Brian Fitzgerald

Here’s a look at my day yesterday and some thoughts

Opening General Session

Kevin Lynch demonstrated a lot of fantastic AIR apps. Some of them include a twitter client, an instant messenger, ebay, paypal, salesforce.com and a desktop client for Google analytics (which I don’t think was from Google).

Ben Forta demonstrated a technology makeover of the United Way site in which they did some things to improve it with ColdFusion 8. They implemented inline Flex that used cfimage to create new images for the site and used the accordion interface to clean up a form.

Adobe announced and released on Labs AIR beta 2 and the Adobe Media Player. The next version of Flash (Astro) was shown very briefly. H.264 in the latest flash player was demonstrated and Adobe is working with Intel to speed thing up by better leveraging multiple processors.

Overall it was a nice presentation that did a good job of moving the spotlight from the applications to the work of the developer community.  While there wasn’t anything especially memorable about the session, it was an effective kickoff to the conference.

Design Shootout with Adobe Gurus

With the way that Greg Rewis continually told photoshop users that they suck (and then quickly offering a ‘just kidding’) this session could have been titled “Adobe v Macromedia: the rivalry continues. I think that part of the intent of this session was to say that now that Macromedia and Adobe are together, here are some tools that you could be using to make your workflow easier. This would have been very helpful. I know that there are things that I do in Fireworks that I might be able to do better in Photoshop. Likewise I have seen people do things with Photoshop that I laugh at knowing how much easier it is in Fireworks. This session suffered from a lack of focus as it covered Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge, After Effects and Soundbooth. It was also hampered IMHO by presenters that seemed to enjoy the stage and spotlight a little too much.

Inspire Session: Dynamic Abstraction and Finding Creative Inspiration

This was one of the best sessions that I have ever attended at a MAX conference. I won’t try too hard to describe what he presented as I wouldn’t do it justice, but Joshua Davis spoke about his artwork and the process and inspiration that went into it. It was profane and awesome. You can see his work here and a feature about him at Apple here.

As somebody that does design work and many years ago now it seems used to kick out some pretty wild stuff, this was a real kick in the head to wake me up to what I haven’t been doing and how uninspired I have become. The thoughts and feelings running around in me after this session have made this whole conference worth coming to… now to hold on to that and produce.

Creating AIR with Dreamweaver

Not an inspiring session, but an informative one by the Dreamweaver product manager detailing the creation of AIR apps with HTML and Javascript using Dreamweaver. Glad I hit this one.

Case Study: Implementing Large-Scale CSS on Adobe.com 

Often, it is hard at a conference like this to take what you hear and learn and apply it to a large web site. When you consider that most web sites that are popular are really not a lot of pages, developers spend a lot of time on the experience of those pages and not managing the web site. In this session, one of the two people that manage the CSS of the Adobe.com web site spoke about their experiences and methods. I picked up several tips here that I’m excited to try out on the LPS web sites including the changing of @imports to server-side includes, doing whitespace management, using space delimited styles and componentizing the styles.

There is a lot of debate over whether HTML email should be used at all, but if you are going to do it, here are some templates to get you started.

People seem to get bored with technology. I know that I often do. It’s why I can’t wait for Apple to release Mac OS 10.5 even though 10.4 works great. It’s why I check macupdate.com throughout the day looking for something that’s new or improved. It’s also why I think that people seem to have forgotten what a great tool Manila is and are so ready to push it out the door.

It is true that Manila is not the best tool for creating sites that I refer to as “traditional” where you are presented a front page the site branches out from there. It is also true however that Manila was built to be a pretty easy blogging tool since before we were calling them blogs. Using Manila’s “news items” feature to manage a blog could hardly be easier than it is and it is periodically updated to take advantage of today’s blogging trends.

One update that Manila has received in the last couple of years is the ability to handle RSS enclosures. While this can be used in many ways, it’s most common application is podcasting. A podcast is nothing more than a RSS feed in which media files are referenced for downloading. In manila this is done by simply creating a news item and picking a file on your computer to associate with the item. When you hit the save button, your asset is uploaded to the server and the RSS is updated - you are podcasting!

I just said that I’d stop posting constant lists of links… but these are from somebody else, so it’s okay. Chris Pultz (trainer extraordinaire) sent me some great links through del.icio.us that would be useful to anybody getting started in designing with cascading style sheets

• Keep It Simple, Stupid showcases 49 site designs that are beautiful for what they did not do to their sites more than what they did do. The easiest thing you can always do to create a great looking site is create strong alignment and not litter the page with widgets, type and color. Many of these do it very well.
• Stripe Generator: Along with text/icons reflected off a surface, you can find a striped texture in many sites that could be considered a part of web 2.0. If you're looking to look cool and trendy, this site will help you get your stripes.
• Faux Column CSS Layouts: Columns in CSS tend to only be as long as the contents of that column dictate. This causes you to have columns of different lengths when you really want them to all be the same length. The easiest trick around this is to visually fake the columns by placing a columned image background behind the layout. This site provides many examples to help you get started.
• 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers: For the intermediate web developer, these are some useful code bits that will help you add some interactivity and pieces of flair to your web site. An AJAX contact form, sIFR and examples of CSS unordered lists are just some of the things that you will find here.
  

I really see my blog as the center of my life on the web. My blog is the first place I search when I want to recall something that I did months or years ago. For this reason, I have often muddied my posts with everything I have been bookmarking and more. Throwing all of this information in one pot can discouraging to those that are looking for some perspective.

One of my favorite sites to read these days is our local police chief’s blog and I’ve had to ask myself why I find it so interesting. I’m drawn to it in the same way that some may be drawn to shows that you see on Discovery and other like-channels where you get to see inside another profession. I don’t think that it would matter if it were the president of the united states or the guy that cleans the toilet of the president, it is fascinating to know what people are thinking, what challenges they face and what they find interesting each day when they go to work.

For this reason, I’m going to try (TRY) to change the nature of my blog a little bit. For those that are interested, I am going to post the exciting and the boring things that I have the opportunity to do as a part of my job as a web developer. If there are things that you are interested in knowing about, please let me know.

The beginning of this summer has been hectic as I have launched a couple of sites already including the new Lincoln Public Schools web site. The new site is a little wider than the old site, now being 990px wide. We had quite a bit of discussion about this before we went live wondering if it was the right decision to do this. Interestingly, since then Apple has launched their new site and CNN has released the beta of their new site. Both are the same width as the new LPS site. This was some appreciated validation of the width and certainly a sign that this new size is becoming a standard size for current sites.

Interested in what a month of traffic at the LPS web site looks like in terms of screen resolution? Here it is.

I’m not sure how long Contribute 4 has been out, but it has not been a long time. Six months? I was surprised to see, during the Adobe CS3 launch event yesterday, that a new version of Contribute (Contribute CS3) was being bundled with the web studios. I wanted to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were just renaming the product, but after a visit to their web site it is clear that this is considered a full upgrade and an owner of version 4 has to pay the same to upgrade to this new version as an owner of any previous version. While, neither I or Lincoln Public Schools (where I work) purchased any version 4 licenses, I can’t help but feel bad for those that have.

Mike Chambers has a set of training/introduction videos up on Lynda.

Apollo Alpha Preview - lynda.com Online Training Library ™

I hate taking photos with my camera phone as I know they aren’t going to look as good as a picture taken with a normal camera, but sometimes you need a shot and it’s all you got. Here’s some tips to make the best of your situation.

Digital Photography Weblog: 13 best tips for Improving CameraPhone Pictures

In a story detailing how some Pokémon game will be the first to tie the Nintendo Wii and DS together, an upcoming schedule sets June 4th as the release date for the Nintendo DS web browser. I’m pretty excited to see how well this Opera browser runs on a DS compared to other available portable browsers.

Chris Pultz hit me with this incredible list of 53 CSS techniques. A couple of the methods listed here are duds, but most of them are fantastic. If you don’t do CSS yet, you should look through these to see what you’re missing. If you are on CSS, then get to using them!

powered by performancing firefox

Mike Potter from Adobe demonstrates Apollo at FlashInTO.

Looks like Google has added some new tools for following backlinks on a site.

Read/Write Web has an article today on a web site genre I hadn’t considered before - event invitations. After taking a look, some of these sites could be a real help to anybody planning any kind of activity.

Macintosh users can now download the “WPF/E” beta from microsoft. This allows Macintosh users to play files created by Microsoft’s new “Flash Killer” application Sparkle. Once you have installed it, the plugin works with both Safari and Firefox. You can see examples of it’s use here (note the first video in the second example where they talk about the number of Macs that have been appearing in Redmond). This is exciting only because it offers hope that whatever development platform content developers use in the future, the mac should be able to display them all. I really hope that this doesn’t start pushing Flash out of the way too much, but I’d be happy just to see a lot less sites that say “Sorry, Microsoft Windows/Internet Explorer Only”.

The Google Operating System blog has found clues that Google may be working on a presentation application to go with it’s word processor and spreadsheet application. While Powerpoint is fine and Keynote is fantastic, I think that I would be very willing to give up the beautiful looking slides and transitions for something that was built into Google. Even if you didn’t use it to create and present your slideshows, one could always use it (I’m assuming) to upload your Powerpoint presentation for online storage and retrieval.

Zoho has released their new notebook application as a part of the zoho suite and it looks uh… sweet (I had to do that). Anyway, it’s just another example of the best applications moving to the web.

I’m working today on designs for the next www.lps.org and this morning trying to establish a target width. To get started, I’m examining some of the best sites on the web to see what width they are using. Here’s what I’m finding.

    * ESPN, MLB, NFL: 990px     * New York Times: 973px     * ABC News: 770px     * ABC: 803px     * Cnet (including drop-shadow): 990px     * Washington Times: 980px     * Apple: 781px     * UNL (including drop-shadow): 1000px     * NBC: 971px     * CBS: 977px

So that’s what we’re seeing on the web. How does that match up against the traffic we see at Lincoln Public Schools? Here’s our visitor resolution breakdown (timeframe is 8/1/06 - 1/29/07), provided by Google Analytics:

I’m kind of depressed to see this chart. In my dreams most people are at 1280x1024 but we see it coming in here at 5%. Even if we lump all of the 1280ish and larger resolutions, we come to 20%. So, in general 65% of our traffic is at 1024 x 768 with the remaining 35% being split about 2/3 larger and 1/3 smaller.

A piece of information that I haven’t provided yet is the current size of the site, which is 897 pixels. This means that for the past couple of years, I have already been in excess of what a 800 x 600 screen can display. I am going to work on the assumption that as we improve computers in the district that this number will continue to fall. I think that a site can establish some visual credibility simply by exhibiting traits of sites that have credibility. If many solid sites work at 990 pixels, simply using that width can piggyback on their success subliminally.

So I think that’s where I’m going. I’m going to shoot for 990 pixels. For those that can not display this width, it is only 100 pixels larger than what I was doing before. For others, I think that it will be a forward-looking design that will provide room for a lot of flexibility in content delivery.

Here’s an article at read/write web with good information about some current web 2.0 e-learning products.

Chris Pederick has updated the invaluable web developer toolbar for Firefox and Flock to version 1.1.

I have really liked using textile for my post formatting as it provides easy to read and write code while also publishing very clean HTML. I have had problems with it when I mix HTML and Textile code as I do often on my web log. Textile's main alternative is similar language called Markdown. I have started working with it this morning and so far so good.

• First, I downloaded the markdown plugin for wordpress.
• Then I converted my pages using textile to plain html.
• Finally, I converted that html to markdown and pasted it back into my web log.
  

technorati tags:markdown, textile

One of the greatest things about CSS is the ability to create styles for non-screen delivery. Digital-Web features has a new article called “CSS Styling for Print and Other Media”.

Adobe has launched a new design center on their web site specifically for Fireworks. If you are looking to get the most out of Fireworks, this will be the place to stay tuned to. There’s already some neat articles up there including one on how to “Create a night scene with Fireworks” and “Creating lens flares using Fireworks”. Interested in participating in the Fireworks 9 beta? You can sign up for that also.

technorati tags:fireworks, adobe

I started visiting Brightcove a couple of years ago when Jeremy Allaire (creator of ColdFusion) mentioned it at the 2004 Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. It took a long time before it became publicly available, and even then it seemed to be geared towards professional media producers and not something available to the masses.

I'm not sure when things changed, but recent visits have excited me as it became clear that Brightcove would make it very possible for non-professional media producers to get their content online in a way that was easy and looked great. Brightcove (and DiVX's Stage 6) allow for the creation of "channels" so that you can put an organized set of media online that can be browsed and viewed easily. The other nice thing about these channels is that it provides the content creator some ability to provide custom branding around the videos instead of having the hosting company's logo all over the place (like youtube, yahoo or google).

I have begun a new player at LPS. It will be a while before it goes public (if it ever does) but consider this your invitation to take a look and let me know what you think. I'm just going to start throwing whatever video I have access to up there.

technorati tags:video, brightcove

If you tried visiting my blog yesterday, you may have seen a short-lived experiment as I considered moving my blog from Wordpress to Blogger. My only real reason for trying Blogger is that I've really become pretty fond of Google's other tools and figured that I might as well do everything that I can in one place. I discovered quickly that Blogger is no Wordpress.

Today, Ted Patrick of Adobe found his blog's feeds broken as in Google's upgrades of Blogger, they disabled all RSS and RDF feed publishing and moved everybody completely to Atom. Of course the biggest problem with this is that you just broke the feeds of thousands of blogs and are going to force millions of readers to fix their subscriptions. Bad bad bad...

technorati tags:blogger, google, wordpress