/25 split… most of us being on Macs. We use the Creative Suite for all our production work and use Eclipse as a primary IDE, though I still use BBEdit for casual text editing. (Casual text editing? You know, like with a linen shirt on and drinking a mojito or wearing a scarf). We have XAMPPinstalled on our machines because it has a full Apache, MySQL, PHP stack on it and is fully cross platform, as opposed to WAMP or MAMP. Everything about XAMPP is awesome, except for the stupid stok photo models on their site.

Our local dev servers are virtualized Linux boxes in some tidy racks that our IT Director graciously keeps running for us. They’re pretty rock solid and haven’t ever given us a problem that a reversion to a snapshot couldn’t fix. They are Apache servers (though we do also have some Windows IIS server for when they are needed, too), running PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x along with Tomcat and Red 5. Standard fare, really.

We use SVN for version control. Specifically, we use a hosted SVN service at Assembla.com. They handle our issue tracking, project wikis and Scrum. It really is a fantastic package and well worth the money. It’s more feature rich and as easy to use as Unfuddle and I have never once experienced an outage like some of my friends have using other services. If you are interested in trying them out, I highly recommend it. They offer a 30 day trial. During signup, enter ‘chadu’ in the “Referral code” field to get a $5 discount on your first paid month. When we first signed up, we had a Mantis Bugtracker database with thousands of issues in it. They took our SQL file and imported it for us. Pretty sweet.

The really cool part comes when you start tying the things together with post commit hooks. Assembla (and SVN in general) allows you to fire post commit actions to publish files, do things like automate builds etc after you have done you home and independently run your local tests, etc. Very cool indeed. This helps take the human error part out of file migration from a development server to a system testing server. You won’t forget to upload that JS library, etc if it was included in the commit. Very nice. After a promotion of a successful build, any number of other post commit hooks can fire off shell scripts to RSYNC a directory back toa file server for cold storage/backup purposes.

We like the power and flexibility, and we really like the burndown charts and metrics… It just makes reporting that much easier for us.

In the creation of the process we use, I made a couple diagrams to help document it all. It’s not really proprietary info and I think a lot of people can benefit from seeing it diagrammed out this way. Dan Roam has a great book called “Back of The Napkin” and I truly believe in the power of a good drawing to help people understand a concept.

So, here is a step by step picture of the issue tracking and testing process…

So, what do you think? Are you applying this sort of process to your Flash work? If so, how’s it working out for you? If not, does seeing something like this help you get closer to it?

Alright… so now that you have a bit of a grasp on the process, how do you go about setting up the environment and handle the progression. What machine does what and where is it located? Here is a simple view of what we are doing for most sites.

I’d like to hear from you if you are doing something similar to this. I’d also like to hear if your set up wildly deviates from this. Let me know your thoughts.

If you are interested in a higher quality PDF of the above files, click here to download it.

This setup has greatly increased our quality level and productivity. When you add in things like data safety (multiple file backups, full version control, tape backups and offsite storages), it makes everyone feel a lot more secure, too.

Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them:

The Iona Group will be going, with myself, Mark Tovey and John Feser all attending. Mark and I will be presenting. Our topic is about the use of APIs in eLearning. It’s a topic that is pretty dear to us. We have learned quite a bit about this through our experience getting Doctum up and running. The concept of building a resuable, sharable codebase is very prevalent in web and interactive development, but we have found that in the eLearning community it is relatively unheard of.

This could be due to a number of things, but by and large it appears to us that this may be in large part due to the fact that eLearning tools are not focused on separating content from presentation and behavior.

This practice is the foundation of of OOP and implemented in all of our work at The Iona Group. We’re happy to talk to others about it.

Here is the link to our presentation… check it out.

I was in an environment with a number of people that use a computer only as a communication tool, email, etc. Their level of web saviness and familiarity with computing in general is pretty low. They are casual technology users in general, not early adopters. They are all what you would consider white collar workers in various economic sectors. All are pretty successful in life, with nice homes, families and all the things that come with it. All of them great people, and people I consider myself lucky to know. Their lines of work and the careers they have built through their hard work are all things to be proud of, and rightfully so. I feel the same about the choices I have made in my professional life, too.

There was a clear dividing line between them and myself that was far more important, though much less noticeable than simply being a power user or a casual user of a computer. That line? A clear and driving force behind the work we choose to do. You see, I haven’t really ever considered a career path that didn’t involve design and interactivity. Since high-school, I wanted to be a graphic designer. I avidly learned Photoshop and Illustrator, Aldus SuperPaint and Apple Hypercard, etc… Once in college, I taught myself HTML and dug into Apple Media Tool, Director, and picked up Flash. Since then I have expanded into user experience design, application design and social media design. All evolutions of the same basic tenet, creating and providing superior experiences for the people that use my products, services or solutions.

The paths the others had taken or are currently taking, these friends and many of my other friends included, have been a little less clear. A few years in consulting, maybe a few in real estate or retail, on and on… not really in one sector or even one basic task/goal type. I find this a difficult life path to comprehend. To not love the work you do so much, that it is really about the only thing you want to do, so much that you are willing to take a lower paycheck or see a lull in your billable hours, just doesn’t sound rewarding to me. To be able to move from selling Widget A to selling Widget B without a blink just isn’t me. I love the weekend, but I’m never really working for it.

In the wake of the dot com bomb, I was unemployed for a while. Taking any sort of design oriented gig I could scrounge. Websites, brochures, banners, web games, etc. I interviewed a number of times for creative positions, but to no avail. At the lowest point, after the work dried up and we were seeking to buy a home to start a family, I interviewed for a position selling technology products at a full commission store. The interview was great, I was virtually a shoo-in with my level of expertise on computers, home entertainment gear and the like… then the big question, “What will you do if a position in your previous line of work becomes available locally?” My answer, “I’d probably take it.” They promptly shook my hand and showed me the door. I just couldn’t do it, I needed a design job!

It makes me think. What other career paths are out there that people take that they are so passionate about that they just can’t think of doing anything else? Teaching, Law, Medicine? What? I am anxious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you love what you do? Could you envision yourself in a totally different job or career path? I’ve made my decision. It’s like some sort of tattoo. Design.

Congrats to all involved on these efforts. We did some great work and it got noticed. If you’re interested in learning more about the winning projects (toolsets, process, etc) mentioned in the post… let me know!