Tonight, I attended FlexCamp at Adobe in San Francisco. The event was sold out, with about 20 on the waiting list. Anyone could watch online via webcast, but attending FlexCamp in person proved to be a great experience that was well worth the trip. What I got most out of FlexCamp was a healthy, regenerative dose of inspiration! For a Flash developer, it is inspiring just to see where the magic happens. This is the home of Photoshop, Illustrator, and now Flash. Adobe has a monopoly on print and Web development tools, and for good reason: They know how to make software that professionals want.
I also enjoyed the numerous freebies given out. I signed a short nondisclosure agreement, but I honestly didn’t read a word of it, being in such a hurry to get inside. So, I’m not sure if freebies are off limits for public discussion, but what I feel fairly safe in disclosing, since it was my idea, is that I had the most wonderful epiphany while in attendance, which is that beer and brainstorming create serious synergy!
Flex is a great rapid application development (RAD) tool for building rich Web-based applications. And it doesn’t hurt that Flex is built on top of the already phenomenal and lightning fast core of Flash Player 9. I see a lot of promise in Flex (and Air) for enabling the creation of original, cross-platform solutions.
Tags: flexcamp, Flex, Flash, Adobe, Air
intrinsi on July 27th 2007 in Web Development
In my opinion, Jakob Nielson has always maintained an ugly website. Fortunately for him, he is a marketing genius, exploiting hype with hype and proving, once and for all, that image is more perception than percept. I gotta hand it to him.
But I don’t gotta hand my website to him, because his definition of usability is to create websites for the lowest common denominator. Yes, we Web developers should use alt attributes in our image tags. Yes, we should give end-users the ability to search our websites and to find the information they want in the fewest clicks.
Does this necessitate abandoning technologies like Adobe Flash or AJAX? Does research showing that most users passively observe content on social websites provide sufficient rationale for halting further development of those websites? 16.9 percent of the world is always offline. Does this mean we should abandon the Internet as a medium of communication? Second Life is in trouble.
Furthermore, does it not occur to Nielson that Web 2.0 might be evolving and that its user base might be relatively young because the technology behind Web 2.0 is itself relatively young? Does it not occur to him that a young user base might not preclude adoption by an older, wiser crowd? Finally, does it not also occur to him that it might be a subset of the older, wiser crowd called "managers" and "CEOs" who are pushing young Web developers to rapidly implement Web 2.0 design principles because most Internet users actually like not having to refresh their homepages to see new content? I wonder.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Web 2.0 ‘distracts good design’
Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said.
intrinsi on May 14th 2007 in Web Development
Imagine an inexpensive search engine that is faster than Google:
Super-fast RDF search engine developed
The next generation of the internet is a step closer thanks to a major breakthrough in "semantic web" research in Ireland.
The semantic web, or data web, is a machine readable version of the internet that makes it more efficient to conduct searches, using RDF (Resource Description Framework) statements, which are used to represent information and to swap knowledge online.
These RDF statements are the backbone of the semantic web. They create associations of meaning and cause and effect relationships between concepts and ideas which can be displayed in computer languages.
Researchers at the National University of Ireland, Galway’s (NUIG) Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) have developed a search engine that can answer search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second, which is the highest number recorded to date.
Using these semantic web tools, users should get more relevant results, with the computer filtering the information and allowing the transfer and sharing of information between systems, rather than leaving it up to users to filter it themselves. At present, this information is kept in separate "silos", for example in different software systems. The semantic web could help bridge that gap.
"The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated," said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI. "These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them."
Apparently, the semantic web is already filtering through to regular users. "RSS (really simple syndication) was the first incarnation of this, and it’s pretty prevalent," Professor Decker told ENN.
