Demo of Flash Catalyst
Adobe’s Flash Catalyst is a bridge between Photoshop/Illustrator and the Flex world. It finally allows designers to build amazing Flex UIs in the tools they are comfortable with. There’s a great demo video over at the Adobe Edge website. Highly recommended if you are interested in this stuff at all. Also, they are going into public beta in early 2009!
I think this app might be the catalyst (pardon the pun) for me updgrading to CS4!
Adobe’s next generation RIA design app
A lot of you might remember the Thermo demo that Adobe showed about a year ago; Thermo was the code name for a new application that allowed designers to create Interfaces for Flex. (Yes, you can design UIs in FlexBuilder, but there is no integration with Photoshop/Illustrator, and doing important things like databinding is very hard. )
Thermo is now called Flash Catalyst and is on the Adobe Labs site; it is not available yet, but it’s nice to see the project did not disappear and that Adobe is hard at work on it! Go check out the site and read the project blog to see how the application is coming along.
Interesting article about selling your own software
The coder of Balsamiq prototyping software has a great article about the dilemmas that a small dev shop faces when its product starts to sell. Interesting read for those who have the goal of writing and selling their own software.
If you tried to email us recently…
If you tried to contact us via our contact form recently, I just discovered that my hosting company made some changes that broke the form. If you were expecting a reply and did not receive one, please try to contact us again… we will answer you this time, promise!
Really cool reverse-highlighting plugin
Seek Attention is a jquery plugin will dim everything but the selected element, thus bringing the selected element to the user’s attention. This is a cool idea and very effective. Go check it out!
Fitt’s law jquery plugin
Fitt’s Law says that the larger a target is, the easier it is to click on (duh).
This jquery plugin will make a link’s container element clickable, thus making the links target size much larger and easier to click. Super cool and easy to implement. Go check it out!
Your software product is only as good as your design process
I have worked on many large software projects during my career, and unsurprisingly the quality of the product’s design is directly related to the quality of the design process. Yet so few companies actually look at their design process; they think that hiring a designer is all they need. Yet it is so much more than that.
Awesome new touchscreen text entry method
The guy who created T9 input for mobile phones has come up with w novel method for text input for touch screens. The technique is very similar to Bill Buxton’s “marking “menus”; you draw out the word you want to spell on the screen in a continuous motion; of course you hit letters that are not in the word, but the software predicts what word you intended. Watch the video and it will make sense instantly.
The “new wave” in web apps
Much like French cinema in the 60s, there is a “new wave” going on in web-based application development right now.
When I attended the iPhone dev camp here in Austin, one of things that I learned was that Cocoa had MVC concepts built right in to the language. This approach works very well for interfaces, and this has not gone un-noticed by a few web developers.
Sproutcore and Cappucino are very Cocoa-like languages that run completely in the browser and offer a very desktop-like experience in the browser without Flash or Silverlight. Apple used Sproutcore for Mobile Me and 280 North used Cappucino for 280 Slides, which is a very nice Powerpoint/Keynote app for the browser.
Both of these frameworks offer near desktop-like performance and allow apps to run on/offline. I fully expect to see a lot more apps built on these in the near future. The hard part is that programmers are going to have to learn new concepts to make the most of these new environments; they are a pretty big change from doing an app in a framework like Rails.
Ok, the new Microsoft commercials with Seinfeld are actually GOOD
This new spot with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld is pretty darn entertaining!