A new year. A new venue. A new format. Well, not completely true, it is a new year, but the February Auckland Web Meetup has met at the Vodafone NZ headquarters before and has tried the 20×20 format before. But this was a new venue and new format for my experience with the group. Most recently held in the smaller quarters of the Media Design School, the meetup was moved this month to the spacious conference hall in the vodafone headquarters, giving it the air of a conference instead of a meetup (complete with name badges, and, of course, free pizza and beer).

The format—20×20—stood for 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. Actually, 20×20x13 would be even more descriptive, 13 being the number of presenters to grace the stage. What was covered? Here’s a brief recap by presenter:

• Daniel Too kicked off the night with a quick run-through of the Gaia Framework for Flash, authored by Steven Sacks (Side note: I had the pleasure of seeing Steven present at FITC Toronto in 2009, his presentation is available on Adobe TV—view it here!)

  The Gaia Framework takes care of common Flash tasks such as implementing SWFObject, page transitions, bulk preloading, deep-linking, and memory management.

• Keri Henare, CTO of pixelfusion.co.nz, showed another framework from another programming realm—the Symfony framework for PHP. Keri showed that Yahoo! is using Symfony and even New Zealand’s own eventfinder runs on the framework. He then ran through the reasons he likes Symfony, such as its code generation, community, and license. He finished up with a high-level run-through of its technical features, such as its dependency injection structure.
• Ben Gracewood changed the tone of the stage with a presentation sprinkled with random inspiration and RC airplanes, which culminated with the idea of taking something that’s purposeful and re-purposing it. He gave SketchPad as an example of using modern web development technology in a way that hadn’t been conceived of prior.
• Vaughan Rowsell promoted his MGRD method of getting things done, which stood for Motivation, Goal, Risk, Do it! (Right to the end). He used his recent 2300km bicycle ride from Stewart Island to Cape Reinga as a case study in its efficacy. His bicycle ride is documented on nzuphill.co.nz. He also mentioned that he is founder of vendhq.com, a retail management software webapp.
• Andrew Hedges, gave a noble presentation on open source software that saves lives, termed “Humanitarian Software.” He showcased Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases Disasters (InSTEDD), an organization that coordinates disaster relief through SMS technology. He pointed out that while 25% of the world’s population may be online, 60% have cell phones, making SMS a farther reaching technology. Most recently InSTEDD went to Haiti to help with disaster relief using software they had only just finished developing in December 2009. Andrew also pointed out the twitter account of Eduardo Jezierski, director of technology at InSTEDD.
• Danushka Abeysuriya of Rush Digital Interactive emphasized the rapid progression of technology, evinced today by the rapid development in the capabilities and appearance of mobile phone software. He likened the time to go from the first 3D PC computer games to modern immersive games was 20 years, while the same development progression has happened in 2 years on mobile phones, due to the fact that many of the lessons learned developing PC games can be transferred over to mobile development. For 3D mobile development OpenGL ES 2.0 was mentioned. He also made many predictions for the direction of mobile phone technology, such as double-sided phones, integration with cloud computing, built-in projectors and stereoscopic displays. Lastly he showcased his own 3D engine he’s developing for iPhone and Android OS.
• Rowan Wernham gave some tips for getting a social media idea off the ground. He used his own project, sna.pr as an example (some kind of mapping web app—I’m not sure?). He also gave resources for start-ups such as the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, crunchbase.com, and compete.com.
• John Ballinger, meetup organizer, presenting a fast-paced presentation on “The Rule of Three,” a small guide to making better software. The points are as follows:
  • Test, test, test
  • If, if, if – if there are three if statements in a row, something is wrong!
  • Frown upon multi-dimensional arrays, such as catz[x][y][z], they are slow and hard to update.
  • Break code up and keep each chunk short; under 300 lines.
  • Use one-line conditional statements, in the format of x=(i.Cat)?1:0. (Personally I think this is only good for very short conditionals, as it is arguably less readable.)
  • Use guard statements
  • Utilize OR booleans in conditionals (Note: I may have misunderstood this slide!)
  • Debugging is twice as difficult as the code, if the debugging is too difficult, the code is too difficult.
  • Write expressive function names.
  • Learn regex.
  • Comment your code.
  • XML – not your friend, use plists or (if using Flash) AMF.
  • Question everything. If something isn’t working, it may not be the code. Look at the process.
  • Utilize your file system, you don’t need to store everything in a database.
  • Debug by talking. By explaining a programming issue, if can often be easier to solve.
  • Avoid premature optimization.
  • Refactor early.
  • Exercise (as in physical). Get it!
  • Always code as if the guy maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
• Lisa Phillips presented on multi-tasking. She emphasized that web development is inherently working in an environment with lots of distractions. If procrastination becomes a problem, it’s important to figure out why you’re procrastinating. If it’s because you don’t know what’s next you’re in trouble.

  She gave “Lisa’s Pick & Mix”:

  • Establish priorities.
  • Make lists (hand-written, and make post-its readily accessible in your environment).
  • Know what you’re doing.
  • Plan.
  • Revise your plan.

  For task management, Lisa mentioned Getting Things Done, The Pomodoro Technique, Inbox Zero, and Remember the Milk. Lastly she mentioned that the Apple App Store has a whole category on Productivity and that you should “find out what works for you.”

• Walter Rumsby, who emphasized that he’s just a “guy who works at Orion Health” and does not speak for them presented all his slides as twitter tweets, creative! He introduced that he works on software for hospital records and then gave a smattering of web development tips, such as that web standards are not about making your website work with a 10 year-old browser, but making your 10 year-old website work on a browser today.
• Dr. Carey Stevens, of Spark Dental Technology, showcased his company’s use and work on the FireFox add-on Zinc for online dental imagery. He then listed some tips for having a good development environment, such as using Continuous Integrated Testing, Mochitest, and Buildbot. Plone CMS was also mentioned.
• Tristan Phipps presented on fear. Specifically “Fear Killing Creativity.” His tips for tackling creative decisions under fear (of failure, etc.) are:
  • Break your behavioral coping mechanism patterns, and build new ones through repetition.
  • Make radical changes.
  • Face your fears (for a dopamine hit when you conquer them!).
  • Take time out every day.
  • Learn something every day and find a mentor.
• Dave George, of Serato Audio Research (a firm dealing with software for DJ’s and musicians) presented the following problem when presenting a user with a selection they’ve already encountered: “we waste their time showing them the same stuff again.”

  Using whitelabel.net—a website his company runs for Pro DJ’s—as an example, Dave summed his presentation up at the end with three points: We are all busy, so… Listen to their (your users) decisions and focus [them] on new decisions.

I just attended the September Auckland Web Meetup, which had a full house of 200, free beer and pizza, and interesting presentations on the direction of web browsers.

To kick things off Microsoft technical evangelist Giorgio Sardo introduced IE8, which looks to be the most standards compliant browser from MS yet. Giorgio emphasized the large number of test cases IE8 has undergone. Giorgio showed some scripting and JSON encoding/decoding in IE8. He then went on to demo a cross-browser comparison tool, SuperPreview, which can be run as a stand-alone app or as part of Expression Web 3. A free version to compare the different versions of Internet Explorer is available here. The paid version includes other browsers in the comparison beyond Internet Explorer.

After pizza and drinks, Robert O’Callahan and the Mozilla team showed some of the upcoming features of Firefox. Some highlights included:

• Support for accelerometers – with the necessary hardware the browser can recognize the tilt and orientation of the viewing device.
• WebWorkers – An API for asynchronous JavaScript threaded processes (multiple processes running at the same time). Quite interesting!
• Drag and Drop, between browser windows, and from the desktop.
• 2D drawing using the Canvas tag – A simple vector example with apparent rigid body dynamics was shown.
• 3D rendering using WebGL – This was the classic “3D teapot” demo, and I was quite impressed since performance seemed very good in the example.
• Video tag – A variety of video scenarios were shown, such as a plain video tag with the browser’s built-in controls (for play, etc.), one that used JavaScript/CSS to overlay subtitles on the video, and some impressive examples that introduced an image into a green-screened video using just the browser. Also shown was overlaying and manipulating pictures, video, text, and Canvas elements on top of a video that had two reference points, a sort of augmented reality demo. This reminded me a lot of what can be done with BitmapData in ActionScript. A final demo on motion tracking was too cutting edge and crashed the browser.
• DOM storage – an better alternative to cookies for local storage.
• Client-side database storage – Robert cautioned that this may be a bit in the future yet, but the idea is to have a database on the client that can be used for storage, with the potential to have web applications that when offline work better than previously possible.
• Geolocation – Allows the browser to notify websites where you are located.

It was all very interesting. I wouldn’t say I saw anything terribly innovative in its own right, since overall these are technologies that currently or will shortly exist through other means (such as Flash, AIR, Silverlight, etc.), but to see these built directly in a browser is interesting and may open these tools up to a wider field of developers.

UPDATE October 4, 2009: I forgot to mention Geolocation, it’s been added.

After all the rewards and hard work of putting together the 2009 Spring <br /> Conference last month, as well as finishing up my Master’s degree, I rather quickly and surprisingly found myself opening up an exciting new chapter in my life. I am now living in Auckland, New Zealand working as a lecturer at AUT teaching Interactive Media Production I & II. Hopefully between exploring and teaching I’ll have some time to get more posts out here soon.

Once again I had the pleasure of working as a technical editor with O’Reilly Media and author Rich Shupe on his latest title, Learning Flash CS4 Professional. It has just recently been published. Check it out!

This blog just turned 1 year old today, how neat! In celebration of one year of blogging, here are 5 reasons why you should start a blog:

1. It helps you clarify your thoughts – Nothing makes something clearer in your own head than writing it down for others to read.
2. It is your public portfolio and resume – Move back through these posts and you will see my areas of expertise and what discipline I am working in at any given time.
3. It’s a repository of useful links and resources – Want to store a link or a useful tidbit of information where you can easily find it again? Blog it.
4. It allows you to share your ideas and thoughts – Ask questions of your readers, share links to your most useful posts elsewhere. A blog isn’t just about one-way communication.
5. It brings a worldwide audience to your doorstep – After the United States, my second greatest number of visitors are from India. It’s always good to be reminded that while we live on a globe with a vast array of different cultures, we retain common interests across them.

My third pilgrimage to Toronto to attend FITC has come and gone. Knowing the routine of the conference made this the best one yet for me. I finished off my deck of old business cards from last year and filled my wallet with a stack of cards from others.

Here are few notes and links:

• For me, the conference kicked off with Alec Cove’s Beautiful Algorithms: Design from Nature and Mathematics, which fell in the thematic vein of sessions I’ve seen from Keith Peters and Grant Skinner, which described beautiful algorithms inspired by or mimicking nature.
• The Adobe keynote on day one was a tad disappointing as it was filled with what was (to me and those I talked to) old news. I did pick up one link from it when Justin Everett-Church demoed an interesting augmented reality piece by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for GE—a piece which later won at the FITC award show. See it here (use FireFox, I had issues in Safari). A great interactive piece, though for a site promoting more environmentally friendly energy practices, the requirement to print out a piece of paper for the sole purpose of interacting with the site seemed disappointingly off message.
• Another Adobe session covering Adobe Flash Catalyst was an interesting introduction to this product, which I’m sure I’ve not seen the last of. Some features, such as the four pre-defined states of a button and existence of a timeline (though time, not frame, based thankfully) were reminiscent of the Flash IDE.
• Check out SourceBinder, a node-based programming environment. Build programs visually by linking nodes of functionality together. Also, VizualPV3D, a GUI interface for laying out PaperVision3D scenes.
• Grant Skinner’s Things Every Flash Developer Should Know was one of my favorite sessions of the conference. Well prepared and refined, as I’ve come to expect from Grant’s presentations. Check it out online here.
• There were a number of frameworks shown this year, two I hadn’t previously heard of:
  • Gaia Flash Framework, for quickly building mini-sites (showcase-style sites was my impression)
  • Moccasin – “Flex framework for visual object-based editor applications.”

  Additionally, there was a session on PureMVC, which was to be presented by its inventor, Cliff Hall, but was instead covered by someone else whose name I failed to jot down.

• The final general session was an engaging presentation by Jared Ficklin of Frog Design, who taught much about sound and sound visualization through his hour talk/flame-and-smoke-machine-laden-sine-wave-surfin-act. A very fun session . Within his presentation, Jared showcased the work of the talented Annika Hamann at Das Plankton, creator of some remarkable sound visualization work housed at foulowl.com.

Microsoft’s Web design and development conference, MIX09, is currently happening in Las Vegas, Nevada. As is tradition with major corporate-backed events such as this one, a slew of new products were released. Of note is the Silverlight 3 beta (available here, but it sounds like it is very much a preview). The new features are extensive and—for many of them—sound very Flash-esque (Ryan Christensen’s site provides a nice write up of the new features). Along with Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8 was released out of beta, and thankfully sounds to be the most standards-compliant Internet Explorer version to date. It is foreseeable that if Microsoft were able to bundle the Silverlight plugin with a standard’s compliant browser that gained broad support from developers—without raising the eyebrows of antitrust regulators—that Flash would be presented with its greatest obstacle in maintaining its present dominance in the interactive website space.

In the mean time, while Adobe and Microsoft develop increasingly similar looking products, Google and open source initiatives such as JQuery UI are moving JavaScript beyond a mere scripting language. Google has launched a site called Chrome Experiments, which showcases contemporary interactive pieces built entirely in JavaScript. Many are quite impressive, for example, this piece could easily be a Flash piece (turn your speakers on). I noticed Flash master Mr. Doob has a piece up there too. The about page begins “We think JavaScript is awesome.” I’ve been playing with JQuery UI recently and I do have to admit it has come a long way from what JavaScript was capable of when I really seriously last played with it in the late 90’s.

At any rate it’s exciting to see the explosion of possibilities all these projects will bring. More than ever the Web feels like the digital frontier.

I learned about this too late unfortunately(!), as many of the workshops are now full, but there is a symposium called ArtAndCode happening next week, March 7-9, 2009, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. I am very busy right now, but am quite tempted to attend the first two days. General admission is only $25. The symposium is organized by the very creative Golan Levin, and has a long list of creative professionals speaking, including Ben Fry, co-creator of Processing.

Mozilla Labs has a design challenge to encourage students to answer this question. In their own words:

As the Web becomes even more ubiquitous, we’ll never have to leave it. Whether it’s on touch tables, giant wall-sized screens, mobile devices, or just our computers, exploring the interactions for browsing a windowless Web will become ever-more important in the next couple of years.

To get started, you’ll need to submit a mockup of your idea. This can be anything from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic or video.

Unfortunately the deadline for the initial phase is only 3 days away, on March 1st!

Today was a big news day for mobile content developers—at least in the eyes of Adobe, whom, to coincide with their participation in the GSMA Mobile World Congress, released a number of press releases detailing—among the finer technical points—the incredibly large sum of money they are throwing at securing Flash as the de facto platform for multimedia on mobile devices.

A summary of their announcements is as follows:

Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player

Available immediately to developers via Adobe Labs, the Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player, if I interpret it correctly, sounds like a mobile version of Adobe AIR. Using something called the Adobe Mobile Packager, a SWF application can be bundled with a player version checker, an icon, and metadata to provide an installable file that can be distributed to mobile devices with Flash Lite support. Because of the player version checker, developers can target the latest version of the player without worrying about their end-users not being able to view the content. Should they have an earlier version of the player, the version checker can download the latest version without leaving their application. This eliminates the step of requiring a user to navigate to Adobe’s site to download the latest version of the Flash Lite Player, and then returning to the application they were originally attempting to view. With an update, content targeting the latest Flash Lite player can be created with Adobe Flash CS3/CS4 Professional, and Adobe Device Central CS3/CS4.

Flash Lite Developer Challenge

To spur on Flash Lite development, Adobe has launched a competition called the Flash Lite Developer Challenge. The competition is offering a combined total of $100,000 in cash prizes for the best applications developed in the following areas: Game, Lifestyle, Infotainment, Sports, Social Networking, and Most Innovative Application. This reminds me of the ongoing Ribbit Killer App Challenge.

$10 million Open Screen Project fund

The Open Screen Project, an initiative aiming to enable a consistent experience for web browsing and standalone applications is barely a year old, but now thanks to the collaborative effort of Adobe and Nokia, the project has a US$10 million fund available to support developers in creating applications and services for mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices using the Adobe Flash Platform. An Adobe press release provided the following details:

Projects submitted for development will be reviewed by a group of multi-screen application and services experts from Open Screen Project partners including Adobe and Nokia. Focus areas include: entertainment; social networking; productivity; gaming; news and information. Developers retain all rights to their applications while Adobe and Nokia have the right to evaluate, test and promote the content. For more information and details on how to apply, visit www.openscreenproject.org.

Full-fledged Flash Player 10 coming to Smartphones

While the elusive iPhone is still not in this mix, a full-fledged version of the Adobe Flash Player 10 (the full version of the player that runs on desktop PCs) is coming soon to a whole group of smartphones. It will be available on smartphones running Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, Nokia S60/Symbian, and the new Palm operating systems. Devices using Flash Player 10 are expected to hit the marketplace in 2010. This is great news for developers, as it provides continuity between developing for the desktop player and a mobile device.

Adobe Reader Mobile 9 SDK

Adobe announced the Adobe Reader Mobile 9 software development kit (SDK), a proprietary SDK for allowing third-party mobile developers to implement PDF and eBook (utilizing the EPUB format, an XML-based format for eBooks) viewing functionality on their devices. At the moment, the SDK is available to “OEMs, ISV integrators, and mobile applications developers on a case-by-case basis,” so the impact will likely been seen in existing big-name devices. For example, the Sony’s Reader Digital Book already utilizes the Adobe PDF engine.