R&D Departments & AD Agencies.
There was a pretty interesting entry up on CREATIVITY (online) last week. It was about how Arnold, Boston started it's very own Research & Development department, staffed with a couple of young technologist/designers. [read here]
My opinion on this matter is a bit mixed. Part of me is looking at this type of idea with great skepticism, another is looking at it with a little jealousy, and a small part is looking at it with some hope. I'm more curious what other peoples' opinions are on this subject.
Will Adobe Continue to Please Us All? Yeah, I think so.
Recently, as seen via MXNA, I've noticed quite a bit of discourse over Adobe's future plans with the Flash platform. Specifically, are few people are nervous that Adobe will abandon the Flash IDE and perhaps focus on other development platforms such as Flex Builder. Its a rather interesting thing to think about at this point in time and, after reading a few posts, I'm a bit surprised that anyone is nervous.
Google Announces Open Mobile OS. Adobe to accelerate Linux support?
So Google has announced their open mobile OS initiative: Android. The OS is based on Linux, totally open source, and will be released under the Apache v2 license. Additionally, there are already a slew of carrier, software, manufacturing, and other various "alliance" members. And to top it all off, they'll be unveiling an SDK on November 12th. Sounds pretty promising, no?
I can't help but wonder what Adobe is thinking today. Will this help the Flash Player or AIR get on mobile phones? Will Adobe take interest at all? I sure hope so. I'm getting rather excited over the possibilities.
FlashForward & Books
We've been wickedly busy over the past couple of months. Outside of rocking our day jobs ( at Schematic & Rokkan ), we've been co-authoring a book on Adobe AIR with Todd Anderson ( of Schematic ).
On top of this, we're presenting at FlashForward, Boston in September. Our presentation is entitled, "Designers vs. Developers: How to Avoid Fights on the Playground." As the name implies, it's going to be focusing on how Designers and Developers can work together better by understanding some helpful tips and tricks of each of the disciplines. Matt & I are originally from a design education, but as it turns out, we've both weaseled our ways into programming/development roles in our respective companies. As such, we constantly rack our brains on how the two different sides of the office can work together better, or how designers could learn the basics of programming easier.
We'll hopefully talk more about these things in the upcoming months, as we get closer to launch dates.
Oh Boy! Safari on PC (complete with immediate problems).
So if you haven't heard, Apple released Safari 3 beta for XP and Vista today. I can't say that I'm all that stoked about it because, for one, I think Safari is a crummy browser. Aside from rendering stuff really fast, I've never heard anyone talk about how good it is at rendering things properly. All the CSS and Javascript guru's at ROKKAN have nothing but ill feelings towards the browser. But of course, the two mac users, think its the best thing since sliced bread. The reasons for this are obvious, and I won't get into them because it will, and it always does, turn into a big shouting match.
At any rate, I downloaded and installed the browser immediately so that I could give it a whirl. Naturally, since I'm a Flash developer, I checked out all the recent Flash sites I've worked on to see how they faired. The first one being one on an internal development server in which we use .htaccess password protection on...CRASH! Apparently it doesn't like .htaccess. That immediately bummed me out. But an even bigger issue for me was that SWFAddress does not work properly. Apparently, from my first observations, whenever the hash variable is updated via SWFAddress the browser clears the hash variable and reloads the entire page. Total bummer! On the upside, the Flash Player was prepackaged and I didn't have to install anything.
I was really excited to be able to test on Safari without having to get out my chair, but now my big question is, are we going to have another browser to account for? I certainly don't imagine many PC users will convert to Safari in large numbers, but who the heck knows.
Oh, and two other things. 1) I really hate programs that don't use the default chrome because now UltraMon util buttons don't appear! 2) When I put Safari on my 2nd monitor and try to maximize it, it disappears!
Pimp Your Blog
Sunday's are awesome because you can sit around and do nothing thats productive and not feel guilty about it. So after watching Arsenal come back from a goal down against Wigan, I did a lot of snooping around for WordPress stuff. At first I was looking around for useful plugins, and I realized that I should setup Google Analytics for this blog. There's a handy plugin to easily set that up for WordPress located over at Richard Boakes Blog. I also stumbled across the widgets plugin that allows you to add all sorts of stuff to your side bar. There are some handy dandy widgets available too. Everything widget related can be found at widgets.wordpress.com. I advise all you WordPressers check it out.