Who You Calling A Jesse?

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 ;)

Macromedia’s Studio 8 along with Dreamweaver 8 has arrived in the CHIP (Computer Help Desk). The prices are very reasonable for upgrades and new copies. I recommend Studio 8 over just Dreamweaver as it comes with Contribute 3 now and Fireworks 8 is very nice ;)

When you install, a couple notes/annoyances:

1. Flash 8 plug-in requires you to shut down your browsers, I already have Flash 8 but the silly installer insists… plus on OS X, why do I need to shut down anything?
2. If you have a lot of sites defined the first start-up of Dreamweaver 8 will be slow. It is faster than MX 2004 after that.
3. Note the template problem.
4. There is an interesting problem with temp files and permissions, more on that later. If you get oddly numbered files in your web directory let me know.

If you are waiting, there will be a presentation some time in November on Dreamweaver 8 and Studio 8. I will go through some of the CSS improvements, panels, plug-ins, etc. Some good resources to start with are the Dreamweaver 8 section of the Dev Centre and the Studio 8 section.

Finally got my article on the general thought and theory behing an app we have been working on done and published. Big thanks goes to Areeb (Co-op student) for helping finish it off. This is my second DevNet article in the past year and I am starting to enjoy writing them… well sort of ;) Anyway, take a look at Maintaining Database Content with PHP, Contribute, and Dreamweaver and let me know what you think.

A Slashdot post on a new technique for tracking folks is quite interesting. Seems that Flash’s popularity makes it a dead ringer for annoying marketting techniques. Read the post, clean up your Flash – Macromedia posted a fix, its in the slashdot post.

Another post today also mentioned a Ruby on Rails vs Java test. Guess what? Ruby is faster, easier to create (less code), and in my opinion cooler ;) Interesting day on slashdot.. or I am tired of email today.

Yup things have been slow to be posted. My apologies for the CSS documentation and the XHTML.

This afternoon you should see a Malarkey style topographical image of the CLF XHTML. My notes from last week’s ‘create your own CSS’ will be up as well. Over the weekend I will work on more detailed step by step if I get some time and the weather is nasty ;) For now Macromedia has some information on Design Time Style Sheets for those forging ahead. Remember that you need to copy the CSS files from http://uwaterloo.ca/css/ that you need and when you bring them in you need the proper order, including your custom.css.

More details appearing soon… mad week I tell ya. Mad.

We are developing an idea to work with the new Contribute – writers and publishers work in a password controlled staging area. This area mimic everything on the live site but is password protected. We then have an admin area that uses PHP to drop the files to the main server – brilliant isn’t it? I am sure its been done loads before.

We have a basic site set up now, and I can this basically be what dreamweaver does with its local/remote.. See how much fun this can be over the next couple of days.