ScaleNine

When I was added as a speaker at 360Flex, Andy McIntosh, of Effective UI, and I had topics that overlapped in a number of ways. I was scheduled to present on “Creating a Theme” and Andy on “Skinning and Styling”. When I read this I got in contact with Andy to try to hash out how we’d make our presentations not overlap. The more we discussed it the closer we got to a realization that we should do a joint presentation.

We proposed this to John and Tom, the organizers of the 360Flex conference, and we were given the green light to move forward. As a result, Andy and I will be giving an informational presentation discussing methods for “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2″, which will be followed by a hands-on session where we’ll put those methods to use on an application.

Andy and I are excited about this new direction and it’s made our presentation authoring much less of a headache. For more information on our sessions, or any other events occuring at the conference, check out the 360Flex conference site.

I recently made some of the ScaleNine themes available for download from Adobe Exchange. I figured there’s probably people out there who haven’t heard of the ScaleNine, so it’s another way for me to reach them.

If you haven’t checked out the Adobe Exchange, it can be a great resource, not only for Flex but for other products like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.

I just got back from an awesome trip to Troncones, Mexico, which is near Ixtapa and I was far away from all things digital. It was a great trip and I’m just getting through reading the emails and catching up with world.

It seems like it was quite a week. Apollo released as Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) beta, Flex 3 beta is now available, details were released about Mac OSX Leopard, Safari on a PC with 8 security vulnerabilities already discovered.

What a week. Now it’s time to play a little catch up.

Ted Patrick is posting information this week all about Flex 3, codename:Moxie. Right out the gates he’s addressed what improvements have been made in regards to Designer/Developer workflow. There’s a lot of great features in there that I think will make that workflow a bit more seamless.

Some enhancements include the ability to preview your CSS styling in Design View, direct importing of skins, the ability to zoom/pan on your layout, visual preview of item renderers and a CSS outline view of your CSS structure.

Very nice!

Check out the posts:

Flex 3 – Monday: Designer/Developer Workflow

Flex 3 – Monday: Designer/Developer Workflow (CSS Design View)

The Speaker-to-Session list for the 360|Flex Seattle Conference has been posted. I have yet to secure a flight and lodging, so if anyone that’s going to the conference is flying out of Los Angeles or Orange County, CA let me know. Maybe we can meet up.

The Flex 2 Style Explorer was updated with a more robust color picker, which includes the ability to save swatches. This is great because formerly I was writing down custom color values, then retyping them in each time I wanted to use them. You can read about the features here and experience the app here.

Also, the Flex 2 Style Explorer was packaged as a Fireworks CS3 Extension, which allows you to run it right in Fireworks CS3. I can’t wait until the new CS3 applications are available for trial downloads so I can try this out.

Apollo shirts are now available for purchase and have one of the winning phrases from a previous post. The design is as seen above, and here, with your choice of one of these three phrases on the back. Choose from:

One small step for man, one giant leap for developers.

Desktop 2.0

The web is not enough…

They’re available in Red or Dark Grey in sizes S, M, L, XL. Prices are $9 + $4 shipping and handling. So, $13 all together, unless your ordering from outside the U.S. Then it’s a bit more. I make the shirts as they are ordered and I when I have enough orders to do a larger run. They’ll get screened as I have time, so it may take a couple weeks to get the shirt.

Before purchasing, make sure you are happy with the quality. Again, I made these on my screen printer at home with a type of ink that is semi-transparent. I tried to take detailed shots to make sure to illustrate this. Also, I will only be taking orders for the next couple weeks.

Purchase an Apollo Shirt Here:

http://scalenine.bigcartel.com

Adobe made Apollo available for download. Time for some more sleepless nights.

Download it here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

A decision has finally been made regarding the back of the Apollo T-Shirt I’m putting together. There were so many great ideas (more responses than I expected) that it made for a hard decision to make on my own. So, I enlisted other fellow bloggers and friends to help me make the decision. Even then I narrowed it down to three.

The overall top choice was (insert drumroll here):

“One small step for man, one giant leap for developers” posted by Mathias

I think Ryan Stewart had part of it right as to why this ended up being the decision:

…it ties in so well with the theme and the
old days of central.

In the end it was the tie in with the theme, memorableness (a word?) and reactions that I got that pushed this one to the top. So, Mathias, you get a free shirt and if you don’t claim it the free shirt goes to Grant

There are also two runners up:

“Desktop 2.0″ posted by Faisal Abid and “The web is not enough…” posted by Stefan le Roux. If the runners up want a shirt they can get it for a discount with their winning phrase on the back.

Thanks to everyone who put their 2 cents in. If you’d like a shirt I’m thinking of making them available for sale in any size, red or dark grey with one of the 3 phrases on the back. I need to finish the design first, so if you’re interested you might want to wait to see what the art looks like.

Keep in mind these are “home-made” shirts, so there might be small imperfections, but I’ll do my best

Time to get screenprinting.

Now taking orders: http://scalenine.bigcartel.com

Mike Chambers and Ted Patrick got the ball rolling with a one stop site to view all the videos they’ve been putting together for Flex and Apollo. I tried getting something like this going on over at flexcursion.com, but I’m sure they’ll be much more successful.

Not only can you view the videos they’ve put together, but you can also download them for your own purposes. Very nice!

Check out video.onflex.org