Brian Fitzgerald

Some observations and thoughts from the first day at Macromedia’s MAX Conference:

Flex is awesome and the price may be right now. I’m frustrated that right now there is no way to develop flex applications on the Macintosh (that I can see). The code is just XML, but you have to have something that can compile the SWF file and that seems to be Windows-only right now.

Stephen Elop (Macromedia CEO) took quite a swing at Microsoft and their new flash-like features in Avalon. He displayed a big slide telling them to “try again”. Of course Microsoft has the money and resources to try again, and again, and again, and again.

Adobe’s Bruce Chizen (CEO) spoke at the end of the general session (many thought it was over and had left). He’s not a great speaker and stumbled over his points quite a bit. He flattered the developers some, but propped Acrobat and print. It will be a curious melding of philosophies when Adobe meets Macromedia. The first’s idea of digitizing content is to put replicate print formats while the other’s goal is to blow people’s minds with ways in which content can be delivered.

Macromedia’s XD development group has a series of sessions available in which they are discussing the way that they build applications. This is something that I thought was really missing next year – talk about how to build an application (beyond the code). The session I was in this morning talked about application design, brainstorming, cycling, etc. It got me excited and I hope to find more sessions like it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is going to be a loooong day. Morning starts at seven. General session should be a lot of fun as the different product groups take turns showing what cool and new. There will be a sneak peak session after the sessions have ended to show what may (or may not) be coming in future products. Finally, there is an event for attendees at Disneyland’s Paradise Pier. I may need to be dragged back to the hotel room tomorrow night.

I found another post about the Yahoo blog search that made things much more clear – AND OF COURSE linked to the correct page. That’s not so hard is it News.com?

The Yahoo blog search is nice. When you do a search on the Yahoo news site, a sidebar is presented on the right side of the screen that displays recent blog entries with related information. You can also click a link which takes you to only blog results.

I was just reading a news.com article regarding a new blog search that Yahoo has and of course wanted to then try it out. News.com however, never seems to have links to the topics which they are discussing. This is so 5-years ago, sticky-mined. Stop thinking that you have to be everything to everyone (like yahoo) and just link to those things that a person would likely want to go to. For reference, here is the story that I was reading.

Macromedia’s MAX Conference starts one week from today and I can’t wait. With studio 8 just out and the Adobe acquisition, there should be a lot of exciting things going on there. Five co-workers and myself will be headed down to Anaheim next Sunday to check it all out.

Yahoo has launched a new podcast beta site. It’s a really nice site that does a pretty good job of introducing visitors to lots of podcasts. The site allows you to listen to podcasts right within the website, but directs visitors to existing podcasting tools to subscribe.

“NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software”:www.newsgator.com/NetNewsWi… and the developer of NNW, Brent Simmons, will be joining NewsGator as a software architect. The future of Ranchero’s blog posting tool, MarsEdit, is being discussed in the product’s mailing list.

“Google now has an AJAX powered RSS reader available.":reader.google.com I can’t seem to get to really liking an online reader, but as far as they go – this seems like a real nice one.

“Mozillazine”:www.mozillazine.org has announced the availability of “Firefox 1.5 beta 2”:weblogs.mozillazine.org/qa/archiv…

Hasting workshopers: Here are the final notes and downloads from yesterday’s workshop…

You may “view the completed site here”:www.brianfitz.net/20051006_… OR “download the project folder”:www.brianfitz.net/20051006_… to mess with.

A few extra notes…

I didn’t have a chance to show sites and books, although there are many reference “on the workshop page”:www.brianfitz.net and in your handout. If you are really interested in standards-based design and want to read more about “why?” than “how?”, the best book you can read is Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards”:www.amazon.com/exec/obid… It’s a fantastic book that I think everyone doing web development should read. Second, you should take a look through the “CSS Zen Garden”:www.csszengarden.com . It is a single page that different people design style sheets for to demonstrate how great style sheets are. It’s a lot of fun to go through.

Apple has announced a media event for October 12th. CNet reports that Apple will use the event to release a new video iPod (I swear I read this but I can’t find it now). “MacRumors says they will not”:www.macrumors.com/pages/200… and instead release a larger-capacity iPod with some cosmetic changes.

Thank you to those that attended the workshop at ESU 9 in Hastings on Thursday. I really had a fun time out there and hope that each of you got something from it when it was all finished &em; other than a headache. ;-) I’m working on getting some final wrapup pieces posted here tonight or tomorrow.

I’m in Hastings, Nebraska today to work with 16 victims willing participants on Dreamweaver, CSS, XHTML and other standards-based issue. It’s going to be a great day…

“View the Workshop Outline”:www.brianfitz.net

Wikipedia hosts one of the most complete browser comparison charts I have seen. In most cases however, it seems to be comparing the last or latest version of each browser, not breaking the features out by version.

Speaking of Sparkle. Here is a blast from someone to claims to be a PC user at Microsoft’s new photo manager (which is still in beta).

Microsoft has been rumored to have a “flash killer” in the works for a long time and it seems that the newly announced “sparkle” program may be it, but is it designed to go up against flash? It really seems when watching the available interview/presentation that it is not meant so much to be a low-bandwidth internet technology as a way to add a ton of vector-based eye candy at desktop applications. Of course, it becomes difficult to separate web from desktop when you are talking Internet Explorer, Visual Basic and Windows and I’m sure that this will impact the web in many ways.

Sun and Google announced that they will be partnering on different technologies. It’s interesting that Google (who is the big fish here) has nothing about this on their site while Sun, who really really needs this - and seems to think that they are the big player, has this as the biggest item on their site.

That which makes October the best month of the year begins today as the major league baseball postseason begins today at noon central.

MIT has put together the specifications for a computer that should cost no more than $100 to build. The 12 inch laptop computer has wireless networking, six usb ports and a shoulder-strap that doubles as a power cord. The computer would be built primarily for third world countries looking to introduce computers into the classrooms of their students. Given this, the computer also features a small crank which can be used to provide juice to the computer in areas without handy electrical power. The computer may be produced commercially for developed nations and would likely run around $200 with some of the proceeds going to the effort to get these computers, again, into more povershed areas.

Tomorrow morning, I'm catching a plane to Boston to watch Saturday's game against the Yankees. It's going to be incredible. Wakefield vs Johnson. I don't know if I'll even sleep tonight

PunBB seems be be a nice, newer, no-frills php-based bulletin board.

Here’s a good article from scottberkun.com about software design and why people call it sucky. What are they really thinking? What does this make the developer think? How can developers spend time more efficiently to create software that is user-friendly?

Today I’m nailing down the page structure for a new set of sites that I’m working on and a key part of that is asking “what gets denoted h1, h2, etc.”? I perused several HTML and design forums looking for discussion on the subject, but did not find answers that seemed practical. A model that kept coming up was that your h1 or h2 should mimic your title tag. If your title tag follows the convention of “site name - page name” this is problematic as these are two distinct elements that should be marked separately.

So… I started visiting sites that I know are marked up pretty well and have come up with the following convention. H1 will always be the site name, therefore h1 on every page will be the same. H2 will be the page name. I will have one h1 and usually one h2. I could see multiple instances of h2 where there are elements on the page that are not related to the page topic (navigation, etc.). From there on, the headers should simply be nested in a logical fashion.

I’ve done a few personal podcast episodes on this site and more recently, produce the Board of Education podcast on the Lincoln Public Schools website. Through these efforts I have tried just about everything available on the macintosh right now and am yet to find a tool that does a great job of making the entire process easy.

I’ll use the Board podcast as an example. I publish two podcasts for the board. One is an enhanced m4a version for iTunes with chapters. The second is a standard mp3 version for other clients. Here’s how it goes together…

1. First I separate the meeting audio from the video, trim the beginning and end, and save it as a separate quicktime file
2. Then I create a text file with the current date in it which I feed to an application called TextToMP3 to get an MP3 file with the computer speaking the name of the podcast and the date
3. I open up the last podcast that I did in Apple's Soundtrack Pro software and replace the meeting audio and the date audio with the new files. I adjust the bumper music to fit the new lengths and output the AIFF file. (I had a difficult time getting garageband to work with a file that was more than an hour long -- but I've read ways to get past this and will be trying it out)
4. I drop the AIFF file into iTunes and compress it into a mp3 file and an m4a file.
5. Add ID3 tags and the podcast image in iTunes to the two files
6. I open the m4a file into ChapterToolMe and listen to the file, putting in chapters where appropriate.
7. I re-export the m4a file. I now have finished mp3 files and m4a files.
8. I launch Feeder to create the XML entries for the two podcasts and attach the files.
9. I post the podcasts.

A lot of work isn't it? I would like to see as much as possible of this in one application: The ability to record tracks, mix tracks, compress the files as both mp3 and m4a, tag the files, chapterize the m4a file, create the posts and upload. There are podcast tools available now for the macintosh (Chat Easy and Podcast Maker are two), but they assume that you have already produced the podcast into an audio file. There are some decent audio programs out there, but they don't make podcasting as simple as it could be. I really hope to see something soon that is a beginning to end solution for doing this.

I downloaded the new Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash last night and have had some pretty good opportunities today to use DW and Fireworks.

Regarding the previous post about folks bashing Fireworks, I’m not in agreement. They were obviously doing some things with Flex that I’m not doing, but Fireworks suits me very well and I do not feel like the product seems neglected, although there is not much new there.

Dreamweaver feels like it has gotten some much needed love on the macintosh. Parts of it feel a bit more native, the tabs are fantastic and I think that the file transfers seem a little snappier. That said, I have also had it hang on several file transfers and have resorted to force quitting and relaunching DW. I hope that I can figure out what causes this and avoid it in the future. I look forward to trying out the style sheet features in it, as well as the XML and XSL features.

Want to get your own copy? Grab it here…

Studio 8 has yet to be released for non devnet subscribers, but news is starting to hit the web and one of the first interesting critiques focuses on Fireworks' improvements, or lack of.