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Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.
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AS3 port of JZLib – A project that uses FZip to decompress zip files in flash. Pretty nice stuff if you need that kind of thing.
I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, begins the real work. The work of consolidating the notes, following up on the contacts made (some virtual contacts finally made real… I always love when that happens) and trying to make some steps to implement the great ideas I picked up there and talked over with new and old colleagues.
The event’s venue is at the Fairmont Hotel and it really is a great place for an gathering the size of Devlearn. Plenty of space, lots of bandwidth coming into the building and a wealth of options in the area for meeting, eating and having some drinks with friends. (Not to mention the great Karaoke, right Aaron?) There are so many positive things to say about the conference, from the expo hall to the lunch conversations and various networking opportunities, it’s clear that the Guild knows how to organize and facilitate a professional and pleasurable conference.
The keynotes from Andrew McAfee (insightful and reassuring), Eric Zimmerman (fun, if a little bit spastic) and Leo Laporte (so good!) were awesome, with me spending a good amount of time geeking out with Mr. Laporte and chatting with him and a small group outside the main ballroom on a variety of topics ranging from Rupert Murdoch’s cluelessness to Android vs. iPhone development hurdles and also what’s next for TWiT and his plans for a great new digital delivery system coming soon for his content. 
I even got a picture with him… check it out. What a great guy and so super nice!
Some other really good things about this year’s event: A lot more real content on mobile delivery. This is notable not for the fact that there were sessions on mobile, but rather that they really were focused on the realities of today… That you can actually start to deliver for mobile due to the ever increasing ubiquity of capable devices. Exciting stuff!
Another welcome change this year, a LOT less commercial-like sessions on tools. This was a major problem last year in my opinion and it’s reassuring after talking o a number of Guild people that they are taking big steps to prevent this from occurring now. Nice work guys. Last year I would say fully 20-25% of all sessions I hit had a very infomercial feel to them and this year I can only recall a couple sessions that I hit that felt like that at all.
The DevLearn 09 Zombie Apocalypse Alternative Reality Game (ARG) set up for the conference was also super cool. I found a lot of great content and was able to connect with other attendees in a new way and overall it was a big success for the organizers and developers. The folks at Tandem and Hybrid Learning did some stellar work getting this up and running and I look forward to hearing more from them on how to roll these sorts of ARGs out to other organizations and events. I could see The Iona Group implementing a solution like this for one of our clients if the opportunity arose. That would be some serious fun!
A number of sessions I saw really had me enthralled and ready to use the knowledge gained. Bryan Chapman’s talk on Repurposing Content for various delivery formats was so poignant and packed with facts. I need to review those notes and share the deck with my coworkers and some clients immediately. Seeing the esteemed Dr. Allen and his lead Flex architect, Patrick Krekelberg, from Allen Interactions, demo their new Adobe AIR app, Zebra was jaw dropping. I wish I had that software right now. I could be busting out some rich interactions and blowing clients minds. 
When finished, you can bet it’s going to shake up the industry. Dr. Allen, certainly had something with Authorware (begrudged as it may be, it was great eLearning development software for it’s day), and this appears to be just as much of a game changer, IMHO. The folks from JTInc. had some good info I will find useful in my localization efforts going forward. Lots of ideas popping! So many many others to mention… Too many to cover here, I think.
That said, the conference wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns for me. There are some real underlying problems I have with the conference’s overwhelming love affair with Social Media or Web 2.0 or whatever you may want to call it. Let me clarify that, please. It’s not that I don’t find Social Media useful for learning, for collaborating, for connecting. On the contrary, my Twitter feed teaches me so much every day. Our company’s Wiki is indispensible. The answers section on LinkedIn is a wealth of treasures I use all the time. This is the real problem… Isn’t it so pervasive at this point that it seems like stating the obvious over and over again is a bit of a waste of time in a conference like this? Do we really need 5-6 sessions about “Leveraging Twitter in your Learning Organization”? Now, I just made that session title up, but it may have been used for real… certainly a version of it was. The topic was beaten to death by the tons of people pounding it in. Given that Mark Oehlert so masterfully managed the Social Learning Jam as a dedicated area for discussion about using Social Media for learning in the eneterprise, it seems a tad silly to have so many concurrent session on the topic.
I may be cast out by talking so candidly about this, but here’s the crux of it for me: If the conference really is called “DevLearn” shouldn’t their be more “Dev” in the schedule? I mean, how hard is it to set up a Twitter account or get your IT to install a wiki these days? Not very. Couldn’t there be a slant to these Social Media topics to bring forth some real “Dev” issues? Here are some examples: “Integrating your Employee’s Twitter feeds into a HR friendly Dashboard using Adobe AIR”, “Connecting MediaWiki to your HR-IS Authentication Systems”, “Securing your Opensource eLearning Systems”, “Rejuvenating Legacy Learning Systems Via WebServices”, “Engaging your IT Department to Create Some Kick Ass Learning”. I would be very interested in hearing what other DevLearn attendees and Guild members think about this line of thought. From my point of view, there was very little content at the conference on actually “developing”, or at least what I would consider “developing”. I think I went to two or three sessions that dealt with real development topics, but that was about it.
Now, on to scheduling and time blocking. An issue I noticed is that with a venue and gathering of this size, you are sure to miss out on some great sessions due to concurrency and overlap of schedules. There were several times this happened this year. This was clearly evidenced to me last evening, when in the hotel lobby lounge I met Steven Wenrich, a highly talented Flash platform developer. He mentioned he had given a session that day on using Papervision in eLearning. Say wha? And I missed it? NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! When I told him that Mark Tovey and I had delivered a session on building your own custom ActonScript API for eLearning development, he felt the same way. Then, another person at the table let us know there was yet another session given at the exact same time on Augmented Reality in Flash for eLearning. This says to me that it may be time to split DevLearn into tracks. One track for software/coding/development. One track for content developers. One track for business/management. Maybe one track for Instructional Designers. Just a thought, but with 6 or more concurrent sessions going on at the same time, it would probably let some people see more content that really spoke to them, preventing walkouts and making sure you maximize your DevLearn experience. By splitting up tracks, it would a lot easier to avoid the scenario I mentioned, and, depending on how many tracks you wanted to create, it could virtually eliminate it.
Let me recap by stating though my criticisms may be sharp, they are meant to be constructive. And I also want to reiterate that the praise given is well deserved, the Guild truly has put together an unbeatable event again and I absolutely feel that it was time well spent and completely worth every penny spent to attend it. I will absolutely be attending again.
I’ll have a full recap on the conference later, but for now, here is our presentation deck. Enjoy!
Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them:
The eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference is rapidly approaching. DevLearn 09 is sure to be a great event with keynotes from Leo Laporte and more. The conference this year is particularly interesting, with a complete ARG being played around a “Zombie Apocalypse” scenario. Teams, points, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more are all coming together in a very fun interactive way. It’s been great so far! I’m looking forward to see where it goes once the conference gets started.
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.
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You likey the Data? Me too! Check out these amazing examples of statistical display genius.
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FLARManager makes integrating FLARToolkit into your Flash projects way easier. Here is an overview of the library and some more links to follow up on.
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The tutorial closes with using JQuery with Actionscript. Very col stuff.
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A thorough and very insightful article to help you reduce CPU usage in your AIR apps.
I’ve written a couple posts on the subject of books I read and collect regarding web design, RIA design and other technology topics. It’s been awhile, though and I have added a number of great books from O’Reilly Media to my shelf. A couple of these, I am currently using or will be using soon in my web design classes at Bradley University. I used to buy books from a lot of presses, but grew tired of quality issues, etc. Typos, factual errors and other things just seem to be a lot more rare in O’Reilly titles than other publishers.
Visualizing Data by Ben Fry – This book is a mind blower. At the same time, it’s a real clarifier. Visualizing rich data sets is no doubt a very deep, heady and amazing beautiful discipline. Most books about it float around in cerebral land, never giving you tactical steps you can make to clear up your charts and make your presentation really pop. This book is fairly Processing focused, but the code is close enough that you can see parallels on how you could maybe achieve similar effects in Flash (if you can get around the slightly less powerful Flash player’s CPU/Memory limits for things like this). The Treemap (a sweet visualization technique!) and data acquisition (useful for mashups) sections were particularly cool in my mind.
Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer – I really think this book kicks ass. Great pictures, some awesome tips on how to storyboard and test gestural UI and much more. This is a somewhat self explanatory discipline once you get deep into it, but the photo reference in it is worth the price alone. Some reviewers on Amazon were pretty harsh about the book not having enough code or something in it, but really, if you want API specific code samples on how to do deep interactivity go buy some books on that specific API. I’d call those reviewers dipshits, but that would be rude.
High Performance Websites by Steve Souders – Not surprisingly, this is pretty much YSlow in book form. Steve Souders was once Chief Performance Yahoo! and is currently web performance evangelist at Google (and one of the chief minds behind YSlow). This book is fantastic and since its a super short read and written pretty plainly, it can often be used to start off client or management conversations regarding misconceptions they may have about website performance. I highly recommend this title for it’s concise writing, inexpensive advice and a clear ROI it brings your sites. I guess he has a new book out that goes a step or three beyond this, but I haven’t picked it up yet.
Painting the Web by Shelly Powers
– This is a dense book, covering virtually every aspect of graphics on the web. From server side image creation to graphic prep. Tips on achieving some contemporary styles are covered, though this content will undoubtedly date the book sooner than much of the rest of this otherwise very fine title. The book does need a second edition, though, covering a bit more HTML5 and hopefully some FXG to become a true must must buy.
Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter 
– My only non-O’Reilly pick in this list. Why? You gotta love an easy read with lots of pictures and simple points you can actually remember. This is one of them. Not only that, but this is a book you can share with your managers or your marketing folks and not scare them. No code, no psuedo-code, even… Just pure social web design from one of the industry’s brightest minds. Easily worth the 4-5 hour read that it is.
In addition to these titles that have been on my shelves for a few months, I recently added two brand new books that are so far big winners in my view.
Mobile Design and Development by Brian Fling 
– This book is a home run. A history of the mobile space, a great overview of the current mobile ecosystem (devices, providers, OSes, etc), and an entire design and development/implementation guide. Wow. 300 pages of must read mobile content for right now. What happens in 6 months? Well, maybe some of the book will be a little out of date, but the reference info on device targeting and ROI is pure gold.
Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
– If you took the Porter book and smashed it together with Jennifer Tidwell’s excellent book, “Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design”, which is a goldmine of UI help, you would get this book. 100 UI patterns dissected, with images and how and why you should use each one of them all handily indexed. It’s like a print version of Pattern Tap focused on social interaction and devoid of any filler or self promotional crap.
So, there you go, the most recent books I’ve added to my collection. I’m always looking for ones to add to my library, what are you reading now that you would like to share? BTW, I need a Kindle. My shelves are getting full! Hook a blogger up!
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A nice breakdown of CSS3 features supported by the major browsers.
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Mozilla Dev Center's font-face reference
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a @font-face primer
About a month ago I got two URL shortening services up and running. I launched http://fnla.me and http://fnaweso.me, learn more about the launch here. Now, I’ve updated them. I’ve added some new features, stats, for one. Additionally, you can now add the shortened link to your clipboard with a single click. Keep in mind, I still have the bookmarklets and an API available to you if you want!
To see how many users have clicked on a link you create in either service, simply add a “~” after the URL in your browser. Your link will be displayed along with the number of clicks you’ve received since it was created. Cool, eh?
The services are available in the AIR app, Shrinkadoo, so give that app a shot. If you maintain a Twitter app or would want to add the services to another website or service, let me know, I’d love to be included.
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Custom fonts for you and me. It is the dawn of a new age… make your type look better.
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Fonts have been lacking on the web for so long… now with a recent resugence in interest, the technology is finally catching up.
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fonts galore. for free
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You have heard of FOUC, now get ready for FOUT… performance tips for using @font-face
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Sticky footers, activate!
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Why settle for Lorem Ipsum? Get some better greek text already.
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flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours
Please join myself and my coworkers from The Iona Group at our upcoming Peoria Ad Club event. You can sign up here.
From the link:
The Iona Group engages with a wide variety of clients using the latest communication strategies and technologies. Join us for a discussion of trends in digital advertising, audience engagement, and online strategy. Iona Group will share recent work and research and development; including killer wireless robots, eye bulging video installations, incredibly sticky phone applications, and websites that will make you scratch your head and wonder, “HOW?”.
We’ll be covering our latest work, sharing some stories and drinking a couple cocktails. Come talk shop with us and raise a glass.
So, I’m not going to MAX this year… The economy has made a lot of extra spending go away and conferences are no exception to this rule. I do plan on virtually attending the webcasts and keynotes this year, though, so I definitely am staying in the loop.
I’m not putting together a prediction list, but rather a wishlist… Will any of these happen? I dunno, but I do know they would make my life in the Adobe universe better and more productive.
- AIR on iPhone - It’s unlikely that I am going to be learning Objective C anytime soon. And while I would love to take a stab at creating an app on the iPhone, this is really about the only way to do it. If I could compile an AIR app for the iPhone, this would help bridge that gap.
- A release date for Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst - Believe it or not, I’ve been using these tools for some time on real work. Flash Builder a bit more, but I have been able to get some nice stuff out of Catalyst from time to time. I’d like a formalized release schedule and a price so I can put it in my budget ASAP and get it on my team’s desktops for real.
- Some word on what the Omniture buyout means for Flash platform analytics - Is it going to be a LiveCycle product? A Flash Platform SaaS? What? How can I get integrating this into my experiences and RIAs?
- A bit more concrete info on AIR 2.0’s deeper features - FOTB leaked that C++ and other API integration was coming, but what about Google Earth? Open GL? BYOAPI (Bring your own API)
- More Hardware acceleration control and/or better threading/CPU support. - Building 1080P+ experiences on Flash sucks. There I said it. I’ve been burned enough over the last couple of years to know this. At The Iona Group we often build large HD resolution kiosks, presentations, installations etc. We prefer using Flash for our rich media development. These two things collide in unpleasant ways more often than they should. In many ways, Director is still more capable at performing in world class fashion at high high resolution. Processing is too. This could be for Flash Player 11, AIR 2.0 or whatever… Just the sooner, the better. Grant Skinner has made pleas to Adobe to improve CPU usage and performance, so maybe that will be enough.
So there you have it… not sure if any of these will happen, but it sure would be grand if they did. What are you putting on your MAX Wishlist?
No, I haven’t lost my mind. If you are visiting this site wondering, “What the font???!!!!”, well, yeah… This is in Comic Sans. October 1st has been declared National Comic Sans Day!
Read about it on John Wilker’s blog.
Oh, and if you want to learn about the origin of the world’s most hated typeface, read up on it here.