ScaleNine

I just realized I haven’t posted anything on my blog for 7 months. Either time is flying by way too fast or I’ve got way too much going on. I think it’s probably a combination of the two. That and I’ve been using Twitter and Posterous as my preferred means of dispensing my ramblings.

Hard to believe it’s been nearly a year since the last one, but I’ll be heading out to Adobe MAX in Los Angeles. In fact, I’m already here in Orange County visiting family, but gearing up for MAX to get started for me at 8am tomorrow with the Adobe Agency Summit. I’ll be joining 10+ other EffectiveUI friends, some of which will be speaking. If you’re interested in hearing about or seeing some of our latest work, swing by our booth.

I’ve got the majority of my sessions picked out and I’m super excited to learn what Adobe has been cooking up since last MAX. In addition, it’s always a good time catching up with friends, meeting new ones and seeing what everyone has been up to. See you at Adobe MAX!

On a recent project I was implementing some skins into an AIR application. Things were moving forward without any problems until recently when the lead developer on the project, Greg Owen, walked up to me and asked about potential performance issues with skinning. I asked what the issue was and he mentioned a major CPU hit was being taken as soon as the style sheet was loaded and it just continued to climb. He also mentioned the issue had gotten worse as more development and skinning progress had been made.

We stripped out Degrafa (we were using Degrafa for skinning). That wasn’t the issue. We changed around some embeds. That wasn’t the issue. Greg eventually narrowed it down to using the Flex Component Kit for skinning as the issue by reverting a sample skin back to the “stateless” way of creating skins. When that was done there was a substantial difference.

The thing is, this issue may not be very noticeable in smaller applications. It’s when you begin to add more controls that the issue becomes very apparent, which may explain why nothing really comes up when you do a Google search.

Patrick Hansen, the UX Designer who created the skins, has written about the issue from a designer perspective and Greg Owen has written a post from a developer’s perspective. They’ve also provided sample files so you can see the issue first hand.

Here’s my Flash Catalyst presentation slides and source files from this weekend’s Flex Camp Orange County. Along with the slides (which I partly borrowed from Ryan Stewart), I walked through the “next-gen” workflow of creating a design, bringing the design into Flash Catalyst, then taking that into Flex Builder 4 to add some data.

The app I walked through was kind of a social address book. Along with some basic interactions I added in some 3D flip action and a expandable drawer. It was a pretty simple example, but it was plenty to go through in the 40 minute time slot. You can view the final app here.

If you’re interested in walking through the workflow yourself, you can download the Illustrator CS4 file, Flash Catalyst FXP file, final Flex Builder source and slides in a single zip file: Get the Flash Catalyst Source files.

The turn out for Flex Camp Orange County was great! And who can resist Flex and AIR cupcakes from Two Parts Sugar. Thanks to Nahuel, Laura and Jeremy from ASFusion for putting things together, as well as Tom and John of 360|Conferences.

If you’re looking for the Degrafa presentation Tom Gonzalez and I gave, I’ll be posting it to the Degrafa blog, or you can see the slides here.

I just caught the trailer for this film and can’t wait to see it. The film is called “Objectified”:

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets.

The film is done by the same person who did a documentary on Helvetica, Gary Hustwit. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it to SXSW, but until then there’s always the trailer:

If you live in Southern California and are interested in Flex, you should make your way Flex Camp being held in Orange County on January 31st. There’s a nice range of topics that should be of interest to developers and designers alike.

A number of fellow developers from Denver will be going to speak. I’ll be heading down there with Tony Hillerson to present on Degrafa, while Tony is speaking on Flex Frameworks.

To learn more about Flex Camp Orange County, you can check out the website.

Like so many others, I thought I’d do a personal year end wrap up of 2008. This year flew by and a ton happened in just 12 short months.

The Book

A good portion of my free time this year was consumed by the book Andy and I wrote, “Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0″. Writing a book is something I had always thought about writing, but never knew what about. The subject matter for the book became immediately apparent after giving a presentation at 360|Flex. Andy and I jumped in with both feet and are glad to see all the work we put into the book has paid off with good reviews coming in.

For those of you asking for a poster of the diagrams in the back of the book, we’re working on it.

ScaleNine

ScaleNine has been doing pretty well. I’ve been slacking on updates to the Showcase and Resources sections because of other things I’ve gotten involved with. I was able to put on a contest thanks to Adobe, specifically Andrew Shorten and Mike Potter, and EffectiveUI. Not only did Patrick Hansen whip together an awesome logo, but we got a great response with 20+ themes added to ScaleNine.

Stats for the site have definitely grown, which is probably in part to the interest in Flex/AIR growing. Here’s some numbers:

124,470 Unique Visitors

533,319 Page Views

197,399 Visits

Last year stats were 145,427 visits, 323,763 page views and 90,446 visitors. Sounds like I need to start getting some ads on there to generate some revenue for the long hours managing the site

Degrafa

This year has been an exciting one for Degrafa. Working with Adobe to find a happy medium with Degrafa and FXG was great to see and I think some of the full benefits of that are still to come. What’s really been amazing is the number of downloads, the amount of community support (like tutorials, screencasts and samples) and seeing some big name companies using the framework. We get emails from people all the time saying that the reason they looked at Flex was because of Degrafa. It’s stuff like that that keeps the team going.

I think this year is going to be awesome for Degrafa. We have several things in the works that are going to blow people’s minds. We’re on our way to Degrafa 1.0, but we’re also looking at things that will compliment the framework and make it a very approachable solution for designer’s and developers.

Effective UI

In February of 2008 I started at EffectiveUI as an Experience Architect. The first project I got to work on was awesome. I got to architect, design and develop a fun AIR application that I hope to share more information about soon.

Since that first project I’ve been able to work with technologies beyond Flex (iPhone, Android, etc.) and across different types of devices. It’s been fun, as each device/technology/app offers it’s own set of problems.

I’ve also been able to hone my design skills at a rapid pace. The design team at EffectiveUI is awesome. It’s the reason I moved to Denver, so I could sit right in the middle of it. The conversations that fly around just amaze me and I couldn’t imagine not going into the “office” every day.

I’m excited to see what we do this next year as a company. If it’s anything like what we’ve talked about, it’s going to rock!

The Industry

I’m excited to see where things go in the industry in 2009. 2008 almost felt like a transitionary state that will take new paths in 2009 with things like Flash Catalyst, Android, 3D and more. Sitting right in the middle of it all is definitely inspiring.

Other Stuffs

Beyond all the work stuff, my fiancé and I have settled into Denver (oh yeah, I’m engaged). It’s a great city. Granted it is colder than Southern California, it’s what I wanted. A change.

This year also saw me go out and present a bit more. I was excited to make it out to MAX Europe to present on “Prototyping AIR Applications with Fireworks CS4″. Maybe next year I can hit a trifecta for MAX (North America, Europe & Japan).

Future Stuffs

Another things I’ve always wanted to do is start my own successful business. Whether by myself or with others. There’s nothing to report on that yet, but I’ve got ideas and several seeds have been planted. I’m excited to see if any of them take in 2009.

One of my goals for 2009 is to crank out more screencasts. I can make them much more quickly than tutorial blog posts, but that’s probably cause I don’t do any editing.

The End

So, this post turned out to be much longer than I expected and I’m sure I forgot to mention some stuff. Anyway, I look forward to seeing everyone in 2009. See you next year!

Here are the presentation slides and source files for the presentation I gave at MAX Europe titled, “Prototyping Adobe AIR Applications with Fireworks CS4″. The slides give a brief overview of prototyping, using Fireworks, why AIR and set the stage for the application that was prototyped during my session.

Download the Slides

Download the Source

This is my first MAX I’ve spoken at and the first MAX Europe I’ve attended. Overall I think the presentation went well and I look forward to the opportunity to speak at future MAX events. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking with Jason Hawryluk about Degrafa during lunch in the Community Lounge.

I’m heading out to MAX Europe in Milan, so if you’re out there be sure to say hello. I’ll be there (along with others) representing EffectiveUI and giving a talk on Monday on “Prototyping AIR Applications using Fireworks CS4″. I’m excited to be giving this talk because I use Fireworks everyday and Fireworks CS4 has a lot of great productivity features.

I’m also looking forward to giving a talk on Degrafa with Jason Hawryluk on Tuesday in the Community Lounge. I think the presentation will probably be the best one ever considering it will be given by the 2 guys who founded Degrafa.

You can learn more about the Degrafa presentation here.

I just recently got ScreenFlow and have been playing around with Adobe’s new interaction design tool, Flash Catalyst, so I thought I’d make a screencast to test out some of the features of ScreenFlow. I also wanted to try to share some info about Flash Catalyst for those of you who didn’t get to go to MAX and get a preview release.

Hopefully I can get myself into the habit of throwing together some quick screencasts surrounding all kinds of content around creating UIs for Flex, AIR and AJAX apps. Creative Suite 4 has a lot of great new stuff geared towards making those workflows much easier.

I’m thinking of switching to screencasts for more tutorial-oriented content. To make this screencast it took me 30 minutes. I did very minimal preparation, did no editing and it’s pretty casual. In future screencasts you’ll probably hear phones ring and dogs bark, but I’m not going for pro production here, just a quicker way to get information out in a more meaningful way.

We’ll see how it goes.

John McCree, a fellow Experience Architect here at EffectiveUI, sent some good Friday inspirational linkage around the office (see below). It’s called G-Speak and it’s developed by Oblong Industries.

The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs.

I’ve seen some similar stuff floating around, but this seems much more evolved and pretty amazing. I’m not sure how I’d feel waving my hands around without any tactile response, but I’m sure it’s something I could get used to. You can check out some more videos on Vimeo here.