Brian Fitzgerald

This will be my last post specifically about the Adobe MAX conference. I promise.

This year’s conference was, in my opinion, the best that Adobe/Macromedia/Allaire has ever put on. The developers that were with me seemed to be pretty satisfied with the technical content, and I was more than pleased with the creative content.

I felt that the conference ran smoothly. The food was not great, but there wasn’t anything to complain about. There was certainly plenty of it. Each of the host hotels had a penthouse/presidential suite that served as a participant lounge until midnight with video games, internet and snacks. The buses could have run more frequently.

Next year the conference is in San Francisco. I do not know if I will be fortunate enough to attend, but I certainly hope to. Being so near home base for Adobe should allow them to really do a heck of a job. Also, with so many important web development groups in the bay area, there should be fantastic content.

Responsible Web Design with Dreamweaver CS3

I took notes during this and am going to have edit this when I find them, but this was an excellent session given by the product manager for Dreamweaver that covered good web design practices in general.

Designing the Obvious

One of the great things about the MAX conference is that you get a large number of book authors and world-class designers. Robert Hoekman, author of “Designing the Obvious” led this presentation. Rather than just hit the points in his book, Robert showcased of the designs he has worked on the last couple of years. He showed what he started with, explained the goals, demonstrated the intermediate designs, described their failures and finally revealed what the final design was. The key point of the presentation was to decide what it is that you want your users to do, then make them do it.

Effective Website Redesign

This was the second session that I attended presented by the team of and focusing on Adobe.com. Some of the tricks discussed here were the same detailed during the CSS session on Monday, such as using server-side includes rather than @import statements for CSS and JS files. The presenter talked about how most “redesigns” end up really being nothing more than a “reskin”, while other projects are a complete rewrite. Of interest was that they do use Dreamweaver templates and check-in check-out for their own processes. Also, they seem to be accessing some features in templates that I am unfamiliar with and will have to try out where one can set variables such as the number of columns to trigger particular bits of code. This would be extremely useful and eliminate the need for many one-off templates.

Fitting Fireworks into the Design Spectrum

This was primarily a session about “what good is Fireworks” for people that are generally Photoshop users. This also had very little to do with Design and more to do with photography and photo management. The most interesting thing to me in this was to see how cleanly documents could travel between Photoshop and Fireworks. Bridge was also demonstrated as a work center, although I still do not consider Bridge a good idea when you are focused on web sites and not individual photos or files.

Font Perspective: The New New Typography

The head guy for typography at Adobe presented this fascinating session that chronicled the history of fonts on computers, then demonstrated some of the crazy things possible with today’s Unicode Opentype typefaces. I love typography and wrapping up MAX with this session was really a treat.

Rapid Prototyping in Fireworks

This is one of the few sessions that I ended up attending that taught or demonstrated how to do something. One of the new features in Fireworks CS3 is the ability to create an entire prototype of a website as images. Fireworks, besides layers now has what it calls “pages” which can really act like web pages. One can then select areas of a page that act as buttons and link them to different pages within the project. Finally, the whole thing can be exported as a web site so that you can have clients review what the web site will look and feel like before you have invested time with any code at all. This is a fantastic feature that I am a little ashamed to have not used at all yet. I certainly plan to make this process a part of future sites that I build.

CSS Part 3: Advanced CSS Concepts and Theories

Whenever I see the word “advanced” I hope to see something during the session that I have never seen before. I was disappointed by the CSS content, but happy to see some of the Dreamweaver tricks that were demonstrated by Joseph Lowrey (author: the Dreamweaver Bible). Two things were especially useful. First, the ability to create styles in the header of a page and then easily drag and drop them via the styles panel into an external style sheet. Second, Dreamweaver has a handy utility to clean up your source code so that you can code in an efficient, ugly manner and then apply formatting to clean things up when you are done.

XD: Best Practices for Creating Great Web Experiences

XD is the Adobe internal design team that designs the user interface on adobe web applications. I always enjoy hearing people from this team speak, although I did not feel that the content of this session matched the title. More than anything, the speaker discussed how the team works. Some things he mentioned were:

• Open work space without walls or high cube walls to promote community and discussion
• Team building exercises that encouraged problem solving outside of design/code
• Having only enough project management to keep the process going and on time. (they just had a table on a web page detailing jobs, deadlines, etc.)
• Enjoying each others company outside of the work environment (pub, etc.)

Beyond Web 2.0

Here’s another session that I didn’t feel addressed the title, but was a good one nonetheless. Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path spent his session taking real world examples of usability and good customer experiences and applying them to what is successful in technology and on the web. In each example, the innovator took something that was complex and simplified it. Eastman created a camera with film on a roll that was easy to use. Tivo didn’t just put a hard drive in a VCR, but created a UI that made it far easier to use than any VCR. The iPod was more expensive and had less features than other MP3 players of the time but was simple and fun to use. These are all good reminders to those of us that develop applications that simple is best.

Our entertainment last night was lounge against the machine

Adobe has been taking this bus around the country demonstrating air
to user groups and web developers. This was the last stop on its north
American tour.

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.

A new thing this year at max are the inspire sessions. These are
fantastic sessions featuring some of the best designers talking about
their methods and definately madness. This is Joshua Davis.

Getting ready for the kickoff of adobe max 2007!!

Chicago!

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.

I’ve always wanted to get better at creating a portfolio of good designs that I find. A friend that I used to work with had a file cabinet full of magazine clippings and other things that that they had stored away for inspiration. This was a great resource to spread out on the floor when getting started on a new project.

If you are looking for some inspiration, here is a page of business card examples. Even if you aren’t designing cards, it is a great thing to look through for fonts, colors, alignments, and everything else you need to get the creative juices flowing.

I thought that this reporter for USA Today (shown here on CNBC) looks a little too much like Steve Jobs himself.

I love these posters every time I see them

Every year Jeep releases a new travel bug edition. Today, I received one in the mail, enabling me to be the first to place one! Now I just need to decide where. Don't know about geocaching or travel bugs? Visit wikipedia ;-)

A good storm passed during the second inning of a Lincoln Saltdogs game the other night. As the storm moved out, the tarp was removed and the players warmed up, a full double rainbow broke out over Lincoln. A hot humid day quickly gave way to an evening where sweatshirts were comfortable.

Apple today released a nearly 25 minute-long video about the iPhone demonstrating its use. There are two things that it confirmed to me. One, it seems be a great pocket-sized mac in the way that it handles email, the web and sms chatting. Second, I think that its going to be an awkward phone. The size and shape just don’t seem like something that I would want to carry everywhere.

I’m anxious to have one in my hand to make a better judgement on it. In the meantime, I’m super happy with sony ericsson phone I have (w810i) and imagine that I will probably upgrade it when the time comes with another sony phone.

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.

It may not be often that you give your mouse a lot of thought, but I just had one of those moments where I thought “Wow! What a great mouse."

I use a Logitech VX when I’m portable and a Logitech MX at my desktop. These are basically the same mouse with some small differences that make each better for the environment they were designed to be used in. The key feature on both is a scroll wheel that is able to work (as many scroll wheels do) in a mode that sort of clicks as you scroll, and a mode that is unique where it is free to spin like the Price-is-right Big Wheel. This last mode is by far my favorite. When you are on a long document of any sort it is really nice to be able to give the wheel a little flick and have the page scroll along until you stop the wheel. The wheel is weighted to keep it moving and has a good-enough build quality that it doesn’t feel like a cheap feature as one might expect that it would.

Thanks again to those of you that attended my workshop in Columbus on Tuesday. Here are some of the resources that I told you I would post here:

Firefox Add-ons

• Firebug (Firebox-based CSS Inspector)
• Firefox Web Development Toolbar
• MeasureIt (screen ruler)
• ColorZilla (Color grabber)

Browser Testing

• Evolt.org (Browser Archives)
• Install multiple version of IE on Windows XP

Web Sites

• CSS Zen Garden
• CSS Beauty: CSS Design Showcase
• CSS Vault: Inspiring Creativity
• CSS Hack
• Glish: CSS Layout Techniques
• Layout-o-matic
• A List Apart
• Digital-Web Magazine
• Stylegala
• The Web Standards Project

Useful books

• Designing with Web Standards — Jeffrey Zeldman
• Bulletproof Web Design — Dan Cederholm
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability — Steve Krug
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions — Andy Budd, Simon Collison, and Cameron Moll
• Access by Design : A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers — Sarah Horton
• CSS Pocket Reference — Eric Meyer
• HTML Pocket Reference — Jennifer Niederst

Workshop Files

• America — Finish
• America — Start

Digital-Web Magazine offers an educational article about PNGs and how to use them in ways that no other web image format can be used.