We have been heads down at work. We have 3 interactive exhibits set to go live this month. One at a corporate headquarters that uses Red5 for multiuser sync, motion detection and high definition video and moton graphics on 3 52″ LCDs. One that broadcasts live data streams detailing savings gained from a grey water reclimation system and overlays the infographics on high-definition video on a huge 1080p 120Hz display. The other project is a pair of kiosks set to be installed in Bermuda (no, I don’t get to go there to install 
).Once we have some photos/videos of the installs, I’ll try and post them.
Beyond that, we are exiting a first round of usability testing on a great new elearning development application we are building at doctumlearning.com. We used Silverback for our testing. It’s a really really cool tool for Macs that records a screencast and a video feed from the iSight to create a record of the test. Hard to argue with video evidence, after all. The app is coming along strong, feature complete and ready to build some training. We’ve put together a great interface and the Flash based content it outputs is pretty dang nice.
Related to that, I will be attending DevLearn ’08 next week. You can catch up with my twittering and possibly blogging from there. Tim O’Reilly is giving the keynote. Dan Roam is going to be there speaking, as is Dr. John Medina. Should be really really cool. We’ll be demoing at demofest, showing of the work we did with the International Society of Arboriculture that uses the Doctum platform. Psyched!
There is a one day Adobe elearning summit going on there, too, I’m definitely hitting that one. Are you planning on attending? Let me know! I’m interested in meeting up with other developers out there, so track me down.
If you twitter, be sure to check out the dl08 hashtag on twitter search and the devlearn08 one as well. This blog post here has a list of fellow twitterers headed to devLearn. Check it out.
This one’s from my Mashups class. The first project, was to build an RSS Reader. I’ve already posted a quick tutorial on how to build an RSS reader with Adobe Flex. Here’s a simple one that uses JQuery to get the feeds and then loop through them to output them to the browser window. Piece of cake for many of you, yes, but if you have never used anything but the DOM and plain ol’ JavaScript, you may be scared by the whole AJAX fad on teh intarwebs these days. JQuery makes it super easy to look like a Javascript rockstar. I teach a lot of students that haven’t ever touched a library of code like JQuery before, so tutorials like this are pretty valuable to some readers..
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A little over a year ago, I converted my then dormant domain, Mediadinosaur.com, into a gossip focused news aggregator (previously, it was a media/celeb focused community and blog). It now captures feeds from a number of high profile celebrity rags (Egostastic, TMZ, E!, WWTD, etc) and lets you get your fan fix in one centralized place. I built it in Flex to highlight the ease of use of the Framework and the power that the HTTPService and E4X gives you in getting and parsing XML. I’m using the site as an exercise for my Mashups and RIAs class as an introduction to developing with Flex and a easing into the concept of reading and using XML feeds and services for students that may have never used either of them. So let’s take a look at how this all comes together. (more…)
Much has been written about the recent announcement of Google and Adobe working together to make Flash content indexed and searchable. Much written, with no real concrete answers. Lots of tests (A very good one done by Peter Elst), a contest held by Ryan Stewart (Flexmagically Searchable, FTW!), and some well formed opinions from SurviveStyle and YourSeoPlan. John Dowdell has also tackled the topic via comments on several sites as well as a post on his site.
While the idea of having rich media crawlable by a juggernaut like Google is indeed exciting, I’m not holding my breath waiting for the results to materialize. With SWFObject and the other myriad Javascript embed methods, the use of XML and AMF to retrieve dynamic data and all the other things that are going on in a modern Flash/Flex RIA, a panacea seems near impossible to imagine after over a decade of less than stellar results in this area.
It sounds a tad overdramatic, and I know this. But let’s just reflect for a moment on how it’s come to this. It’s a matter of purpose and function of the media you are creating. When designing an experience site or CMS powered brouchureware site you obviously are not making the same sorts of design decisions you might be making in a state/screen based RIA. They are just two completely different beasts. These two basic groups of sites (yes, I’m oversimplifying) ‚Äì Experience/Brouchware sites and RIA havem completely different needs. Because of this, the tools and techniques you use to build them are most likely going to be different. Standard sites are built for searchability and accessiblity by the widest range of users, because making sure the sites are found is of paramount importance! RIAs often have a narrower audience and are built to replace a desktop app or minimize clicks over a basic web application… making the tasks at hand as easy as possible is the key here.
You can kind of see where this is going… I very rarely would recommend using a rich media tool to build an average B2C or B2B site that doesn’t need rich media functionality. Rolling your companies marketing message up in a binary blob that requires a plugin, or burying it in a heap of JavaScript seems like commercial suicide. Poor indexing, potentially poorer performance in comparison with Plain Old HTML, incompatibility with plugin versions, market penetration, the mobile users, etc, etc… For this reason, unless you are a major player in your industry who has little need for keyword density simply because of your domain name and real world brandname recognition (think Nike, Apple, Disney, etc), you should think twice about using a tool like Flash or Silverlight to build your public website. If you get a site from me, and you fall into the average company size and profile, you are probably going to get a site designed with standards in mind. Something that degrades gracefully, something that uses semantic markup. You get the idea. Flash might be sprinkled throughout for visualizations or other enhancements, but the bulk of the site is going to be pretty much straightforward best practices based design.
On the other hand, often an RIA doesn’t necessarily require indexing at all. Indexing interior views of a mail app or information dashboard doesn’t seem logical. Strange question arise when you think about this, too.. security, landing pages, transitions, breadcrumbs, etc. For cases where an RIA does need to be indexed, maybe a SWFAddress method of enabling deep linking might be adequate to serve as signposts. For Flash based experience sites, a Google sitemap and some very clever use of WebServices feeding SWFObject/SWFaddress enabled Flash and AJAX may also work for you (Check out the recently relaunched BobDylan.com, built by some friends of mine to see the results of this. A nod to Brian and Steve on that one. Great work indeed.)
In conclusion, I’m optimistic but not overly so for the future of indexed rich media. Without a very detailed spec and best practices documentation, tests like Peter’s and contests like Ryan’s are going to be about the extent of success in this arena for the immediate time frame. Reading the comments at Peter’s post kinda confirms this for me. Lots of confusion and lack of knowledge about how this all interfaces with typical search engine directives like robots.txt etc… It’s all a very new area, so I’m thinking things will become more apparent soon.
After a long wait, I finally got my invite to a.viary. One word… WOW! This is RIA the way it was meant to be. Absolutely easy to use UI design, great user feedback, fast responsive interaction and tons of fun. These flex apps that I have tried out, Peacock and Phoenix are the tools I currently have access to. Phoenix is a Photoshop clone built in Flex and Peacock is a node based pattern generator built in Flex. Unbelievable! I have had a ton of fun with them already and can’t wait to see what comes out of this site. Great work by the Worth1000 team.
I have already given out my 5 invites, but hope to get some more soon. If you are interested in playing, direct message me on Twitter and send me your email… If I get more invites, you’ll be on my list. Until then, check out these images I created using Peacock… so fun!
It’s no secret that I dig mashups. There is a particularly cool one that popped up recently called Wordle. It generates a word-art style tag cloud from a collection of text, an RSS feed or uses your Del.icio.us bookmarks tags. A very nice packing algorithm and some good color and typography customization options make the end results pretty aesthetically pleasing. Using my web design bookmarks (used very often as a teaching resource for my students), produced this masterpiece:
You should go check the site out. A pretty good selection of creations is popping up over there. I’m not sure about the actual construction of the piece, but due to it being a Java Applet, I’m guessing it was built with Processing.
Last week at RIAPalooza a number of the presenters mentioned the use of animations in the design and development of RIAs. No one got very specific, but nearly everyone agreed that some amount of animation was helpful in assisting users with cues on how to use the application or letting them know that they have affected something. In general, I would agree. In my opinion, before you go off and idly start animating those widgets or state changes, though, it would pay off to think through the applications design and goals and make sure that those animations streamline the user experience, or in some other way ease the use of the application making it more pleasurable to work with. Read on for some helpful tips to consider. (more…)
Are you in the Chicago area? Do you like RIAs? If so, are you attending RIAPalooza? If not, why not? If you are planning on attending, drop me a line. Also, be sure to follow the RIAPalooza feed at Twitter. I will be tweeting from the event, and hope to have a nice long recap post on my site sometime Sunday. Here’s to a 1st time for a promising event! Hope it goes well, I’m excited and optimistic. They have some interesting speakers,¬† great sponsors, some excellent sessions and its in my favorite city in the USA.
Last April, I wrote a post listing some reasons why I felt Silverlight would not succeed. That post garnered a lot of visits, comments and a few trackbacks. It’s still a highly trafficked post of mine. Furthermore, that post is the number one Google result for “silverlight IDE” and ranks pretty highly for a number of Silverlight related phrases like “silverlight penetration”, “silverlight market penetration”, and a few others along those lines. I’d like to revisit some of those points to see how things have changed in the past year. I was inspired to revisiti this after reading Robert Scoble’s friendfeed topic on this subject. Read on to see the progress. (more…)