• Nigel Parker, from Microsoft (a sponsor), showed some deep zooming examples using Silverlight (from Seadragon technology, a company MS acquired in 2006), such as the Te Papa pounamu wall and the MSN Fashion Shows 2009. Also demoed was a World Cup Pivot, a data visualization piece using MS Pivot technology. Also mentioned was the preview of IE 9, which is available to be test driven.
• Ludwig Wendzich and Vicky Teinaki gave a talk about natural user interfaces (touchless gesture-based interactions). Despite some technical difficulties while attempting to demo a natural gesture interaction on the webzine he curates, WeeklyRetrospect.com (which, by the way, has an interface worth checking out!), the idea of touchless interactions was conveyed. This was followed by an engaging talk on the future of interface interactions. Mentioned were Adam Greenfield’s book Everyware, Eric Zimmerman, and the Wired magazine’s iPad app. As was often the case over the course of the event, Apple was discussed, and how the Apple model of design was “deceptively” simple, in that it is superficially simple, but (at least in the case of the computer OS) scales to become more complex the further the user digs.
• Rob Coup and Glen Barnes showed a number of open data related resources in NZ, such as open.org.nz, openstreetmap.org, and the upcoming fixmystreet.org.nz.
• Mike Dickison provided the link Wikiteach.info during his talk on the benefits and issues of using wikipedia in academia. Mike also humored the whole event during his reading from 24 Unplugged, about student responses to going 24 hours without being connected to digital communications.
• Lastly, Phonegap – “PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript”

Two things that may be of note for a Flash developer are the Auckland Interface Model, a universal table widget, and Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii projects, which demonstrate methods of using the wiimote to achieve various types of motion tracking. Check out of the video for head tracking, for instance.

Following the conference, I attended the Northshore .Net User Group meeting that happened to be happening after the conference. Keith Patton gave a great presentation on the upcoming Windows 7 Phone platform. He presented an overview of the platform advantages and limitations and gave a live demo of an app in the phone emulator. And winning Windows 7 Ultimate at the end wasn’t bad either, thanks guys! Visit the MS Windows Phone developer site for more information and the developer tools.

• COS (Community of Science) Funding Opportunities – Provides a database of worldwide funding opportunities.
• New Zealand Funding Information Service – includes a link to BreakOut, which is—according to their site—”New Zealand’s primary source of funding information for students, researchers, sports people, artists and those wanting professional development.”
• New Zealand Vice-Chancellor’ Committee Scholarships page – Convenient portal to scholarship pages of New Zealand Universities.
• Rutherford Discovery Fellowship – supports early and mid-career researchers with five-year terms of funding. Ten awards given annually.
• Royal Society of New Zealand Awards page – Provides a list of awards for science or technology in New Zealand. These are for recognition of past achievements, as opposed to grants that would fund future projects. Includes a link to the The Prime Minister’s Science Prizes.

First to present was Michael Andrew, who demoed FlexPMD, an auditing tool for ActionScript/Flex projects. Essentially the tool provides a set of recommendations of how your code could be improved/cleaned up. According to the Adobe Open Source page (linked above), the tool can be invoked from a number of different environments:

• The command line
• Maven
• Ant
• Automator on Mac OS X
• Eclipse
• TextMate
• FlashDevelop

Oddly Flash is not listed, but perhaps Flash is beyond hope as a quality code IDE!

Second to present was Greg Dove, who live-coded a simple touch screen demo on a Dell SX2210T, an inexpensive touch screen display with two touch points capability. Greg also mentioned the best display he’d seen, the 3M M2256PW, which is capable of a whooping 20 simulations touch inputs (view a demo on engadget). Greg’s demo created a group of colored stars that could be resized and zoomed—both as a group and individually. The specific event Greg demoed was the recently added AS3 TransformGestureEvent

After pizza Jove Lam, of TVNZ, demoed a Flash application he helped create for the Sony PS3 in-game browser to view on-demand content. Called TVNZ OnDemand the application featured an intuitive columnar layout for browsing content in different categories. On first impression it was not apparent that the application was essentially a full-screen Flash website. In his presentation, Jove mentioned the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF).

Some highlights:

Production Premium

• Utilizing 64 bit processing, Adobe Premiere and After Effects have greatly increased performance compared to previous versions.
• The rotobrush feature in After Effects looks like a great time saver when rotoscoping video elements (cutting them out from the background).

InDesign (feature tour)

• Much smoother workflow when moving an object inside of its frame. There is now a “donut” area that when clicked allows the internal object to be moved. Also an “autosize” checkbox has been added to allow an object to resize to its frame when the frame is resized.
• A caption text field can be created that will pull metadata out of an image when it is near to it. Great concept!
• There is a new tool called the “Gap tool” that allows the gutter (gap) between elements to be easily resized and moved.
• InDesign CS5 can produce simple interactive presentations that can be exported as a SWF or FLA.

Illustrator (feature tour)

• There are three new tools: the Perspective Grid tool, the Perspective Selection tool, and the Width tool. The first two provide guides for creating artwork along a 3-dimensional perspective, while the last tool—the Width tool—always the manipulation of the width of a stroke along its length.
• There are two new drawing modes: draw behind and draw inside. These, as might be expected, streamline drawing behind and inside shapes respectively.
• The dashed line feature has been to improved to ensure a part of the dash appears on corner points. This eliminates the ugly problem, for example, of having the points on a star disappear when using a dashed stroke.
• Joining two paths has been improved, allowing paths to join by their nearest points.

Photoshop (feature tour)

• The much hyped Content Area Fill is present in many forms throughout the fill and brush tools in Photoshop CS5.
• There is a new sharpening and noise reduction engine that can be utilized in the RAW photo dialog box.
• There are new HDR features, such as a new HDR Toning menu under Adjustments.
• Settings in the effects menu now have a “make default” button, allowing the setting of user-defined defaults.
• The old extract filter for extracting hair has returned in the form of the Refine Edge option of a selection. This is a great time-saver for cutting out hair from a background.
• The new Puppet Warp feature allows for the creation of a mesh that overlays a image that then can be distorted along a set of points.
• Color mixing brush, which allows colors to be blended together (at first glance it appears similar to the Smudge tool).

Of particular interest in this release is the heavy integration of the Flash platform among the Adobe products. Brand new in CS5, Adobe Catalyst is integrated with InDesign and Illustrator, each of which can be used to create Catalyst layouts. Catalyst allows the creation of simple interfaces and interactions without the use of any code.

Not all products were shown that I’m aware of (although I missed about an hour of the event during midday) such as Flash Builder and Sound Booth.

Following pizza Vijay Anto from Rad3 showed some examples of skinning the new Flash Builder component set, named Spark.

First up was Rasheed Abdul-Aziz, Flex/Rails developer at VisFleet. Unfortunately I arrived a little late and missed the beginning of Rasheed’s presentation, but he covered a diversity of Rails and Flex development topics, including discussing refactoring and Domain Specific Languages (DSL). In the later half of Rasheed’s presentation the focus turned to Robotlegs, a fairly recent (as to my knowledge) dependency injection ActionScript 3.0 framework that Rasheed swears by. I’m excited to find some time to try it out! Next, Rasheed demonstrated some of the benefits of using IntelliJ IDEA for Adobe Flex development, and gave it a glowing recommendation. Robert Penner’s AS3Signals (a new approach for AS3 events) was mentioned at the end during Q&A.

Next Vinnie Vivace showed some simple 3D examples using Away3DLite, a slimmed-down version of Away3D. Vinnie also briefly showed a Unity3D example.

The format—20×20—stood for 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. Actually, 20x20x13 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.

Content Management

date
The date module is a flexible date/time field type for the CCK content module.

Content Aggregation & Distribution

feedapi
FeedAPI aggregates feeds on a Drupal website by generating light weight items or nodes from feeds. It provides a straightforward configuration for most use cases and is extensible through an API. FeedAPI integrates with OG (but does not require it).

tattler
Tattler (app) is a Drupal Distribution, an open source topic monitoring tool for today’s Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics you ask it to monitor. Using semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to your organization.

Content Relationships

context
Context allows you to manage contexts for different portions of your site. You can think of each context as representing a “section” of your site. For each context, you can choose the conditions that trigger the context to be active and choose different aspects of Drupal that should react to this active context.

flag
Flag is a flexible flagging system that is completely customizable by the administrator. Using this module, the site administrator can provide any number of flags for nodes, comments, or users. Some possibilities include bookmarks, marking important, friends, or flag as offensive. With extensive views integration, you can create custom lists of popular content or keep tabs on important content.

location
The location module allows real-world geographic locations to be associated with Drupal nodes, including people, places, and other content. The location module allows admins to collect addresses, geocode them (translate addresses to latitude/longitude), and associate locations with Drupal nodes and users. Location data is automatically used to generate GeoRSS within your existing RSS feeds. Location also provides an API so that other modules may take advantage of its address storage and geocoding features.

node reference auto-create (drupal 6 dev version only)
Provides an additional CCK widget type for the base field node reference. The auto-create widget type provides a text-field for input of the node title like standard node reference fields, but instead of linking to existing nodes it creates a node with the specified title on save. When the title is changed during subsequent node saves the referenced node title is changed as well.

node reference field (drupal 6 dev version only)
Allows fields on the node referenced by a node reference auto-create field to be viewed and edited. In other words a node reference is created to a particular node which has additional CCK fields. The additional fields can also be edited along side the node title provided by node reference.

spaces
Spaces allows features (a blog, calendar, casetracker, shoutbox, gallery, etc.) to be enabled and customized in different configurations in different spaces.

E-Commerce

ubercart
An e-commerce suite developed for Drupal.

Ubercart Payment Express (DPS PXAccess and PXPost) (in development)
Payment processor implementation for DPS (Direct Payment Solutions) Payment Express payment gateway.

Filters

better formats
Better formats is a module to add more flexibility to Drupal’s core input format system.

html purifier
HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library. HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it will also make sure your documents are standards compliant, something only achievable with a comprehensive knowledge of W3C’s specifications.

flexifilter
Flexifilter is a module that allows non-admins to create their own, configurable custom filters. It is not limited to simple text replacement or regex replacement; it includes logic such as if() and while() statements, and is easily extendable by other modules.

Image Processing

imagecache
ImageCache allows you to setup presets for image processing.

Package and Deploy

deployment (drupal 6 dev version only)
The deployment framework is a series of modules which are designed to allow developers to easily stage Drupal data from one site to another. This includes content (nodes, taxonomy, users, etc) as well as configuration (views, content types, system settings, etc.).

drush
A command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal, a veritable Swiss Army knife designed to make life easier for those of us who spend some of our working hours hacking away at the command prompt.

features
Features provides a UI and API for taking different site building components from modules with exportables and bundling them together in a single feature module.

legacy (drupal 5 core module)
The legacy module provides legacy handlers for upgrades from older installations. These handlers help automatically redirect references to pages from old installations and prevent page not found errors for your site.

node import (some limitations)
Allows you to import a set of nodes from a Comma Seperated Values (CSV) or Tab Seperated Values (TSV) text file.

table wizard
The Table Wizard facilitates dealing with database tables:

• It allows surfacing any table in the Drupal default database through Views 2.
• Relationships between the tables it manages can be defined, so views combining data in the tables can be constructed.
• It performs analysis of the tables it manages, reporting on empty fields, data ranges, ranges of string lengths, etc.
• It provides an API for other modules to views-enable their tables.
• It provides an API for importing data into tables in the Drupal default database (automatically doing the views integration above).
• It is bundled with an implementation of this API, for importing comma- and tab-delimited files.

Paths & Navigation

admin menu
Administration menu module provides a theme-independent administration interface (a navigation menu for the admin side of a site). It’s a helper for novice Drupal users coming from another CMS, a real time-saver for Drupal site administrators, and definitely a must for Drupal developers and site builders (also includes integration with Devel ).

menu block
Provides configurable blocks of menu trees starting with any level of any menu.

menu trails
This module adds some common-sense usability to Drupal’s menu system

• Menu Trails implements primary/secondary links which keep the current menu trail “active” or highlighted. A handy snippet ready to go into your template.php is included.

• The module provides a means of broadly categorizing nodes (by type or taxonomy) as falling “under” a known menu item. These nodes are not added to the menu tree (keeping the menu admin system sane) but they will trigger the functionality above — preserving navigation state for the user — when viewed.

pathauto
Automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system which the administrator can control.

Performance

varnish (Drupal 7 only)
This module provides integration between your Drupal site and the Varnish HTTP Accelerator, an advanced and very fast reverse-proxy system. Basically, Varnish handles serving static files and anonymous pageviews for your site much faster than any webserver.

Security

mollom
Mollom provides a one stop solution for all spam problems and can protect the following Drupal forms. It offers and intelligently combines:

• CAPTCHAs — both image and audio CAPTCHAs.
• text analysis.
• user reputations.

and can:

• block comment form spam.
• block contact form spam.
• protect the user registration form against fake user accounts.
• protect the password request form.
• block spam on any node form, such as forum topics, articles, stories, pages, and more.

Site Stats

google analytics
Adds the Google Analytics web statistics tracking system to your website.
The module allows you to add the following statistics features to your site:

• Selectively track certain users, roles and pages.
• Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto).
• Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages.
• Cache the Google Analytics code on your local server for improved page loading times.
• Track user segmentation from Drupal profile data.
• Site Search support.
• AdSense support.

UI

flot
This module provides an API for using the flot graphing library. It is designed to make it simple for developers to add flot graphs to their modules or applications.

jquery media
The jQuery Media plugin will automatically turn links to media into their embedded media equivalents. The module works best in conjuction with the File Field module, but may be used in other cases as well.

jquery ui
A wrapper module around the jQuery UI effects library that lets module developers add swooshy, swishy effects to their code.

slider
Slider module creates an effect called the “Coda slider”, which was made famous by the site: http://www.panic.com/coda/.

thickbox
ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal.

vertical tabs
Provides vertical tabs like http://drupal.geek.nz/static/node-form/default/summaries2.html on the node add form.

User Management

node profile
This module builds user profiles as nodes, which opens the opportunity to use the Content Construction Kit (CCK), since it’s possible to make use of the field types, which are available for CCK. The integration of the views module allows one to easily build customizable user listings or even user searches.

user points
This module provides an API for users to gain or lose points for performing certain actions on your site.
In conjunction with other modules, such as the userpoints nodes and comments users can accumulate points for actions such as posting nodes, commenting or moderation duties.

Views

views bulk operations
This module augments Views by allowing bulk operations to be executed on the nodes displayed by a view. It does so by showing a checkbox in front of each node, and adding a select box containing operations that can be applied on the selected nodes.

calendar
This module will display any Views date field in calendar formats, including CCK date fields, node created or updated dates, etc. Switch between year, month, and day views. Back and next navigation is provided for all views.

draggable views
DraggableViews makes rows of a view “draggable” which means that they can be rearranged by Drag’n'Drop. This module makes it possible to organize complex structures with just a few clicks.

views showcase
This module integrates with Views module, so you can use any content type and fields to be displayed as Showcase. In this first release Views Showcase provides 3 slots where you can put an image, a title and a teaser. The fields are provided by Views module, so you can virtually put any field in these 3 slots. In future versions more slots will be provided.

views imageflow
This solution is known as the Cover Flow technique, which has been developed by the artist Andrew Coulter Enright. Now – since being acquired by Apple – it is used in iTunes and the file browser of Apples OSX.