Revity

Flex in a week update

2008-09-29T08:19:00.002-04:00

Adobe just added Day 4 to their Flex in a Week training. This day focuses on "Adding Visual Appeal." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn Videos

2008-09-09T08:31:00.004-04:00

Picked these up from a discussion over on the Agile Usability group....

Stewart Brand's How Building Learn Videos (1997)

These videos are based on Stewart Brand's book of the same name. (Publisher's Weekly says about the book: From Publishers Weekly
All buildings are forced to adapt over time because of physical deterioration, changing surroundings and the life within--yet very few buildings adapt gracefully, according to Brand. Houses, he notes, respond to families' tastes, ideas, annoyance and growth; and institutional buildings change with expensive reluctance and delay; while commercial structures have to adapt quickly because of intense competitive pressures. Creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and founder of CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review ), Brand splices a conversational text with hundreds of extensively captioned photographs and drawings juxtaposing buildings that age well with those that age poorly. He buttresses his critique with insights gleaned from facilities managers, planners, preservationists, building historians and futurists. This informative, innovative handbook sets forth a strategy for constructing adaptive buildings that incorporates a conservationist approach to design, use of traditional materials, attention to local vernacular styles and budgeting to allow for continuous adjustment and maintenance.)

As you watch the videos, imagine we are talking about usable and adaptive software instead of buildings....

Part 1: Flow

Part 2: The Low Road

Part 3: Built for Change

Part 4: Unreal Estate

Part 5: The Romance of Maintenance

Part 6: Shearing Layers

Flex in a Week

2008-08-06T11:32:00.002-04:00

They are not done with it yet (on Day 3 right now), but Adobe is offering a series of training videos called Flex in a Week.

Flex Notebook: Application Development Phases

2008-08-06T11:16:00.003-04:00

Start of a semi-regular series called Flex Notebook which capture my thoughts on Flex as I distill the various Adobe-provided materials and user guides for myself.

Application Development Phases

Design. The folks at Adobe seem to be big on Design Patterns for Flex and ActionScript. The KingDaddy pattern that they push is the MVC - Model/View/Controller pattern. I'm not going to say too much about patterns except: 1) As a developer, you need to understand them so you can communicate with folks. The MVC pattern is something you should definitely take on as a task to understand today if you don't.

For the seasoned web guys, I want to make this note: Don't treat Flex as simply a V part in your architecture and feel that since it is a View you don't need to architect/design it. In fact, dig into most of the sample Flex apps and you will notice that the cool backend you are so interested in is reduced to a simple datasource in the minds of the Flex app -- a lot of MVC is happening inside the Flex app. Keep a open mind and consider that tiered MVC happens all over the place.

If you want a good book on design patterns for Flex/ActionScript, consider Lott and Patterson's Advanced ActionScript3 with Design Patterns.

Design also includes how you plan on reusing code for the future, how you are going to interact with environments around you (local and backend), how you components are structured and packaged (embedding assets, sharable libraries). All of this can be sketched out on a napkin or two or three. Get together with a senior mentor type person and have them show you some of their napkins.

Configure. Configuration at this point means looking at the environmental pieces of your design and asking if you can actually make this work in a distributed environment. Are there firewalls? Cross-domain data access? Can you configure the servers to allow cross domain access? Can you serve up the assets you need? For example, I tried using Flex inside a portlet being served up by WebSphere portal. Configuration research was a big piece making sure that we could actually deliver .swf files in portlets and extend the portal security into Flex. You are trying to reduce the risk of building something that works fine on your desktop, but can't be deployed into the real world.

Build. Compile-Debug-Test. Flex Builder does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, a little too much. Do you know the difference between compc and mxmlc? If you are a Flex Builder user, it may be worth your time to sidestep that tool and try to build your project by hand using the SDK command line tools. You don't have to do this every time, but you should have experience in doing it at least once. This will come in handy when you get to the point of trying to put Flex into an automated build process.

Flex and Air provide a variety of visual and command line debugging tools. We'll talk about this in greater detail later in the series. One thing to consider is the use of unit testing tools in your development process. We'll discuss later, but in the meantime, check out FlexUnit, a unit testing framework for Flex and ActionScript apps. It comes with a graphical runner as well.

Deploy. General considerations here: 1) Packaging. Do you put everything into one SWF, or do you chop up into pieces and load when needed. Embedding assets vs load on demand, Runtime Shared Libraries, and initial data loading are considerations. 2) Caching. Understand and control both server side and client side caching. 3) Wrapping Flex apps and placing them into web pages. Flex Builder can do automatically, or you can create a wrapper by hand.

Secure. The Flash Player provides a sandbox model of security and provides SSL communication with the backend. Flash does allow writing and reading from the local drives via a mechanism called SharedObjects. Like cookies, they are specific and secured to a specific domain. More on security in the next few weeks.

Summary. This was a fairly brief introduction into building and deploying Flex applications. In the upcoming weeks, we'll touch upon these topics in detail. Next Time: Flex Application Structure.

Browsershots.org

2008-07-10T17:17:00.002-04:00

Cory sends us this link: www.browsershots.org.

From their website:

What is Browsershots?

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

-----------

Note that the resulting Browsershots screen shots are open for all to see, so don't submit anything you want to keep under wraps. They can give you priority queue status for $15 month, not sure if there is any way to pay to keep your screens private.

Flex/Flash .SWF files now searchable

2008-07-01T09:11:00.008-04:00

One advantage that HTML pages have over RIAs is that HTML content is readable and indexable by search engines, while content in RIAs is typically not exposed -- it's hidden from search engine crawlers and indexing systems. This inability to crawl and index RIA content is considered to be somewhat of a hindrance in the adoption of RIA technology.

That's changing.

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they are collaborating with Google and Yahoo! to roll the Adobe Flash player technology into the their respective search systems. This would allow the search engines to read and run .swf files, in turn allowing allow them to dynamically retrieve (crawl) and index information accessed via these .swf files.

According to the press release, Google has already begun to roll this ability out. Yahoo! is not far behind.

GVU Brown Bag: Is it Friendship if One of Us is Computed and Rendered?

2008-06-17T08:43:00.016-04:00

About 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to build an early prototype of a virtual neuroscience instructor and apply it in a classroom setting; students were able to interact with prerecorded video of a professor and ask a set of questions about the human visual processing system. Based on the questions, the system offered video responses, suggested related follow-up questions, and pointed the students to supplemental information.

A few years after that, I began looking at applying virtual characters for customer service applications. At the time, the artificial intelligence components behind these systems was pretty limited. Even some of the products rolling out onto the web used natural language processing and case-based reasoning systems that required a lot of handcrafted' hocus-pocus' to make it match up with the domain. All and all, I felt that the ratio of A-to-I work (artificial work to intelligent work) was a bit too high in these systems -- too much human involvement to make it even remotely believable or useful.

Fast forward 10 years, and Larry Hodges, formerly of Georgia Tech, now of UNC Charlotte, brings us up to speed on the field of virtual characters and sheds some light on what is really possible, and more importantly, what is really effective when trying to place these characters into "serious" situations. This talk is from from the Georgia Tech GVU brown bag series earlier this year. Larry Hodges at GVU Brown Bag 2/7/2008: Is it Friendship if One of Us is Computed and Rendered?

Who in your organization employs User Experience professionals?

2008-06-15T07:45:00.003-04:00

Just wondering aloud about which departments in your organization employ Human Factors / Usability / User Experience?

In my experience with business organizations, "User Experience" (UE) professionals are typically brought into one of 3 organizational silos:
1) Information Technology / Product Development -- UE professionals are assimilated into development teams, are heavily focused on a single product, and those with good technology skills survive.
2) Product Management -- UE professionals contribute to the shaping of a product in early stages, but have a tough time getting support from development teams in follow up and monitoring activities. Good product managers are a UE professionals greatest ally.
3) Sales -- UE professionals are called in to support a variety of needs (such as justification behind product claims), but their tenure is short-lived.

This is gross oversimplification, as there are some blurring lines and responsibilities, but for the most part I've unfortunately seen these roles often pigeon-holed into organizational silos. This means that if the UE professional only works with one department, (s)he gets much less than half of the exposure they need within the organization. The lack of crossover severely limits the organizational insight the role requires.

Your mileage may vary. Do you agree with these categories? Are you or your UE professionals crossing organizational boundaries? If not, what can you do to hald change this?

Twitterific for the Mobile Consumer

2008-06-13T20:10:00.000-04:00

Macworld points us to Twitterrific will tweet on the iPhone. Twitter is great for floating ideas or problems out on the ether and getting instant feedback. Now we get a potentially excellent Twitter client for the iPhone.

I left my laptop at home during a recent vacation -- it was completely displaced by my iPhone this year. There were a couple of times during the trip where I sure could have used some friendly advice from my Twitter friends -- the basic iPhone experience just didn't quite step up to the plate at those times.

So, let's imagine a highly mobile, yet weary traveler sending out a tweet from their iPhone when something goes wrong with their trip. If you were a company that wanted to support this weary traveler -- How would you go about using Twitter to monitor their issues and deliver some business value? If you could help the traveler in need, do you think this would enhance your brand and open up the door to provide other services? Food for thought.

Photoshop Blending Modes

2008-06-10T08:41:00.000-04:00

Kenbo recommends this page about Photoshop blending modes. A quickly scanned visual reference for all of us.

Introductory article on BlazeDS - AMF server for Adobe Flex and Air

2008-06-06T08:44:00.000-04:00

As an alternative to using REST or SOAP with your Flex / Air apps (which have the advantage of ease and familiarity, but the disadvantage of adding an extra layer of translation on client), you may want to consider Adobe's AMF (Action Message Format). Here's a good introduction to AMF: http://www.infoq.com/articles/blazeds-intro (From Kenbo )

Using Macromedia Flex inside JSR-168 Portals

2008-06-05T20:00:00.000-04:00

Andrew reminds us of this post regarding Using Macromedia Flex inside JSR-168 Portals.

Article a little old, but there is not that much web info on the topic since this was written. During my first foray into Flex and Websphere Portal, I never did get the custom tag libraries to work, but maybe it's time revisit the topic.

Speed up your web pages with YSlow

2008-04-25T16:20:00.000-04:00

From the Yahoo Developer Network, YSlow is a handy Firefox/Firebug add-in for getting a grade on the performance of a web page. I had some pages that were making C's, considered the recommendations from YSlow, and now they are Grade A performers. Thanks YSlow!

HttpWatch for IE

2008-04-05T16:15:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of Firebug, especially the Net tab that provides statistics and information on browser/server communication. Not many similar tools out there from IE, but HTTPWatch comes close. The trial version is sometimes handy, but at $295 for a single license, I haven't been able to balance out cost/benefit of the full version yet.