Brian Fitzgerald

Microsoft has been rumored to have a “flash killer” in the works for a long time and it seems that the newly announced “sparkle” program may be it, but is it designed to go up against flash? It really seems when watching the available interview/presentation that it is not meant so much to be a low-bandwidth internet technology as a way to add a ton of vector-based eye candy at desktop applications. Of course, it becomes difficult to separate web from desktop when you are talking Internet Explorer, Visual Basic and Windows and I’m sure that this will impact the web in many ways.

Sun and Google announced that they will be partnering on different technologies. It’s interesting that Google (who is the big fish here) has nothing about this on their site while Sun, who really really needs this - and seems to think that they are the big player, has this as the biggest item on their site.

That which makes October the best month of the year begins today as the major league baseball postseason begins today at noon central.

MIT has put together the specifications for a computer that should cost no more than $100 to build. The 12 inch laptop computer has wireless networking, six usb ports and a shoulder-strap that doubles as a power cord. The computer would be built primarily for third world countries looking to introduce computers into the classrooms of their students. Given this, the computer also features a small crank which can be used to provide juice to the computer in areas without handy electrical power. The computer may be produced commercially for developed nations and would likely run around $200 with some of the proceeds going to the effort to get these computers, again, into more povershed areas.

Tomorrow morning, I'm catching a plane to Boston to watch Saturday's game against the Yankees. It's going to be incredible. Wakefield vs Johnson. I don't know if I'll even sleep tonight

PunBB seems be be a nice, newer, no-frills php-based bulletin board.

Here’s a good article from scottberkun.com about software design and why people call it sucky. What are they really thinking? What does this make the developer think? How can developers spend time more efficiently to create software that is user-friendly?

Today I’m nailing down the page structure for a new set of sites that I’m working on and a key part of that is asking “what gets denoted h1, h2, etc.”? I perused several HTML and design forums looking for discussion on the subject, but did not find answers that seemed practical. A model that kept coming up was that your h1 or h2 should mimic your title tag. If your title tag follows the convention of “site name - page name” this is problematic as these are two distinct elements that should be marked separately.

So… I started visiting sites that I know are marked up pretty well and have come up with the following convention. H1 will always be the site name, therefore h1 on every page will be the same. H2 will be the page name. I will have one h1 and usually one h2. I could see multiple instances of h2 where there are elements on the page that are not related to the page topic (navigation, etc.). From there on, the headers should simply be nested in a logical fashion.

I’ve done a few personal podcast episodes on this site and more recently, produce the Board of Education podcast on the Lincoln Public Schools website. Through these efforts I have tried just about everything available on the macintosh right now and am yet to find a tool that does a great job of making the entire process easy.

I’ll use the Board podcast as an example. I publish two podcasts for the board. One is an enhanced m4a version for iTunes with chapters. The second is a standard mp3 version for other clients. Here’s how it goes together…

1. First I separate the meeting audio from the video, trim the beginning and end, and save it as a separate quicktime file
2. Then I create a text file with the current date in it which I feed to an application called TextToMP3 to get an MP3 file with the computer speaking the name of the podcast and the date
3. I open up the last podcast that I did in Apple's Soundtrack Pro software and replace the meeting audio and the date audio with the new files. I adjust the bumper music to fit the new lengths and output the AIFF file. (I had a difficult time getting garageband to work with a file that was more than an hour long -- but I've read ways to get past this and will be trying it out)
4. I drop the AIFF file into iTunes and compress it into a mp3 file and an m4a file.
5. Add ID3 tags and the podcast image in iTunes to the two files
6. I open the m4a file into ChapterToolMe and listen to the file, putting in chapters where appropriate.
7. I re-export the m4a file. I now have finished mp3 files and m4a files.
8. I launch Feeder to create the XML entries for the two podcasts and attach the files.
9. I post the podcasts.

A lot of work isn't it? I would like to see as much as possible of this in one application: The ability to record tracks, mix tracks, compress the files as both mp3 and m4a, tag the files, chapterize the m4a file, create the posts and upload. There are podcast tools available now for the macintosh (Chat Easy and Podcast Maker are two), but they assume that you have already produced the podcast into an audio file. There are some decent audio programs out there, but they don't make podcasting as simple as it could be. I really hope to see something soon that is a beginning to end solution for doing this.

I downloaded the new Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash last night and have had some pretty good opportunities today to use DW and Fireworks.

Regarding the previous post about folks bashing Fireworks, I’m not in agreement. They were obviously doing some things with Flex that I’m not doing, but Fireworks suits me very well and I do not feel like the product seems neglected, although there is not much new there.

Dreamweaver feels like it has gotten some much needed love on the macintosh. Parts of it feel a bit more native, the tabs are fantastic and I think that the file transfers seem a little snappier. That said, I have also had it hang on several file transfers and have resorted to force quitting and relaunching DW. I hope that I can figure out what causes this and avoid it in the future. I look forward to trying out the style sheet features in it, as well as the XML and XSL features.

Want to get your own copy? Grab it here…

Studio 8 has yet to be released for non devnet subscribers, but news is starting to hit the web and one of the first interesting critiques focuses on Fireworks' improvements, or lack of.

Subscribers to Macromedia’s DevNet service are reporting that they have been provided links today to download the parts of the new studio 8. Perhaps the rest of us will get it today also… (fingers crossed)

Another school year has started and things are humming. I’ve just switched my blog from being based on Movable Type to WordPress and things are probably going to be a little funky here for a week while I learn this new environment and make this what I want it to be.

I'm three days late on this, but Macromedia announced Studio 8 (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper) on August 8. 8 on 8/8. Great huh? Anyway, I'm quite a bit saddened that Freehand is not in the package as this almost certainly means that it's death is eminent. They have not said as much, but I'm not sure what else a person could think with the coming Adobe merger.

So what's new? One of the smallest new features, but one of the most exciting to me is a tabbed document interface in Dreamweaver for Macintosh. There is a new CSS panel that better merges all CSS work into a single place. You can now use Dreamweaver to edit XML and XSL documents. You can also now do "code folding" which allows you to collapse parts of your code that you are not working on. The product is scheduled to be released at the beginning of September.

As part of a new series of articles from Macromedia centered around the Studio 8 announcement, Marius Zaharia has written one titled "XML Overview" that does a very nice job of explaining XML, it's connection to HTML and XHTML, and XSL. If you are interested in these topics, this article is worth reading.

Again, for any interested, here are the presentation slides and handout from my "Next Web" presentation on Tuesday at the Midwest Internet Institute in Lincoln.

View Presentation | Download Handout

For anybody that might be interested. Here are the files that I used during my session on cascading style sheets Monday afternoon at the Midwest Internet Institute in Lincoln. They are included here as a zip file that you can expand and proceed to play around with if you wish. The presentation itself is also here. Please be patient with these while they download as my server uplink is not very fast.

Download: Presentation | Files

iTunes 4.9 was release sometime either last night or this morning and now features podcast subscriptions. It is so super easy, you can browse the store for podcasts in the same way that you browse for music. When you find something you like you simply hit "subscribe". You can customize how many shows you would like and best of all, you can tell iTunes how to clean up after itself so that old shows are removed as new shows are downloaded. Two great new podcasts are Adam Curry's new PodFinder where Adam plays snippits of other podcasts and Apple's New Music Tuesday podcast where new tunes and albums are introduced. Both take advantage of iTunes ability to display timecode triggered events that allow you to go straight to the podcast or album that you are listening to at that moment.

Whining Dave Winer posted a honest reason for his deciding to cancel his Audible service, which Audible CEO Don Katz blasted him for (I bet he doesn't blast people for posting about subscribing), and in typical form Winer opened both barrels back on him in his blog. Stupid stuff.

Here's a blog specifically to help folks with the cfchart part of coldfusion

You know you want one

Link

The "Giant-Ass Image Viewer" is a very similar project that is demonstrated and explained.

Here's 7 simple steps that describe the blogging process (publisher to reader).

I've been to a few conferences where "poster sessions" have been offered, but I've always been a little confused by the title since I have never seen a poster at these sessions. Here's a post I found that gives good tips for presenting a poster session and a definition of what one is (they are supposed to have posters).