Next term’s Co-op in CPA is…
What a tough decision this term. I interviewed three great students on Wednesday and I had to rank them yesterday. Each had great qualities and no two were the same. So who did I choose? Well they should already know as I have ranked them 
but for the other two, I would hire you both if I could. There is just no space and no budget—there is plenty of work mind you…
The Co-op process at UW is great though. They (Co-op and Career Services) handles everything, all I have to do is post the job, review some CV’s, interview and meet some great students, and then make a decision. The hardest part is actually keeping up with them during the work term.
Anyway… hope to introduce next term’s student soon. I also hope to showcase the work of Spring 05 (Areeb) and Fall 05’s (Vincent) students soon too. Stay tuned.
Digesting MAX 2005
If you have been paying attention to the Macromedia MAX 2005 photo pool you might think MAX was all about partying. But let me tell you, that partying only took place after some really long days in sessions and discussion about web development tools and techniques. Although some discussions in the hotel lobby are rather difficult to recall, the overall feeling from MAX this year is very positive. Here is what I got out of it:
Flash 8.5 changes my perception of Flash
Flash? That ‘skip intro’ thing that was cool in 1999 and won’t go away? That is going to be huge? What about SVG? Flash 8 is not the Flash you know and loath. It could be considered a platform within the browser platform – truly OS independent – and it’s starting to be taken seriously by companies like SAP and ESRI. Not only that but Macromedia is making a bold move in making Flex 2 Alpha available on the new Macromedia Labs site.
You can go to the labs site to check out in more detail but essentially Flex is Flash + Coldfusion following ECMA standards with Actionscript 3 to give you a tool that allows you to make a front end for many different big name back end applications/services. Last year I met a guy from the UK that was using it as the front end for PeopleSoft. This year I heard of much more uses for Flex. Not knowing too much about it myself, I liked what I saw, just wish I could try it out (windows only at the moment).
Mix into all this Bob Regan had around 3 presentations on accessible design for Flash developers that were all pretty full. Bob has done a lot to influence Flash’s accessibility while trying to retain the ‘experience’ for the user – both with and without a screen reader. His example at MAX was the JK Rowling site that was developed by Lightmaker Group. Tom (from Lightmaker) was even in the crowd for every presentation. My favorite comment from Tom after one of the presentations was essentially that ‘accessibility just takes some thought.’ Accessible Flash and people are thinking about it…
I am not a Flash developer but I saw a demo at MAX that show AJAX applications interacting with a Flash application but the Flash one was much prettier of course. I also saw XML providing all the data (content) for the Flash application and it seems to update in real time. Could it be Asynchronous Flash and XML (AFAX)? There are some interesting possibilities here. More sIFR type JS/Actionscript in the future?
Finally, Action-script 3 is supposed to be really close to Java, more than before, how’s that for you students learning Java? Another outlet for those skills that could favor the more creative of you out there. I hope to get re-aquanted with my old friend Java (we don’t get along), maybe Action-script 3 is good venue to mend some fences…
MAX really helped me get a better grasp on where Macromedia sees things going and what role the soon-to-be Adobe Systems Inc. will take. For me, the non-Flash person, I am thinking about using Flash in different ways. Hopefully I will find some time to do that in the coming weeks. For those students I am interviewing tomorrow, I am going to ask what AFAX is just to see if you are reading this blog
MAX 2005 Day 3 round up – Dreamweaver 8, Randy Mode Rendering, and AJAX
Day 3’s round up is a couple days late due to plane travel and overall being tired. The theme of day 3 for me was the Dreamweaver AJAX conversation and the conversations it created. First off lets start with Dreamweaver 8.
Dreamweaver 8
There were next to no real in depth sessions for Dreamweaver 8 really at all at MAX. That was too bad simply because of all the improvements that the team has done with standards, accessibility, and rendering. CSS is really simple with DW 8 and people need to see that. Steph’s presentation on CSS could have been a 3 hour hands on and it would have filled the room.
Randy Mode Rendering
Well you heard here first, DW 8 rendering is officially named ‘Randy Mode Rendering’ after careful consultation with fellow DWTF member Steph. What is it you ask? It’s a hybrid of IE and standards. As I am starting to figure out, it can really help you cut down on hacks (or maybe I use them too much?) by having decent rendering to remove the reliance on browser testing and you only viewing in one browser. If it renders properly in DW 8 it is likely to render in IE 6 without too much hassle. There are a few things DW 8 does better than IE 6 but it doesn’t appear to be worse. What this has to do with MAX is that I finally got to meet Randy Edmunds, the man behind the rendering and it just popped into my head
AJAX in DW 8-ish?
There was a nicely conducted round table conversation on AJAX and DW 8 on Wednesday morning. The DW team gave a closer look to what they demo’d at the sneak peak and then asked questions about how any future version of DW should handle AJAX. It was pretty informative but I think some work needs to be done on techniques used and such.
Also, there is some potential in Flash 8.5… more on that in a future posting. Shall work on a total summary next week. I need to think a bit on what I got out of the conference. Generally though I met some great people, caught up with some folks I met last year, and left feeling inspired.
MAX 2005 Day 2 round up – sneaks, peaks, and Disneyland
Day 2’s round up is being written in the middle of day 3 because, well, Disney Land was a lot of fun last night. It was a really long day but loads of fun so here it is.
Keynote
MAX 2005 is about Flash, which isn’t great to me but it does give an opportunity to check out new features. The Keynote covered a range of demo’s using the theme of Studio 8 match up. It was well acted and a lot of fun to watch. The star of the Keynote was Adobe Aftereffects and not because it is a really powerful and cool video editing software, not for me, it was the user interface that impressed me. It is just amazing. Dig around Flickr, I will update this post with some links later.
Sessions
For the day I will have to rank the sessions at a mediocre. Why? Well there is so much Flex/Flash talk it draws tears. It is a cool application and really demonstrate some power and simplicity that I have never seen in business application development. ‘Flex’ is flexible… just I don’t use it. But Java coders rejoice, with MM going to ECMA your java skills are wanted and given what SAP has done with Flex you can count on some big contracts in the private sector. More on that in the summary.
The Contribute team did their Birds of a Feather in the evening and that was really the next best part of the day. Finally got to meet a couple more members of the team that weren’t in New Orleans last year and learned about some seriously large and complex Contribute 3 deployments. Really impressive. Mike Hazard just has to give me all the custom code he has done for CPS
Sneak Peak OK but Disneyland made my day
I wasn’t overly impressed with the sneak peaks but only because there were just some little things shown and what I really wanted after that keynote was ‘here is our new UI.’ Still, entertaining and fun.
For the big night out Macromedia rented out ‘California Adventure’ in Disneyland. What a great time. Lots of laughs, lots of meeting people, lots of dance floor craziness.
I will write up an overall summary of the conference and a Day 3 round up later on… Some cool things even on the last day
MAX 2005 Day 1 round up – Flex, Flash, and labs
Today was the first day of the MAX 2005 conference in Anaheim California. Just so you know, its raining and cool. There are a lot of photos appearing on flickr if you are interested as to what it’s like around here. To round up the day’s events:
Keynote
What a great keynote with over 3000 in attendance – but a little long. The keynote focused largely on the power of Flex, the impressive potential of Flash, and where MM thinks the (new buz phrase here) ‘web experience’ is going to improve for users. There were some great demo’s that really showed how easy it is to make dynamic, attractive, and powerful applications in Flex. Essentially Macromedia sees more integration of different data sources into web apps and far integration with portable devices (Web 2.0 I think?).
Also Macromedia has caught the alpha bug – Macromedia Labs was launched today. If you are wondering what this Flex is all about, go check it out. Note ActionScript 3.0 is ECMA (javascript). Very exciting there… if you try it out, let me know what you think. Zorn is there too… But perhaps the most entertaining part of the keynote was when Steve Elope called out Microsoft. There was great picture posted and some good comments.
Sessions
I didn’t make it to all the sessions I wanted to attend today. There was a lot of buzz in the halls on what Flash is doing in Version 8 and the coolness of the 8.5 player. I did get to Stephanie’s CSS presentation which was really well attended and I did learn a couple things.
The Accessibility in Flash presentation by Bob Reagan was on my list as well but I got chatting with a couple people and ended up late. Popped my head in and the room was full… so I will have to catch it at 8 am tomorrow.
I did get to the integration of AJAX/Flash/Flex and let me tell you… its cool. Not cool in the typical sense, cool in the fact that the move to ECMA and player 8.5 might mean that AJAX folks have a different way to render their code. They can use the Flash player instead – will this help with the potential accessibility issues surrounding AJAX? Dunno. Need to look into that more. If you want to follow what they are up to there is the Open Source Flash site. It has all you need to start playing.
Overall
It has been a great day. Just heading to the Birds of the Feather to meet up with the Dreamweaver team, maybe will add some of that to my post later.
