ScaleNine

Everyone’s been blogging about the new Flex Developer Center and some of the new features. The area I’m most excited about is the new Flex Interface Guide area. There’s already some great information up and some more on the way. I’m digging the sample FIG components which include a Callout, Paged Lists, and Pan|Zoom components.

More interesting though are the things they didn’t include. The one that caught my eye was “Guiding with Motion”. For those who have worked with Transitions before, it can be quite a task at times. I did a transiton once that was about 80+ lines of MXML and it would have been nice to work with it visually. Maybe like some of the features in Apple’s Motion product. I wonder if “Thermo” will help me out in that area. Hmmm…

Can’t wait until all is known.

This year’s MAX conference is sounding like something to really get excited about. And I am. I’ve got my schedule all configured and I’m looking forward to catching up with people I know and meeting people I don’t. If you see me, don’t hesitate to say hi.

I’m definitely looking forward to all the announcements mentioned by Ted Patrick and being able to see what’s in store for the Flex family. Of course, “Thermo” is a part of that, but it seems that’s only one piece.

Recently, I mentioned the new Orange County Flex User Group I’m a part of so I’ll be trying to get in touch with potential members. Also, were just adding a few new features to BrandDoozie that I’m hoping to be able to demo. If you’re interested in seeing it, let me know. And, like everyone else, we’re hiring.

Oh, and if you’re looking to get involved with the User Group Central App [insert cryptic code name] I mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to get a list together to see if the idea can really take off.

See you at MAX!

I just got a confirmation from Ed Sullivan, the Adobe User Group contact at Adobe, that the OCFlex User Group is official. So far this effort has been put together by Laura Arguello, Nahuel Foronda, and Tom Nguyen of ASFusion; Bill Thompson of PADI; and Rich Oren and myself of Atomic Curve.

We’re very excited to get things underway and are looking to grab new members at MAX. If you’re in or near Orange County, CA and want to check us out, our first meeting is November 1st. It’s a little over a month away, but this will give people some time to recover from MAX and give us time to get things together and get the word out.

See you there!

One of the things many developers have told me that they like about working with Flex, is the amount of involvement the community has and how great it is that everyone is helping each other. I’m currently in the process of getting things all squared away with the Orange County Flex User Group I’m involved with and was thinking:

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an AIR application that allowed any user group manage their blog, members, calendar of events, speakers, get direct messages from Adobe, watch remote sessions, etc. surrounding a user group? It could also be an application a member could download to check out any user group in the world. It could make creating and managing a user group really quick and easy.

Doing a little research I found that their seemed to be common patterns in what people did to get their user group put together. There’s usually a blog, sharing of information, like dates, contact info, member info, etc. Recognizing patterns like this is a great way to figure out whether or not something warrants creating an application to cater to certain needs.

We’re using Mango Blog for the OCFlex User Group, which is powered by ColdFusion and could probably be ported over to be used for an AIR app. Not only that, but I know there’s a lot of the other pieces out there we can use to put this together. Now all we need is time.

Anyone interested? Any thoughts?

I was thinking, what would happen if Homestar Runner and the new Photoshop logo had a child? With a little free time and some Photoshop skills I was able to answer my question. I call him Photoshop Runner.

I just caught the mention of an Adobe project, code-named “Thermo”, on MXNA. There’s a post over at pixelconsumption that caught a job position available at Adobe to work on “Thermo”. Nice find, Sam! Basically the description of “Thermo” was this:

“…an innovative new tool, codenamed Thermo, that will enable designers and creatively inclined developers to easily build rich internet applications and interactive content.”

There’s a bit more about it at pixelconsumption, but I have a feeling there might be more information at MAX. Ted Patrick mentioned MAX should not be missed and this alone will make going there well worth it. As it is right now there are so many ways to create UIs for Flex. I’d like to see the process streamlined, simplified and more powerful by making programmatic skinning more easily accessible. This is partly why I got involved with Degrafa, but hopefully “Thermo” will be the answer.

I can’t wait to see what it is and how long before it’s available.

Someone pointed me at John Nack’s blog and mentioned that there was a new Photoshop logo. “Oh yeah, the blue square, that’s old news.” But no, it was yet another revision to the Adobe logo line up. The new logo uses what looks like a speech bubble with a hole in it. As I was looking at the logo someone mentioned that it looked like every Photoshop filter was thrown at the icon. Maybe they were trying to show off the power of Photoshop. You know, like a little piece of Photoshop travelling around every where the name goes.

Looking more at the shape I started to remember something that looked kinda similar. After a little searching I came across a Quark XPress logo that was exactly what I had pictured in my head. It’s not the same thing, but it looks like it could be in the same group of letterforms.

I assume we’ll start seeing this little Photoshop icon used as a little speech or idea bubble similar to the way the Arby’s hat is used. But, besides the thought bubble, I couldn’t help noticing it looked kinda like a toilet paper roll with the end folded creatively, as though it were in a fancy hotel. I couldn’t hold myself back from creating a logo variation, but sparing the inclusion of a tagline.

All-in-all I kind of have mixed feelings about the new logo, but so did other people when the new “element chart” icons came out. Who knows though. We’ll see how the campaign develops and maybe it’ll grow on me.

I spent part of my day in Los Angeles for the WIRED NextFest and there was definitely a lot of great stuff to see. The venue was split into different groupings of categories like education, exploration, design, entertainment, etc. I had read a little about certain things that I definitely wanted to check out, so I made sure to keep my eyes open for them.

As I first walked in there was a wall of fog that had different images and video projected onto it. It was called FogScreen and I thought maybe the fog would be more like a mist and I’d get water on me when I walked through it, but that didn’t happen. It was a super fine mist. Right in that same area I spotted something I had mentally tagged as something I wanted to check out. It was the Morpho Towers, which was these metal cone-shaped structures that sit in a pool of magentic liquid saturated with iron particles. As music played the liquid was drawn up the sides of the cone and an array of various forms were created around it. Almost like three-dimensional waveforms.

After wandering around a bit I noticed a large dual-screen display in the disctance and as I got closer to it I noticed it was the Multi-touch Collaboration Wall by Perceptive Pixel that I’d seen in a number of online videos. Sure enough, there was Jeff Han giving demos. I tried to reproduce some of the hand gestures Jeff was doing to bring up all these different menus, but I could only get a few to work. Guess I didn’t have the magic touch. It was great being able to play around on a touch screen of that size. It was like the iPhone on steroids.

Along that same wavelength of technology was BumpTop. Again, I’d seen videos of this and it was interesting to see how it performed. When I walked up to the display, one of the people there asked me if I’d ever interacted with files like this before and I responded with “You mean like TileUI?” The person seemed to pretend they didn’t hear me and proceeded with the demo. It didn’t seem as responsive as the Perceptive Pixel multi-touch device and I noticed some people struggling with the metaphor it was trying to use to allow user-interaction with a file system. The demo was given using a stylus that looked like a dry erase marker, but you could also use your fingers. I imagine the stylus was used for precision, as there were a number of tiny icons to be clicked.

Among the things I mentioned above was the mono-cycle, RFID Wine Rack, mind-controlled soccer game, FastTrack 1 and more. I could go on and on about where I think some of these technologies that were there might go. There were so many great things to check out and play with, but I left with the feeling that there was something missing, yet couldn’t really put my finger on it. Ah well, being able to play with the multi-touch screens made it worth the trip.

You can Check out my Flickr photo set here.

Looks like the videos from the 360Flex Conference are starting to appear. There were some really great sessions and I’m bummed I didn’t get to see them all, but hey, that’s what the videos are for. Each one is $3.60 each to download for a single user license or there’s an option to get a 10-user license. You can check ‘em all out here as they get uploaded. The first part of the mega-session that Andy McIntosh and I did is up here. A big thanks to Tom Ortega, John Wilker and Bryan Zug for putting these together.

Inspired by Ted Patrick’s OSX tip I thought I’d share one that I find particularly handy. By holding down the command key and clicking on a window’s title you can display the file path of an open document or finder window. When you select and release on an item in the displayed path it will open the selected location. This is something you were able to do in OS9 and it carried over to OSX. I use it all the time.