ScaleNine

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.

Today a FedEx package dropped on my desk. Inside was the book Andy and I spent so much time on writing, finally printed. When I talked to Doug about when he received his book in hand he said it was all worth it and I have to agree. To think, this book started as a presentation given at 360|Flex Seattle.

For those of you who pre-ordered, the book should be on it’s way soon. Andy and I will be working on getting the source code up as soon as we get back from MAX. If you see us, we’ll have copies there.

You can learn more about the details of the book at the book’s website. The one thing that isn’t immediately apparent is Appendix A: Skinning and Styling Diagrams. To give people an idea, here’s a little sample of one of the diagrams:

Now, imagine every single Flex component with the exact same diagram that points out every skin-able and style-able part of the component and maps to a legend. Better yet, imagine a poster of these diagrams:

The book doesn’t come with a poster, but it does have all the diagrams spread across several pages. That poster is one I printed out at the EffectiveUI office in Denver as a reference to hang on the wall. I also made mini printouts for anyone who asked to tape under our glass desk tops for quick reference. Believe me, there was a lot of time spent in Illustrator to get those done

Thanks to Chuck Toporek from Addison-Wesley, NJ from the Adobe Thermo/Flex team for writing the foreword and everyone who provided feedback and guidance along the way.