Recently in Flex Category

[Updated a few hours later to add a couple details I left out in the first draft.]

I just followed the live step-by-step blogging of the iPad release over at Engadget. The device looks pretty much like what I expected and its functionality is pretty much what I expected. It's basically... a giant iPod Touch. (I had expected a camera, though.)

(This is a posting I started a while back (on my brother's b-day in May) but didn't publish at the time... don't remember why.)

An early morning distraction...

Dial down your MyPods for a message from the luminary genius CEO/guru/deity of Mapple: Steve Mobbs.

Here is an excellent presentation (slides with audio) on "Generative UX Design" by Leah Buhley of Adaptive Path. She gave this presentation at the IA Summit 2008 (i.e. the Information Architect Summit). It is entitled "How to Be a UX Team of One" and goes over her personal best practices for Lone Ranger UX professionals.

One of Leah's key points: Business Needs + User Needs = Design Principles. In other words: software needs to be more than purely functional (i.e. business-focused). It also has to be personal (i.e. user-focused). I'd put it this way: "If all food were nutritious but tasteless, people would be no better off because they wouldn't eat enough to stay healthy."

Leah presents her ideas well and with a lot of passion and provides great food for thought. What more can I say, really? Check it out.

My take-aways (e.g. Leah's points mixed with some of my own ideas):

• Generate many ideas. The more the better. Sketch a lot. On paper, even. That said, you should still brainstorm within constraints. This is the real world, after all.
  
• Use a continuum (e.g. from beginner to power user), 2X2 or larger grid to organize your mock-ups. Experiment with word association, combine ideas, extract concepts from an idea. Build up, break down, re-organize.
  
• Compile an "Inspiration Library" by taking screen grabs of inspirational sites and applications. It incorporates competitive analysis but also provides mnemonic cues (Rorschach) for things that just plain work.
  
• Assemble an ad-hoc team at which to throw ideas and out of which to draw new ideas. Use sketchboards (i.e. butcher paper) on a wall to post up ideas and display low-fi mock-ups. If your ad-hoc group needs some guidance, use basic templates into which they can draw their own ideas.
• Abandon the ideal of the Artiste -- the beret-wearing holder of all design knowledge. Decorate your workspace with mock-ups, ideas, sketches. Get people's input. Be proud of incomplete/in-progress ideas. Share them and get people's impressions.
  

If you want to know what's new and ominously pending in the world of Flash and Flex, you owe it to yourself to check out these videos from Adobe Developer Connection, post haste!

They cover such mouth-watering topics as an intro to Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4 and provide a lot of information about Flex 4 as a language (including advanced CSS, skinning, animations and effects). They also describe the road ahead for AIR on the desktop, which frankly is something I'd like to know more about.

Click on the image below to watch the joint keynote by Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief technical officer and David Wadhwani, the general manager and vice-president of the Flash Platform Business Unit (i.e. two very important dudes):

Adobe recently planted the seed for improved cooperation within the scattered LiveCycle community. In an effort to leverage the social web to combine our collective efforts to get the word out about LiveCycle and build up buzz and a shared base of common knowledge from which we can all benefit.

This "seed", as I call it, is LiveCycle Café, a social AIR app that provides all the tools to start sharing and gaining knowledge on the power of LiveCycle, leveraging Adobe corporate documentation, forums, live chat and various community contributions via a built-in RSS reader. The premise is that beginners and experts alike from across the globe (is that a contradiction?) will use it to connect with each other. LiveCycle is a very powerful but large set of tools, so gaining access to the many experts who are out there toiling in obscurity (some of them are toiling a few cubes away from me, here at 4Point) is a great asset. As we well know, we can only succeed by standing on the shoulders of giants, so having instant access to the cream of the LiveCycle crop can do nothing but make us better at what we do.

After the success of Tour de Flex (which just recently celebrated its 5,000,000th sample viewed) the fine folks at Adobe have released Tour de Livecycle, a one stop shop for discovering the many, many facets of the Livecycle Enterprise Suite. Hopefully this initiative will help put this powerful yet underrated offering from Adobe onto people's radar screens.

There's no point in me going into what Livecycle is, but suffice it to say that any self-respecting enterprise Flex developer owes it to him/herself to seriously consider gaining some Livecycle-related experience. "There be gold in them thar skills."

You know Ottawa has arrived when the Flash Builder 4 / Flash Catalyst Launch Tour announces a date at Adobe's offices here in Ottawa! Aside from the upcoming Flash Builder and Catalyst (if you haven't seen it yet, slap yourself now), there'll be a tutorial for PixelBender (which is freaking awesome), as well as a show off session for CartoVista (no clue).

Inquiring (make that "trivial") minds want to know: What logo will Adobe now associate with the re-branded, better than ever, sliced bread tasty "Flash Builder"?

Since Adobe seems to have somewhat linked the underlying technology that their authoring/development tools use to those tools by making both share similar logos (e.g. the red Fl for Flash CS4 to match the red f for the Flash platform proper), what does that mean for the upcoming re-branding of Flex Builder to Flash Builder?

Flex Builder currently has a gray Fx as a logo. Flash also has a red logo... Will the gray Fx therefore be replaced with a red Fx? (Oh but "Fx" still makes me think of Flex and that word is now a no-go as far as Builder is concerned)

Ok, then. Will Builder get a gray Fl, like a Flash CS4 logo only much, much more serious? (But then what about colour-blind people who can't distinguish red from gray?)

Hmmm. It sure does make one ponder. (For about 10 seconds and then you go back to doing actual work.)

[Follow-up edit: I just got my answer: The new logo is a gray "Fb". Boy do I feel better now that that's out of the way!]

[Edits:

• Added Jun Heider's materials on run-time resource profiling (Day 3, Session 2)
• Added Ryan Phelan's slides on Pixel Bender (Day 3, Session 4)
• Added Lafferty and Frishberg's slides and an example on custom ItemRenderers (Day3, Session 4)
• Added Sanchez' slides on Degrapha (Day 1, Session 2)
• (Über Edit) John from 360 Conferences has uploaded all of the presenter slides from 360|Flex Indy that he could get his hands on here. There are 33 of them, at last count. Thanks a million, John.
• Added Laura Arguello's slides from her (excellent) Mate session (Day 2, Session 5)]

As you've probably guessed by now, if you missed 360|Flex by your own choice, you're kind of a... well, a loser. Many of the best presenters, mentors, open-source community leaders and trend-setting Flex developers were there, pouring their knowledge out in exchange for a hotel room and a 360|Flex "speaker" t-shirt. (If the room was in a train car, then just maybe it's a fair trade.)

One of the worst things about 360 (yes, I'm about to complain here, apologies to Tom and John) is that since there are generally 5 session going on at once, you're going to miss something. (I'll give you a second now to get over it.) Some things you'll never, ever get back (look through your high school yearbook for some quick examples). Fortunately, I have compiled a quick list of presenter materials that didn't make it onto the USB key. I will update this in the next few days as more stuff things trickles in.

I've listed these by day and session. (Note that I'm not counting the keynotes in numbering the sessions.)

Day 1

Session 1

Assert Yourself (FlexUnit 4) -- Michael Labriola (ably assisted by Jeff Tapper)
Slides

Session 2

Degrapha Declarative Graphics Framework - Juan Sanchez
Slides

Session 3

Structured Log testing - Renaun Erickson
Missed Points

Another Mapping API...Not! - Mansour Raad
Slides

Session 4

Any Which Array But Loose - Michael Labriola
Slides

Day 2

Session 1

Creating our first i18n (internationalization) Flex application - Oğuz Demirkapı
Slides

Flex Server Lib - Andy Powell
Slides

FLEXperience - Putting the UX in Flex -- Joe Johnston
Slides

Session 3

How Not to Code Flex Applications - Jeff Tapper
Slides

Session 4

Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus -- Chad Udell
Slides

Session 5

Building an AIR Video Recording Spy Camera with Motion Detection -- Rich Tretola
Slides

Breaking Down your Application with Mate -- Laura Arguello
Slides

Day 3

Session 2

Flex Profiling by Example - Jun Heider

Slides and source

Session 3

Merapi: What's Next -- Adam Flater
Source announced at 360|Flex

Session 4

Bending and Flexing with PixelBender - Ryan Phelan
Slides

Custom Item Renderers - Lafferty and Frishberg
Slides Example

That's all for now. Check back later in case more stuff pops up (it surely will).