Moved my posting to a work blog

To practice using and tweaking a hosted WordPress site, I’ve moved my posting to a blog put together for my work department: TTI COM Visual Media.

AIR: what is it good for?

Still trying to figure out the practical usefulness of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Interesting points in the second paragraph of this Adobe blog: AIR as “PDF of the Web 2.0″. He’s proposing that AIR do for all (other) mobile devices what the App Store is doing for the iPhone.

AIR bascially lets you take anything you’ve created for online (HTML and/or JavaScript and/or Flash) and, fairly easily, turn it into a cross-platform (Win/OSX/Linux) desktop app. I went through the tutorials at the Adobe Community Summit in May ‘07. As a former long-time Director user, it seemed useful but maybe late to the party.

Plus, for CD delivery to a client (we still get these jobs), they still need to download the AIR runtime itself. I’m thinking that from an end user’s point of view, this is one too many steps.

Good free, online video utilities

Even though we use all the high-dollar professional video editors and encoders at my work, for personal stuff and recommendations I always try to watch for what’s out there free, keeping track of them in my Google Notebook. A recent article on this subject on Lifehacker reminded me of some of these, and the comments on the article added some more good links. When my wife wanted to download some videos from YouTube (non-copyrighted, of course) and edit them in iMovie, here’s some of the things we used:

Desktop FLV Players

For anyone who works with Flash video, the annoying lack of a proper Adobe FLV desktop player has not been relieved by the Adobe Media Player. AMP is more of a sell-TV-show software than a simple FLV player. The VideoLAN VLC Media Player is a good, simple FLV desktop video player. For Mac users, even better, installing the Perian QuickTime component lets you open and view FLVs, and a bunch of other formats, directly in QuickTime Player.

Format converters

We tried vixy.net’s Online FLV Converter first, but the server was always busy. So we used the excellent free desktop video format converter, and alternative to the $30 QuickTime Pro, MPEG Streamclip for Mac and Windows. This does all kind of quick and dirty conversions, including converting FLVs back to MOV and other formats too. We found that using the inpoint/outpoint keyboard shortcuts (I and O) made it simple to convert just the clips we wanted to bring into the editing software without having to convert entire long videos.

Downloading from YouTube

For downloading FLVs from YouTube etc., there’s a bunch of ways, but I’m liking viddownloader.com, a simple online tool done in Flash.

ASF to MOV

A while ago we impulse-bought a $99 video camera. It’s amazingly good for the price in every way but one—it shoots in ASF, an old Windows streaming format. Still keeping an eye out for a simple, free way to convert these into an editable format.

Learning Flash/ActionScript

We had some discussion at the last meeting re. Flash and its scripting language, ActionScript. Flash started as an animation program, using a keyframe/timeline model, and it can still be used this way. But to achieve the full power of the modern Flash, you’ll want to learn some ActionScript.

ActionScript is now at version 3.0, which came out about two years ago. I still use AS v.2 but will move to v.3 as soon as practical, project-wise (the only Flash project I’m working on now is an extension of a two-year old AS2 project). I’ve also delayed because I’m careful about forcing users to upgrade Flash Player versions (AS3 requires FP9, now almost two years old) unless really required.

I’ve recently read some discussion of the ‘difficulty’ of learning AS3 as compared to previous versions. What’s the difference between v.2 and v.3? Short description heard at last fall’s Adobe MAX conference in a session titled Intro to ActionScript 3: “AS3 is harder to learn at first but easier to work with once you do.” So, check the links in this post and dive in to one or the other.

Ubuntu LAMP Server Installation: thanks Karsten!

At the April meeting, Karsten Pearce walked us through the steps for an Ubuntu LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation. Here are the notes he used for this presentation, which he compiled from various online sources: LAMP Setup (PDF).

One thing he recommended is, that if you’re planning to do a dual-boot setup with Windows, to install Windows first. This is my situation since I have a PC with a wiped hard drive I’m planning to try this on.

Thank you Karsten!

Interesting web stats

If the global web stats from this site are close to right:

• less than half the people still use IE6
• one in five uses IE7
• one in four uses Firefox
• one in 50 uses Safari
• only one in twelve still have 800×600 resolution
• eleven of twelve search with Google

I first saw these linked from PCMag.com.

MAX 2007 Report

Thanks to everyone who came to the meeting last week for the MAX 2007 Report. Here’s the presentation file: MAX 2007 Report PowerPoint. This file is a summary of my conference notes. Here’s the discussion outline/intro screen:

• Intro
• Keynotes/General Sessions
• Selected Sessions
• Special Interest
• Conclusions
• Questions/Comments

Here’s the conclusions/summary screen:

• AIR is the current Big Thing
• ‘The web, your way’
• Mobile technology still being stressed…
• Adobe/Apple tenseness (under the surface)
• Less overt ColdFusion promotion, but the ‘How to Promote CF’ Birds-of-a-Feather session was a hot topic on the UGM forum

Since these are just speaking points, email me if you have specific questions.

Notes from MAX

I’m at the Adobe MAX convention this week and will give a report on the Adobe announcements etc. at our October meeting. In the meantime, here are the notes I’m taking in a public Google Notebook. The sections show up in reverse chronological order (newest first). I’ll continue to add to it through Wednesday.

Hope to see you all on the 19th. ‘course, we’re drawing for the software, whatever Adobe package the winner chooses up to $2100 in value. We’ll be doing this every six months while Adobe continues it.

Tom Dent CS3 presentation

Here are my notes and observations from today’s meeting. Since there was a lot of info, I pretty much just wrote down what was new to me (or what I’d remembered hearing before but forgot). Therefore, please send any additions/corrections and I’ll add them and credit you:

• It was the best attendance I remember at a BVAUG meeting; I counted 22 people.
• Re: Adobe apps will be available through SELL. From a follow-up email from Tom:
  

  The Student Licensing program is for TAMU students only. The web site isn’t up yet, but will be in the next couple of weeks from what I am told by Romona Stites, my contact at SELL. Three products offered: Design Premium, Web Standard (CS3 edition of the former Studio 8), and Acrobat Professional. Pricing is a much better deal than purchasing standard Education shrink. For example, Education shrink for Design Premium is $599, TAMU student pricing is $395. They may add more products, such as Master Collection, based on the initial success of this new student perk.

• Fireworks:
  • for quickly creating web graphics
  • new prototyping tools— using hotspots, ‘Share Layer to Pages’ command, etc.
  • .pngs can be multi-page (like Freehand documents)
  • pretty strong integration between Fireworks, Photoshop and Illustrator: layers, transfer modes, layer styles.
• Bridge: allows live previews of Flash animations and video (.flv, .mov, .avi)
• Dreamweaver:
  • native .psd import; Dreamweaver automatically opens a dialog like Photoshop’ ‘Save for Web’ when a .psd is imported. This graphic will be updated automatically when the external .psd is updated in Photoshop (like ‘Publish’ in Illustrator or a similar feature in After Effects).
  • Browser Compatibility Check feature and its integration with Adobe’s CSS Advisor. This is actually useful; I’ve used it exactly as presented. Of course, you don’t need CS3 to browse or google the CSS Advisor on Adobe’s site.
  • Spry: quick demo of Adobe’s implementation of AJAX. The question about whether it’s accessible brought this answer: ‘No.’ Perhaps he was correct. They’ll fix this, of course. See below for some books I’m currently reading and recommend on JavaScript and Ajax techniques.
• Flash
  • you can choose to keep .psd vector layers as vector shapes
  • can specify these files’ text layers as bitmaps, vector outlines or editable text
  • can assign instance names in Illustrator for addressing with ActionScript
• Device Central: amazingly well-developed mobile device emulator for Flash, Dreamweaver,and other CS3 apps. Supports some 200 phones etc., with so far one notable, and perhaps sticky, exception (actually two: the iPhone and iPod touch).
• a new certification process featuring interactive (presumably Captivate-created) quizzing with an emphasis on workflow across products, rather than on full mastery of any one.

This was a strong and packed presentation for a lunch hour. As I presented on in June, I received a three-day version of this presentation at the Adobe Community Summit. Thanks to Tom and Patrick for coming and presenting! If anyone didn’t get Tom’s contact info, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me posting it here: tdent@adobe.com.

As a note regarding the Spry/lack of accessibility note above, here’s some books I’m currently reading, and recommend, on standards-based, unobtrusive, accessible, and gracefully-degrading JavaScript:

• DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
• ppk on JavaScript
• The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

Adobe, mobile devices, and the iPhone/iPod touch

As I’ve mentioned before (in April, June, and July), Macromedia and now Adobe have been strongly emphasizing the importance of developing for mobile devices for years—since at least the 2003 MAX conference that I remember. But I’ve been hearing some discouraging words regarding Flash—i.e., the lack of it—on the iPhone and iPod touch.

From Roughly Drafted: though there’s a few out-of-date and/or questionable interpretations here, he makes some points to consider:

Excluding Flash is a huge slap in the face of Adobe, which is pushing Flash as the basis of its AIR and Flex web application strategies. Adobe likes to advertise that nearly every PC has a Flash plugin installed. Suddenly, nearly every mobile that has access to the real Internet won’t have Flash, making it far less attractive across the board.

Of course, even Steve Jobs’ own prediction/goal for the iPhone market share isn’t anywhere close to “nearly every mobile”; it’s 1% of all handhelds (10 million by the end of 2008). But at $300 for an iPod touch, I don’t see how “nearly every” person wanting to surf on a mobile device wouldn’t get one—with or without Flash.

In any case, the iPhone is Apple’s best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such. The company just recently removed all remains of Flash from its corporate website, implementing everything that had been Flash-based using standards-based Ajax techniques instead.

I haven’t tried to check this, but the “standards-based” rationale is interesting. Here’s a comment from another Flash-disparaging article:

… today we ponder one of the most interesting questions about the future of Flash, iPhone and web standards. Despite assurances by Uncle Walt [Walt Mossberg] that Apple and Adobe are hard at work on a Flash Player for iPhone, plenty of naysayers, skeptics, and player-haters have voiced strong speculations that Flash will never appear on the iPhone for strategic, practical and technical reasons. A quick scan of comments on various iPhone related entries across the web reveals an almost universal plea amongst everyday users indicating that the only missing feature from Mobile Safari is the presence of a mainstream multimedia plugin. In fact, the world’s most popular piece of software, in history is well known to be absent from iPhone.